olds of the hills
as though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists,
the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And
when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through
ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of
the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils--mounted to the
top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently waving summit,
and saw at every turn of the path the majestic supernal beauty of the
mighty green waves that swept on and on before him, in wonder he kept
asking himself:

"Why--why?"

He had not come into contact yet with the humanity in those hills.
The log cabins he had seen from the train--clinging to the hillsides,
nestling in little coves amid apple-trees, or close to the banks of
rushing little creeks--had struck him as most picturesque and charming,
and an occasional old mill, with its big water-wheel, boxed-in, grass-hung
mill-race half hidden by weeping willows, had given him sheer delight;
but now he was meeting the people in the road and could see them close at
hand in doorway and porches of the wretched little houses that he passed.
How mean, meagre, narrow, and poverty-stricken must be their lives!

At one cabin he had to stop for midday dinner, for the word "lunch," he
found, was unknown. A slatternly woman with scraggling black hair, and
with three dirty children clinging to her dirty apron, "reckoned she
mought git him a bite," and disappeared. Flies swarmed over him when
he sat in the porch. The rancid smell of bedding struck his sensitive
nostrils from within. He heard the loud squawking of a chicken cease
suddenly, and his hunger-gnawed stomach almost turned when he suddenly
realized just what it meant. When called within, it was dirt and flies,
flies and dirt, everywhere. He sat in a chair with a smooth-worn cane
bottom so low that his chin was just above the table. The table-cover
was of greasy oilcloth. His tumbler was cloudy, unclean, and the milk was
thin and sour. Thick slices of fat bacon swam in a dish of grease, blood
was perceptible in the joints of the freshly killed, half-cooked chicken,
and the flies swarmed.

As he rode away he began to get a glimmer of light. Perhaps Juno--his
Juno--had once lived like that; perhaps her people did yet.

There was another mountain to climb, and a stranger who was going his
way offered to act as guide. The stranger was a