hills to wherever needed. The operatives dwell in little
shanties scattered conveniently about; in front of each is a vertical
half-inch pipe, six or eight feet high, bearing a half bushel of
natural-gas flame which burns and tosses night and day, winter
and summer, making the Bottom a warm corner of the earth, when the
unassisted temperature is in the eighties. It is a bewildering scene,
with all these derricks thickly scattered around, engines noisily
puffing, walking-beams forever rearing and plunging, the country
cobwebbed with tumbling-rods and pipe lines, the shanties of the
operatives with their rude lamp-posts, and the face of Nature so
besmeared with the crude output of the wells that every twig and leaf
is thick with grease.

Just above Witten's commences the Long Reach of the Ohio--a charming
panorama, for sixteen and a half miles in a nearly straight line
to the southwest. Little towns line the alternating bottoms, and
farmsteads are numerous on the slopes. But they are rocky and narrow,
these gentle shoulders of the hills, and a poor class of folk occupy
them--half fishers, half farmers, a cross between my Round Bottom
friend and the houseboat nomads.

A picturesquely-dilapidated log house, with whitewashed porch in
front, and a vine arbor at the rear, attracted our attention at the
foot of the reach, near Grape Island. I clambered up, to photograph
it. The ice was broken by asking for a drink of water. A gaunt girl of
eighteen, the elder of two, with bare feet, her snaky hair streaming
unkempt about a smirking face, went with a broken-nosed pitcher to a
run, which could be heard splashing over its rocky bed near by. The
meanwhile, I took a seat in the customary arcade between the living
room and kitchen, and talked with her fat, greasy, red-nosed father,
who confided to me that he was "a pi'neer from way back." He occupied
his own land--a rare circumstance among these riverside "crackers;"
had a hundred and thirty acres, worth twenty dollars the acre; "jist
yon ways," back of the house, in the cliff-side, there was a coal vein
two feet thick, as yet only "worked" for his own fuel; and lately, he
had struck a bank of firebrick clay which might some day be a "good
thing for th' gals."

On leaving, I casually mentioned my desire to photograph the family on
the porch, where the light was good. While I walked around the house
outside, they passed through the front room, which seemed to be the
common dormito