otions free rein, there are few
educated people who can match his picturesque and pungent diction. His
trick of apt phrasing is intuitive. Like an artist striking off a
portrait or a caricature with a few swift strokes his characterization
is quick and vivid. Whether he use quaint obsolete English or equally
delightful perversions, what he says will go straight to the mark with
epigrammatic force.

I cannot quit this topic without reference to the bizarre and original
place-names that sprinkle the map of Appalachia.

Many readers of John Fox's novels take for granted that the author
coined such piquant titles as Lonesome, Troublesome, Hell fer Sartin,
and Kingdom Come. But all of these are real names in the Kentucky
mountains. They denote rough country, and the country _is_ rough, so
that to a traveler it is plain enough why travel and travail were used
interchangeably in old editions of Shakespeare. There is nothing like
first-hand knowledge of mountain roads to revive sixteenth-century
habits of thought and speech. The most scrupulous visitor will fain
admit the aptness of mountain nomenclature.

Kentucky has no monopoly of grotesque and whimsical local names. The
whole Appalachian region, from the Virginias to Alabama, is peppered
with them. Whatever else the southern mountaineer may be, he is
original. Elsewhere throughout America we have place-names imported from
the Old World as thick as weeds; but the pioneers of the southern hills
either forgot that there was an Old World or they disdained to borrow
from it.

Personal names applied to localities are common enough, but they are
those of actual settlers, not of notables honored from afar (Mitchell,
LeConte, Guyot, were not the highlanders' names for those peaks). Often
a surname is put to such use, as Jake's Creek, Old Nell Knob, and Big
Jonathan Run. We even have Granny's Branch, and Daddy and Mammy creeks.

In the main it is characteristic of our Appalachian place-names that
they are descriptive or commemorate some incident. The Shut-in is a
gorge; the Suck is a whirlpool; Pinch-gut is a narrow passage between
the cliffs. Calf-killer Run is "whar a meat-eatin' bear was usin'," and
Barren She Mountain was the death-ground of a she-bear that had no cubs.
Kemmer's Old Stand was a certain hunter's favorite ambush on a runway.
Meat-scaffold Branch is where venison was hung up for "jerking."
Graining-block Creek was a trappers' rendezvous, and Honey Camp Run is