could have subdued the
beasts and savages, felled the forests and made our land habitable for
those teeming millions who can exist only in a state of mutual
dependence and cultivation. The first lesson of pioneering was
self-reliance. "Provide with thine own arm," said the Wilderness,
"against frost and famine and skulking foes, or thou shalt surely die!"

But there were compensations. As the school of the woods was harsh and
stern, so it brought up sons and daughters of lion heart. And its
reward to those who endured was the most outright independence to be had
on earth. No king was so irresponsible as the pioneer, no czar so
absolute as he. It needed no martyr spirit in him to sing:

"I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."

We have seen that the Appalachian region was peculiar in this: that good
bottom lands were few and far between. So our mountain farmers were cut
off more from the world and from each other, were thrown still more upon
their individual resources, than other pioneers. By compulsion their
self-reliance was more complete; hence their independence grew more
haughty, their individualism more intense. And these traits, exaggerated
as they were by force of environment, remain unweakened among their
descendants to the present day.

Here, then, is a key to much that is puzzling in highland character. In
the beginning isolation was forced upon the mountaineers; they accepted
it as inevitable and bore it with stoical fortitude until in time they
came to love solitude for its own sake and to find compensations in it
for lack of society.

Says a native writer, Miss Emma Miles, in a clever and illuminating book
on _The Spirit of the Mountains_: "We who live so far apart that we
rarely see more of one another than the blue smoke of each other's
chimneys are never at ease without the feel of the forest on every
side--room to breathe, to expand, to develop, as well as to hunt and to
wander at will. The nature of the mountaineer demands that he have
solitude for the unhampered growth of his personality, wing-room for his
eagle heart."

Such feeling, such longing, most of us have experienced in passing
moods; but in the highlander it is a permanent state of mind, sustaining
him from the cradle to the grave. To enjoy freedom and air and
elbow-room he cheerfully puts aside all that society can offer, and
stints himself and bears adversity with a calm and steadfast soul. To be
free, unbeh