ng."

A discreet, pleasant, pretty girl. This surely must be the Esmeralda who
lives in these mountains, and adorns low life by her virgin purity
and sentiment. As she talked on, she turned from time to time to the
fireplace behind her, and discharged a dark fluid from her pretty lips,
with accuracy of aim, and with a nonchalance that was not assumed, but
belongs to our free-born American girls. I cannot tell why this habit of
hers (which is no worse than the sister habit of "dipping") should take
her out of the romantic setting that her face and figure had placed her
in; but somehow we felt inclined to ride on farther for our heroine.

"And yet," said the Professor, as we left the site of the colonel's
thriving distillery, and by a winding, picturesque road through a rough
farming country descended into the valley,--"and yet, why fling aside
so readily a character and situation so full of romance, on account of
a habit of this mountain Helen, which one of our best poets has almost
made poetical, in the case of the pioneer taking his westward way, with
ox-goad pointing to the sky:

"'He's leaving on the pictured rock
His fresh tobacco stain.'

"To my mind the incident has Homeric elements. The Greeks would have
looked at it in a large, legendary way. Here is Helen, strong and lithe
of limb, ox-eyed, courageous, but woman-hearted and love-inspiring,
contended for by all the braves and daring moonshiners of Cut Laurel
Gap, pursued by the gallants of two States, the prize of a border
warfare of bowie knives and revolvers. This Helen, magnanimous as
attractive, is the witness of a pistol difficulty on her behalf, and
when wanted by the areopagus, that she may neither implicate a lover
nor punish an enemy (having nothing, this noble type of her sex against
nobody), skips away to Mount Ida, and there, under the aegis of the flag
of her country, in a Licensed Distillery, stands with one slender foot
in Tennessee and the other in North Carolina..."

"Like the figure of the Republic itself, superior to state sovereignty,"
interposed the Friend.

"I beg your pardon," said the Professor, urging up Laura Matilda (for
so he called the nervous mare, who fretted herself into a fever in the
stony path), "I was quite able to get the woman out of that position
without the aid of a metaphor. It is a large and Greek idea, that of
standing in two mighty States, superior to the law, looking east and
looking west, ready to transfe