Judith of the Cumberlands

								


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JUDITH OF THE CUMBERLANDS
by
ALICE MACGOWAN
Author of
"The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage,"
"The Last Word," "Huldah," "Return," Etc.
With Illustrations in Colour by George Wright

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers, New York
Copyright, 1908
by
Alice MacGowan
This edition is issued under arrangement with the publishers,
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London

DEDICATION
To my mountain friends, dwellers in lonely cabins, on winding horseback
trails and steep, precarious roads; or in the tiny settlements that
nestle in the high-hung inner valleys; lean brown hunters on remote paths
in the green shadowed depths of the free forest, light-stepping,
keen-eyed, humorous-lipped, hitting the point as aptly with an instance
as with the old squirrel gun they carry; wielders of the axe by many a
chip pile, where the swinging blade rests readily to answer query or
offer advice; tanned, lithely moving lads following the plough, turning
over the shoulder a countenance of dark beauty; grave, shy girls, pail in
hand, at the milking-bars in dawn or dusk; young mothers in the doorway,
looking out, babe on hip; big-eyed, bare-footed mountain children
clinging hand in hand by the roadside, or clustered like startled little
partridges in the shelter of the dooryard; knitters in the sun and
grandams by the hearth; tellers and treasurers all of tales and legends
couched in racy old Elizabethan English; I dedicate this--their book and
mine.

FOREWORD
I have been so frequently asked how I, a woman, came by my intimate
acquaintance with life in the more remote districts of the southern
Appalachians, particularly in the matter of illicit distilling, that I
think it not amiss to here set down a few words as to my sources of
knowledge.
I have always lived in a small city in the heart of the Cumberlands, and
a portion of each year was spent in the mountains themselves. The speech
of Judith and her friends and kin has been familiar to me from childhood;
their point of view, their customs and possessions as well known to me as
my own. Then when I began to write, I was one summer at Roan Mountain, on
the North Carolina-Tennessee line, probably less than two hundred miles
from Chattanooga by the railway, and Gen. John T. Wilder, who had
campaigned all through the fastnesses of that inaccessible region,
suggested to me that I buy a mountain-bred saddle horse, and ride such a