Thirdly.  I found homes and a home life, or rather the want of it, which one would hardly believe possible among a white population in this country.

The following illustrations are correct representations of what I found to be average mountain cabins.  Seldom do they contain more than two, often only one, room.  A single window, an open fire-place, and a few home-made articles of furniture, comprise the whole.  The home is begun when its founders are yet children.  Ignorant and poor, the boy has “took up” with the girl, and it may be they are legally married.  A building-bee is announced, a little cabin erected, a few pigs bought or given, a few trees girdled, some corn planted, in so crude and shiftless a way that even an Indian, in his first attempts at farming, would be ashamed to own it, and home life is begun.  Into this home of poverty and ignorance come the children.  The families are large—­eight, ten, twelve, and sometimes more.  The mother is too ignorant herself to instruct, and had she the ability, neither time nor strength to accomplish it are at her command.  Life to her is a struggle.  At twenty she looks thirty-five, at thirty-five she is old.  Always she has a tired, hopeless expression, which simply to look at almost starts the tears.  The children have something of the same expression; the babies even seem to realize that it is a sober, sad world they have come into.  I do not remember seeing a laughing, cooing baby in all the cabins I visited.

[Illustration:  MOUNTAIN CABIN.]

[Illustration:  MOUNTAIN CABIN.]

Educationally, I found this people far below the emigrant on the prairie.  Seventy per cent. of the whole two millions cannot read or write.  The schools are the poorest.  The school houses are built of logs; a hole is cut for the window; the ground serves for a floor, slabs for seats, and the teacher is strictly in keeping with all.  Bare-footed, hair unkempt, snuff stick in her mouth, scarcely able to read herself, she is the example—­the ideal toward which her pupils are to strive.

Religiously, I found that these people, almost without exception, were “professors,” and “had jined” not a Christian church, but some one of these native mountain pastors.  The accompanying illustration gives a good idea of the mountain church; it is built of logs, and is without windows; the pulpit is an unpainted board; the seats slabs from the nearest saw mill, turned flat side up, with pegs driven in for legs.  The ministry is in strict keeping with the church, and intellectually little in advance of the people.  They take pride in the fact that “These yer home-spun jeans have never brushed no dust from off no college walls,” and exultantly declare that “The Lord taught me how to preach:  and when the Lord teaches a man how to preach, you may just reckon he don’t make no mistakes.”

[Illustration:  A NATIVE MOUNTAIN CHURCH.]

On every hand, I found indications that the day of isolation for this people is rapidly passing away.  Yankee inquisitiveness has discovered that these mountains are full of the best coal and iron—­Northern capital has already begun to strip them of their rich forests of black walnut, oak and pine.  The rivers are carrying these logs by the thousands to the immense mills, which in turn are making the large towns, toward which already the railroad is hastening.