IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS, a collection of short stories published in 1884 by Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary N. Mur free), reveals and interprets the primitive and elemental types of character to be found in the mountains of East Tennessee and western North Carolina. Many years before the South ern people had awakened to the undeveloped human resources in these mountains, the author, who had been in the habit of spending her summers in the Cumberland Mountains, felt and depicted the humor the pathos, the kind liness and tragedy of these contemporary an cestors — men and women, who in their moun taro coves had let the . tides of civilization sweep on past them, leaving them in a state of arrested development. The more savage and the more gentle elements of their character are revealed at country stores, in blacksmiths' shops, at still-houses and in various fonns of social life such as hunting, dancing,. playing cards, political campaigns and religious re vivals. if we have the blundering brutality and strength of ignorance, we have also the noble and tragic self-sacrifice of such women as Cynthia Ware, whose lover is saved by her devotion from his prison life only to pass out of her life and that of the mountains into the more material civilization of the valley; or Celia Shaw, who has a revelation of a life of culture as contrasted with her own crude family life only to be made aware that she can not share it. Throughout the stories we are
made to feel that °the grace of nature is in its way a fine thing; the best that art can do— the polish of a gentleman — is hardly equal to the best that nature can do in her higher moods.a As a background for these well-told stories there is always the presence of the mountains. Perhaps no American writer of fiction has surpassed Miss Murfree in de scriptive writing. At times the art of inter weaving the human story and the almost per sonal life of nature is perfect. At other times it is overdone. The best stories in the volume are 'Drifting Down Lost Creek,' 'A Star in the Valley' and 'Sledge at the Settlement.' Emir; Mims.