I have tried to give a true picture of life among the southern mountaineers, as I have found it during eighteen years of intimate as sociation with them. This book deals with the mass of the mountain people. It is not con cerned with the relatively few townsmen, and prosperous valley farmers, who owe to outside in?uences all that distinguishes them from their back-country kinsmen. The real mountaineers are the multitude of little farmers living up the branches and on the steep hillsides, away from the main-traveled roads, who have been shaped by their own environment. They are the ones who interest the reading public; and this is as it should be; for they are original, they are characters. No one book can give a complete survey of mountain life in all its aspects. Much must be left out. I have chosen to write about those features that seemed to me most picturesque.