ILLUSTRATIONS.
IN THE "STRANGER PEOPLE'S" COUNTRY.
I.
Who they were, and whence they came, none can say. The mountains where they found their home—their long home—keep silence. The stars, that they knew, look down upon their graves and make no sign. Their memory, unless in some fine and subtle way lingering in the mystery, the pervasive melancholy, the vaguely troublous forecast and retrospect which possess the mind in contemplating this sequestered spot, unhallowed save by the sense of a common humanity, has faded from the earth. None might know that they had ever lived but for a dim tradition associating them with the ancient forgotten peoples of this old hemisphere of ours that we are wont to deem so new. For this is one of the strange burial-grounds of the "pygmy dwellers" of Tennessee; prehistoric, it is held, an extinct diminutive race; only Aztec children, others surmise, of a uniform age and size, buried apart from their kindred, for some unimagined, never-to-be-explained reason; and a more prosaic opinion contends that the curious stone sepulchres contain merely infant relics of the Cherokee Indian. All I know is, here they rest, awaiting that supreme moment when this mortality shall put on immortality, and meanwhile in the solemn environment of the Great Smoky Mountains the "Leetle People" sleep well.
Quiet neighbors all these years have they been. So quiet! almost forgotten. In fact, the nearest mountaineers start, with a dazed look, at a question concerning them, then become mysterious, with that superstitious, speculative gleam in the eye as of one who knows much of uncanny lore, but is shy to recount.
"I do declar' I never war so set back in my life ez I felt whenst that thar valley man jes' upped an' axed me 'bout'n them thar Leetle Stranger People buried yander on the rise," declared Stephen Yates, one July evening, as he stood leaning on his rifle before the door of his cabin in the cove. His horse, reeking and blown, still saddled, bore a deer, newly slain, unprotected by the game-laws, and the old hounds, panting and muddy from the chase, lay around the doorstep.