growth of observation that, though a multitude of stories has been written about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved into themes as few in number as those which succeeded nearer Tidewater:  how a stranger man comes into the mountains, loves the flower of all the native maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or jealousies of her neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away by a long vendetta until only one representative of each clan remains and the two forgive and forget among the ruins; how a band of highlanders defend themselves against the invading minions of a law made for the nation at large but hardly applicable to highland circumstances; how the mountain virtues in some way or other prove superior to the softer virtues—­almost vices by comparison—­of the world of plains and cities.  These formulas, however, resulted from another cause than the popular complacency which hated to be disturbed in Virginia and Louisiana.  The mountain people, inarticulate themselves, have uniformly been seen from the outside and therefore have been studied in their surface peculiarities more often than in their deeper traits of character.  And, having once entered the realm of legend, they continue to be known by the half-dozen distinguishing features which in legend are always enough for any type.

In the North and West, of course, much the same process went on as in the South among the local colorists, conditioned by the same demands and pressures.  Because the territory was wider, however, in the expanding sections, the types of character there were somewhat less likely to be confined to one locality than in the section which for a time had a ring drawn round it by its past and by the difficulty of emerging from it; and because the career of North and West was not definitely interrupted by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer than in the South, where a new order of life, after a generation of clinging memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety.

The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course, that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men produced by the new frontier.  Except on very few occasions, as in Alfred Henry Lewis’s racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick Remington’s vivid pictures, in Andy Adams’s more minute chronicle The Log of a Cowboy, in Owen Wister’s more sentimental The Virginian, and in O. Henry’s more diversified Heart of the West and its fellows among his books, the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane of the sub-literary—­in dime novels and, latterly, in moving pictures.  He, like the mountaineer of the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings—­a