It may surprise many persons to learn that on the tablelands of the Alleghany Mountains there are still thousands of square miles of virgin forests of hemlock and pine through which roam bears and deer in considerable numbers.  The hemlock trees are rapidly succumbing, however, to the axe of the lumberman and the bark-peeler.  Bark-peeling is the great industry there, almost every mountain-hollow along the lines of the few railways that have penetrated the region in Pennsylvania having its tannery in active operation.  This tanning business, by the way, is in a very prosperous condition, owing to the foreign demand for the liquor extracted from the bark as well as to the steadiness of the leather market.  There is a primitive freshness in the life of the mountaineers and lumbermen of the Alleghanies like that of the mining regions of the far West.  There is a sprinkling of Canadians among the lumbermen, and as a whole they are the most honest, good-natured, childlike set of men in existence.  They are the true priests of those high and dim-green temple-aisles—­priests of Nature one might call them.  The cabins of the bark-peelers are made of rough, sweet-smelling hemlock planks.  The smell of the hemlock bark is fresh and tonical, and appetizing in the highest degree.  The men eat fabulous quantities of food:  some require five meals a day.  I well remember my first meal in a mountain hemlock shanty.  Imagine a long table of unpainted boards with X-shaped legs, and along each side of the table benches for seats.  Let there be upon the table three large bowls of black sugar, here and there towering stacks of white bread (the slices an inch thick at least), and beside each cover a teacup and saucer, a huge bowl filled to the brim with steaming-hot apple-sauce, together with a bowl of the same dimensions containing beans.  Now blow the supper-horn, and hearken to the far halloo from the mountain-side.  Twenty blowzed and bearded men, ravenous and wild-eyed with hunger, presently file into the room.  They sit down:  there is an awful and solemn silence—­they are evidently impressed with the momentous importance of the occasion.  You find your face growing long; you think of funerals; make a timid and humble remark which you hope will be acceptable and within the range of their comprehension.  No answer:  you evidently have their pity.  No word breaks the sullen silence, except an occasional request to pass something, uttered with an effort as if the speaker had the lockjaw.  The meal is bolted with frightful rapidity, generally in five or six minutes.  I remember that I was considerably scared and dazed, on my first acquaintance with these mountain-fauns, at seeing such a systematic snatching and grabbing, such a ferocious plying of knives and forks and rattling of cups, by those huge-limbed, brawny, whiskered fellows.