“Did you come alone?”

“Why, of course.  I come across the mountain by a path through the woods.  That’s nothing.”

A discreet, pleasant, pretty girl.  This surely must be the Esmeralda who lives in these mountains, and adorns low life by her virgin purity and sentiment.  As she talked on, she turned from time to time to the fireplace behind her, and discharged a dark fluid from her pretty lips, with accuracy of aim, and with a nonchalance that was not assumed, but belongs to our free-born American girls.  I cannot tell why this habit of hers (which is no worse than the sister habit of “dipping”) should take her out of the romantic setting that her face and figure had placed her in; but somehow we felt inclined to ride on farther for our heroine.

“And yet,” said the Professor, as we left the site of the colonel’s thriving distillery, and by a winding, picturesque road through a rough farming country descended into the valley,—­“and yet, why fling aside so readily a character and situation so full of romance, on account of a habit of this mountain Helen, which one of our best poets has almost made poetical, in the case of the pioneer taking his westward way, with ox-goad pointing to the sky: 

  “’He’s leaving on the pictured rock
   His fresh tobacco stain.’

“To my mind the incident has Homeric elements.  The Greeks would have looked at it in a large, legendary way.  Here is Helen, strong and lithe of limb, ox-eyed, courageous, but woman-hearted and love-inspiring, contended for by all the braves and daring moonshiners of Cut Laurel Gap, pursued by the gallants of two States, the prize of a border warfare of bowie knives and revolvers.  This Helen, magnanimous as attractive, is the witness of a pistol difficulty on her behalf, and when wanted by the areopagus, that she may neither implicate a lover nor punish an enemy (having nothing, this noble type of her sex against nobody), skips away to Mount Ida, and there, under the aegis of the flag of her country, in a Licensed Distillery, stands with one slender foot in Tennessee and the other in North Carolina”

“Like the figure of the Republic itself, superior to state sovereignty,” interposed the Friend.

“I beg your pardon,” said the Professor, urging up Laura Matilda (for so he called the nervous mare, who fretted herself into a fever in the stony path), “I was quite able to get the woman out of that position without the aid of a metaphor.  It is a large and Greek idea, that of standing in two mighty States, superior to the law, looking east and looking west, ready to transfer her agile body to either State on the approach of messengers of the court; and I’ll be hanged if I didn’t think that her nonchalant rumination of the weed, combined with her lofty moral attitude, added something to the picture.”

The Friend said that he was quite willing to join in the extremest defense of the privileges of beauty,—­that he even held in abeyance judgment on the practice of dipping; but when it came to chewing, gum was as far as he could go as an allowance for the fair sex.