Mountain Frolics

TALES FROM THE CLOUD WALKING COUNTRY (270 pp.)--Marie Campbell--Indiana University ($4.50).

If a person goes up into the mountain country of eastern Kentucky, up along Defeated Creek or Betty's Troublesome or Caney, and if he'll just sit down and rest a minute, he's likely to hear a fine mort of olden tales. Schoolma'am Marie Campbell, who put together this book, was pleasured a heap to sit alistening to the olden tales and to write them down so they would keep.

By traveling a far piece to all the frolics and play-parties in the mountain country, Schoolma'am Campbell became friendlylike with Aunt Lizbeth Fields, who had a big store of tales about all manner of things golden; and with Big Nelt, who was mighty queer-turned and droll-natured but a right accommodating man even if he didn't wear shoes except in chilling weather; and with Uncle Tom Dixon, who favored tales where things go in threes. Most all the stories are tales the tellers had always just known, tales that were told in the generations of their kin, way back to the old country across the ocean waters. Some few, maybe, came to them from a Tally, or foreigner, who worked round in the mines, or a passing Irishman. Big Nelt remembers the Irishman as "not to say old, not to say young. Where he came from it's untelling and where he went to it's the same. He was a clever man and a sight of company to me, a lad of a boy."

Readers who want to give up the time to sit a spell and take it resty are sure to find a heap of olden tales calculated to scunner the young'uns with fright, like the one about the red-haired man whose head doddled about when he walked or talked, or some others that would pleasure them, like the one about a king's daughter that was a sight how pretty. This might well be the last chance, too, for as one old granddaddy after tother told Schoolma'am Campbell: "Tale-telling is nigh about faded out in the mountain country."

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