The Worthington advance. [volume] (Worthington, Minn.) 1874-1908, 1897-07-22
LITTLE
MOUNTAIN MAID. X
..... BY MARY TRACY EARLE.

THE great mountains peered over
one another's shoulders and
watched Georgia Blount at her play.
Bald Top, Crabs Claw and Old Surly
stood nearest; sometimes they seemed
SO near that Georgia could talk to
them; and when low-hanging cloud
shut them out of sight, or the blue au-
tumn haze yelled them softly and held
them aloof from her, she felt as other
children feel when their friends turn
away or refuse to tell what the thoughts
are in their eyes.
A gnarled tree grew at the foot of
the bluff which lifted the big dome of
Copper Head above the mountain side,
and between the roots of this tree
Georgia had her play house. Day in
and day out no one ever came in 81 light
of it except the mountains, but Georgia
was never lonely. In the mornings she
had to take all her dolls out of their
beds of moss and dress them in fresh
gowns of summer or autumn leaves, or
in stiff, fringy costumes of pine needles.
She was very much in earnest about her
dolls and yet she sometimes clapped her
hands and laughed when they were
dressed and leaning in long row
against one of the roots, they made such
an elfin company. Some of them had
nuts for heads and some of them had
acorns. Some of them had been made
out of dry, rounded receptacles of a
composite flower from which the f1orets
had fallen and the winged seeds flown
away, leaving only the circle of bracts
for collar, and brittle stem with two
branches, from which the flower ends
had been nipped off, for arms. These
were the most fragile of Georgia's chill
dren, and it took a most skillful hand
to keep their toilets without swapping
their necks, or their bodies or their
limbs. Georgia could do it, for she
loved them, and she had been dressing
them ever since she was big enough to
wander off by herself up the mountain
side, and through the forest which sep
arated the home clearing from the rug
ged, bowlder-strewn slope below the
playhouse tree and the rock walls of
the dome.
Georgia was much bigger now than
when she had begun to fashion dolls
for herself with chubby, awkward fin
gers; she was so much bigger, indeed,
that she was II years old; she might
haye thought that she was growing up
If there had been anyone to suggest it
to her; but she had seen no other chill
dren growing up, and the mountains
did not tell her, for they themselves
had taken so long TO grow that it never
occurred to them that she would not
continue to be little girl for centuries
and centuries to come. She had work
to do at home now, and that was an in
terruption; yet every day, before or
after work, she managed to slip off to-
ward the forest path.
Among her dolls there was one made
of corncob, and far larger than the
others, and this one Georgia dressed as
man. He was very wicked-looking
doll, having deep black eyes and nose
and mouth which she had burned into
his head with a hot iron nail; and it was
because he was so different from the
rest that she had named him ''the fur
eigner," after the way of southern
mountain people in speaking of any
stranger who comes among them. 1.-THE
fureigner' lived in a corner all by him
self at the back of the tree, and Georgia
always knew that when he came out
among the others there was mischief
brewing. Sometimes she.walked slowly
away from the tree gathering leaves and
grasses as she went, and then, as soon
rs she could slip away from herself,
hurried stealthily back, pulled the for
eigner out of his corner, dropped him
among the other dolls, and ran to her
leaf-gathering again, so that she might
be surprised when she finally returned
and found how he had been romping
up and down among her mountain peo-
pie. "Oh, happy kingdom!' she always
cried when she caught sight Of him, che
have come agin, and oh, how he do have
been a-layin' waste the land!" 3t
One day, as she stood with her hands
held up in horror at row Of mountain
people who had fallen PROSTATE round
the savage foreigner, q real stranger
came out from the thick forest and
stood at the edge Of the natural open
ing around the play house tree. he
~ her 6 once, bare-footed, red
& checked. With her figured bandana
lnettsd q hSr throat, and he could