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These incidents gave me my start by bringing to my mind the story of John Harlow, curiously typical of the imaginary terrors of the deaf and the folly of giving way to them. John Harlow was a New England man. He had all the imagination and all the narrow prejudice of his class; he had never traveled west of his own corner of the nation, and he was deaf. The man who carries this combination of qualities about with him is booked for trouble whenever he gets out among new types of people. Part of the Harlow property was invested in land lying in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, and it became necessary for John to go there, to look up titles and investigate agents.

About all the average New Englander of that day knew of that mountain country was that it seemed to be the stage on which bloody family feuds were fought out. The Atlantic Monthly had printed stories by Charles Egbert Craddock, and they were accepted as true pictures of mountain life. John Harlow should have known that the New Englanders and the mountaineers are alike the purest in real American blood, and that they must have many traits in common; but he went South with the firm conviction that life in the mountains must be one long tragedy of ambuscades and murders.