of the soil and slaves of circumstances. The heavy routine of daily life beats at them and drags them down. Children, too soon and too many; ignorance of housekeeping and farm management; sickness and ignorance of hygiene; drudgery; crop failure and high prices, and abundant crops and no market; corn bread and salt pork, whiskey and patent medicines; cold and hunger and labor and hopelessness, break them down and wear them out and defeat them. The characters do very little wailing—like sheep before the shearers they are pretty dumb. They feel themselves lapsing into defeat by irresistible processes which they don't understand. They accept defeat with the mild querulousness with which we accept bald heads, false teeth, and old age—as the unlovely but inevitable order of nature.
Neither does the author wail much over her tragedy. I think, in fact, that she is curiously and secretly smiling over it. She is not smiling with the derisive smile of the satirist; her book is full of an intimate but quite unsentimental sympathy with her Kentucky farmers—a sympathy and humor which steadily preserve the narrative from drabness and oppressiveness. She knows that these Kentuckians, unlike Mr. Lewis's hard-shelled midwesterners, are not fit subjects for satire. They are not complacent. They are not impervious. They are not hidebound. They are merely desperately ignorant and helpless. Before they can become proper subjects for satirical comedy, something must be done by a power not themselves; they must be con-
