Excerpt from Old Christmas and Other Kentucky Tales in Verse The following poems are the fruit of a visit made some four years ago to the Kentucky Cumberlands and other parts of the Southern Appalachian system. I had planned to spend a summer month or two in that remote region, which I had always wished to explore, and which had recently been rendered doubly attractive by reports of numbers of old English and Scottish ballads surviving there by oral tradition; but, having contracted "mountain fever," in the-course of my travels on foot and on horseback, I remained nearly six months, or from about the first of June till before Christmas. How much further I should have prolonged what had already become largely a "technical" convalescence, I cannot say, if the rough little county seat, where I was then living, had not burned. Losing practically everything I had in the fire, I was forced to beat a retreat. The length and the conditions of my stay in the hill country gave me an unusual opportunity to become acquainted with the life and character of the mountain people, about whom, perhaps, more has been written, and less actually known, than about any other on the continent. It used to be the theory of historians like John Fiske, that they are the descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.