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HERE is a mountain region in the United States larger than the whole German Empire, which supports population of something like three million. It is the only extensive upland country inhabited by civilized people, which has no seaport or navigable river.

The ocean does not touch it; there is no vision of departing ships of strange commerce to inspire the young citizens to activity. With no inland lakes a territory where canals are an impossibility-it is a land of saddlebags and bad roads. Sixteen counties have no railroad, five others only a branch line, and six, no newspaper.

In the valley of the Big Sandy River, which forms a part of this great area, a railroad is now being surveyed, up through the Breaks of the Cumberlands, making a highway to the sea. As it gives easy access to one of the most productive coal fields of America, we can safely forecast results. In a few years, at most, the long, parallel valleys of Appalachian America will be traversed by the iron horse, and primitive conditions will have vanished.

It is a land of valleys and villages, each an isolated community with its "Settlement Store" where barter of produce is the rule, and where news from the outside world filters in through channels uncertain and few. These valleys-many of them twothousand feet deep-have narrow strips of bottom land, and higher up, benches or coves, the only tillable soil.

The natural highways of the Cumberlands-the stream beds-are frequently impassable and as there are no bridges, at times of a freshet they are dangerous to cross. There are no turnpikes, and some of the roads are mere trails.

"We were ice-bound, snow-bound, and

In this shut-in world the patient oxen are still beasts of burden. When a boiler goes across the mountains, it is drawn by these animals. The harnesses are of ropes and chains, the yokes large, cumbrous affairs. From one county seat to the nearest railroad is fifty miles. The cost of hauling freight that distance is one dollar and a half for a hundred pounds-wagons are expected to last only a year.

Logs are driven down some convenient stream, then six or eight yokes of oxen transport them to the nearest station for shipping to a foreign port. They are used as ties in France, England, and Germany. The drivers walk along close to their teams, making the air vocal with their commands and the loud crack of whips.

Sometimes a pair of calves trot along briskly in front of a light, home-made wagon; but there are still more unusual ways of traveling.

On one occasion a lone fisherman was observed to furl his line and saunter toward a little camp whose striped shelter was plainly visible. A nearer view revealed the lodge of a veritable "Wandering Jew". A small, twowheeled cart stood near the embers of a smouldering fire; several children clustered around, one with hair of Titian red not unlike the man's, and a complexion of delicate pink. A woman sat nearby. While the gaunt

fisherman made ready to cook his catch, it was noticed that the woman was stone blind!

Later, this strange caravan resumed its line of march straight into the heart of the hill country. The tent, cooking utensils, and two smaller children

occupied the cart. The man between. the shafts clattered along noisily, while his sightless helpmeet pushed valiantly from the rear.

They furnished a striking example of the axiomatic saying: "Civilization travels fastest over good roads".

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HE Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway was built to serve the Southeast-to drain the Virginias for the benefit of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. But woe to the plans of menas of mice-the beneficiaries were not ready to receive its benefactions, wherefore it was forced to go north also. The line struck out for Elkhorn City in Kentucky, but ends today at Dante, Virginia, in a stub-nosed mountain gorge formed by three mountains. In its path to the new goal rise four lifts of the Blue Ridge each higher than the other; the last of the four is Sandy Ridge. The road's chief engineer, though he may have a sentimental eye for scenic beauty, certainly has a large, practical eye for mountain transportation difficulties. He says:

"The new railroad, to reach the north, must pass over or through these mountains. It cannot do either, altogether. It must do both in part. In the next twenty miles, we are drilling twenty tunnels with an aggregate length of over twenty thousand feet. The worst of them all is through Sandy Ridge. It is the longest and comes at the climax of the grade.

The man of imagination may easily. picture to himself a railroad train climbing the rocky side of Sandy Ridge and disappearing into the tunnel. It seemed, from where we stood, to resemble nothing so much as a great worm creeping up the side of a building and squirming in over the window sill. On such a pull, one almost feels sympathy for the groaning locomotive. When the wheels hold their grip on the rails, you hear the steady hoarse bark of the exhaust. When the wheels slip, you hear a few staccato coughs as the engine races. Watching from a distance, you

see at first a roll of black smoke and then, even in daylight, a ruddy light flares above the stack as the red-hot gases are belched up to outline themselves against the green of the mountainside. It is awe inspiring this almost hourly struggle between machinery and the hills-and you say as much. But the chief engineer doesn't become sentimental on the subject of hills or on the struggle between man and nature. He has a practical matter at heart which threatens to turn the poetry into a tragedy.

In telling what is likely to happen, a locomotive engineer says in a matter-offact way: "On such grades, the biggest locomotive is pulling every pound she knows how. She is burning every pound of coal we can crowd upon her grate bars. When she sticks her nose into a tunnel at the top of a grade, she is throwing out of her stack the greatest volume of deadly coal gas that she ever discharges. This is caught by the tunnel top and is forced down blistering, stinging, and suffocating, first upon the engine men and then upon the other members of the crew. We know what that means—it's death if we have to breathe it for any length of time.

"Trouble usually comes at the crest of the grade. The train usually breaks, if it is going to break, when the engine is in the tunnel and when, seemingly, the worst of the pull is over. The engine driver's first thought is to catch and hold the train before it can plunge down the hills. In maneuvering his engine to save the train, he is overcome by the deadly gases which settle in increasing volume about his head. Always there comes a time when even the stoutest engineer must cut loose and run for safety. A few of them get away; many of them have stayed too long.

"On the Norfolk and Western Railway, where there is a tunnel at the top of a grade, I have sat on the floor of an engine cab with my face buried in a wet sponge while we ran for safety. Once or twice, we barely reached daylight in time. Coal gas is a deadly thing when it is confined. It is at its worst when confined in a railroad tunnel at the top of a grade. And that is what we will have to contend against when that tunnel through Sandy Ridge is finished."

The mere recital of such facts, standing, as

we were, almost in sight of that very tunnel, made us feel that we had been in an inferno. We felt that we had had a hand-tohand tussle with the demon of the tunnel. Having felt rather than having studied the problem, it was like passing from a gloomy cave into brilliant sunshine to find how easily the ingenuity of man has been able to rob even this situation of its danger.

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an inner tube of timber which was about four feet from the tunnel side at all points. This casing or inner tube he carried into the tunnel for fifty feet, sealing it to the tunnel walls at the outer end. Outside of the tunnel he built a small house and installed in it an ordinary blower fan, using the same kind of a fan that is employed to force air into all tunnels and mines. This fan, when running, pours an enormous volume of fresh air into the space between the tunnel sides and the timber casing. The effect of the casing was to give direction to the current of air, even as the rifling of a barrel gives direction to a bullet. When the fan is started, the air rushes immediately through the entire length of the tunnel.

Since freight trains never try to pass through that tunnel at a rate of speed greater than twelve miles an hour, and since the air travels at a rate in excess of fifteen miles an hour, the volume of coal gas is swept through the tunnel ahead of the engine. So long as that fan is in working order, even though the train break in two or any other accident common to steep grades occur, the men may work in perfect safety; they know that the deadly gases will never overcome them.

The Norfolk and Western Railway has a long tunnel- the Elkhorn-at the crest of a steep grade twelve miles west of Bluefield, West Virginia. Almost every mishap common to such tunnels had occurred there, before C. S. Churchill, the chief engineer of the road, found the path to safety. The Elkhorn Tunnel had been made large and high to give the coal gases as much play as possible. Churchill took advantage of that fact.

Since the installation of this device in the Elkhorn Tunnel, the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio Railroads have come to use it on some of their treach