THE COUNTRY. 177

 to conceal. Their blank impassive faces are to
 the eye of the passer-by exactly alike.
 An observer cannot escape the feeling that
the members of a Cracker family must have
been touched by exactly the same sensations of
apprehension, which would hardly be called
thoughts .or emotions; and he admits that he
would have to live among such people before
he could discover their characteristics, just as
he would have to live in the barrens before he
could distinguish individual pines in the mo-
notonous and endless armies of these trees;
and it would seem as though he could scarcely
receive any more sympathetic companionship
from these silent men and women than from
a group of pines full of murmuring whispers.
 Crackers do not often care to live in settle-
ments or villages; instead, each small household
dwells in a cabin that stands quite apart; it is
built generally on a little spot in the woods,
which has been cleared by toil that was almost
as slow and patient, and as without feeling or
interest, as a force in Nature.
 To come out of the silence of the forest into