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The Riddle Of The Rocks, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree) This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Riddle Of The Rocks 1895
Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
Illustrator: A. B. Frost
Release Date: November 26, 2007 [EBook #23629]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIDDLE OF THE ROCKS ***
Produced by David Widger
THE RIDDLE OF THE ROCKS
By Charles Egbert Craddock
1895
Upon the steep slope of a certain "bald" among the Great Smoky Mountains there lie, just at the verge of the strange stunted woods from which the treeless dome emerges to touch the clouds, two great tilted blocks of sandstone. They are of marked regularity of shape, as square as if hewn with a chisel. Both are splintered and fissured; one is broken in twain. No other rock is near. The earth in which they are embedded is the rich black soil not unfrequently found upon the summits. Nevertheless no great significance might seem to attach to their isolation--an outcropping of ledges, perhaps; a fracture of the freeze; a trace of ancient denudation by the waters of the spring in the gap, flowing now down the trough of the gorge in a silvery braid of currents, and with a murmur that is earnest of a song.
It may have been some distortion of the story heard only from the lips of the circuit rider, some fantasy of trad