A VANISHING ROMANCE 211 
with its sparkling waters and high surrounding 
mountains, is so tempting in its possibilities that 
one longs for the means, including the ability of the 
landscape artist, to convert it into the dream of 
beauty it could so easily become. 
But though we may look so safely^down into one 
end of the Dark Corners, hold our breath up there on 
Melrose Mountain, and see nothing to hold it for, 
access to that charmed region is even to-day as 
difficult to the stranger as it has always been be- 
lieved to be undesirable. There is a road in, but it 
appears to have been designed to keep people out. 
By far the easiest way to get there is to walk. And 
this we did many a time in by-gone days, having 
first made friends with the principal offenders 
against the excise law. It was the people of the 
Dark Corners who muddled our hitherto clear con- 
victions about right and wrong. The young girls 
who came out of there to bring us flowers smiled as 
sweetly as any child of fortune. And one has seen 
the face of a moonshiner glow with an expression 
that assured one that, whatever the verdict of the 
world, he would not be counted bad in that final 
court where human prejudices are ruled out. 
That the Dark Corners got its name from the 
flourishing but questionable industry carried on 
there is disputed by some, who say that the name 
was given, not because of moral obliquity, but be- 
cause once a stump orator, trying to rouse the people 
at some political crisis, told them they were steeped 
in ignorance, that they lived in dark corners, and 
