Clay Eaters Of The South

There are thousands of intelligent readers of our news and story papers, who, having read of these unforlunate beings, pronounce the articles referring to them as canards. But the fact remains, that in the mountainous portions of North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, "clay eaters" live and move and have their being. In the year 1883, while engaged with a surveying party in the Cumberland mountains, several cases of clay eating, and its awful coneequence?, carne under my notice. One day while riding through the mountains, I was unexpectedly brought nto the presence ot a family of clay eaterp. I had broken my saddle girth, and gtopped at a tumble-down log cabin, to obtain, ifpossible, a piece of rope or string to make the necessary repairs. Aü I led ray horse up to the cabin door, I was saluted by " Howdy " from the lips of a cadaverous looking man, seated on a log. and sucking the stem of a cob-pipe. I returned the salutation with another "Howdy," and tben made my wants known. While he of the cob-pipe was hunting for my "repairs," I took a mental photograph of the surroundings. The door of the cabio swung on one hinge, the wind whistled through the chinkless log?, the sixzling fire in the fire-place sent out a heavy, suffocating smoke, a part of which crept up and out of the dilapidated mud and stick chimney, while the rest spread out into the room and slowly disappeared between the logs, out into the open air. A big strapping girl of 18 or 20 years, chewing the ever-present snnff-stick, gazed at me suspiciously from behind the door, while four small children, ragged and dirty, rolled and played on the dirt floor. My attenüon had been attracted from the first by a low moaning noise from within, and in reply to my question if any one was sick, the oldest girl loosened her grip on the snuff stick long enough to say "mam." When I asked what the matter was, she briefly replied "Fever, I reckon." Noticing a man and woman inside whom I took to be neighbors, I stepped in, and found the sick person to be a woman of perhapg 40 years of age. She was lying on a bunk, and seemed to be euBering intensely. Her bloated form and sallow, ghastly countenance led me at once to suspect the truth. I approached the man, and on inquiring the cause of her malady, he sententiously remarked, " Clay eatin- they've all got it." I then for the first time noticed the countenances of the cbi'dren, and saw in their pallid faces and dull eyes, the dreadful evidences of the awful habit that had brought their mother to her grave. As I left the house, the woman's husband who had repaired the broken girth, said he reckoned " ihe old woman's gone j der," and I learned afterward that she died the next day. In talking with a " native " physician, who was bom and raised in the mountains, he inforrned me that the habit is formed when young, by cbildren picking up pieces of clay that have fallen trom tbe mud cliimneve, and, chüdlike, putting them, as 'hey do eyerything else, into their mouth. Bcing "smoked" through and throush, by the smoke from the fireplace, the clav has a ppculiar gmoky, sooty taste, which the children in time learn to lik--, and when the habit is once formed, it is alanost impossible to break it. If continued. it produces nausea, the stomach revol.s against the unnatural diet, the appetite f ails, the blood be -omes slugei8h, bloating ensues, and death is the evitable result.