At the lowest ebb of his fortunes there came to him a letter from a young lawyer, much in his own professional position, but who had confessed himself beaten and turned sheep-farmer. Here, among the mountains of East Tennessee, said the letter, he had bought a farm for a song; the land was the poorest he ever saw, but served his purposes, and the house was a phenomenal structure for these parts, --a six-room brick, built fifty years ago by a city man with a bucolic craze and consumptive tendencies. The people were terribly poor, still, if his friend would come he might manage to pick up something, for there was not a physician in a circuit of sixty miles.