New Year's

New Years Day. Preparing the traditional stuff. Grateful to be at home. Finished Horace Kephart's posthumous novel Smoky Mountain Magic, which Frances gave me for Christmas. Very impressed. Had heard of it's existence but had just known Kephart as the writer of Our Southern Highlanders and Camping and Woodcraft. I guess that's only fair since he never published a novel in his lifetime. He had completed Smoky Mountain Magic and was looking to get it published at the time of his untimely death in 1931. The manuscript passed down through his family until this past year his great-granddaughter, Libby Kephart Hargrave, on the 75th anniversary of the establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, worked to finally have the novel published, appropriately, by the Great Smoky Mountains Association.