By James R. Randall.

The late Judge William D. Kelley was an intensely practical man, and so not given to rhapsody, but he has left on record that Western North Carolina was the most beautiful country upon which his feet or eyes ever rested. He had visited many lands and gazed upon many transcendent panoramas unrolled by the Master of the Universe. He was a loyal and devoted son of Pennsylvania, and enthusiastically loved and admired her noble scenery, but when he beheld the unrivalled majesty and picturesqueness of Western North Carolina, his honest soul expanded with the prospect, and, in a burst of genuine candor, he declared that never before had he looked upon a region at once so sublime and entrancing. What Judge Kelley uttered has been, by many other enthusiasts, repeated in varying phrase and similar tenor. It is not called the Land of the Sky because of its altitude. There are numerous localities that surpass it in this particular, but rather, I think, because of a peculiar phenomenon of the region, where the azure atmosphere that we call the skies descends, or seems to do so, actually and magically upon the tree tops and mountain sides, so that the dazzled spectator almost instinctively puts forth his hand to grasp the mysterious panoply. When a child of earth is thus moved, as it were, by heaven, with the blue ether glorified by sunlight, and the alpine groups transformed in shape by fugitive clouds, no wonder his mind becomes blissfully inebriated, his soul uplifted, and his senses plumed to take wing from the solid globe that imprisons his feet. The dullest fancy cannot resist the spell.

The ardent, poetic temperament has a conditional foretaste of what it is to escape the flesh envelope and assume spiritual alertness. But it is not always thus that this gorgeous land presents itself. It has moods of tremendous energy, and to make returning mildness more alluring, as the cunning master of music intersperses rude chords in his glorious melody, it veils the comely perfection of its face in a storm of frowns, but only such as triumphant beauty can assume betimes. Then the alpine cliffs are garmented with mist, while the Hyder Ali of Cloud Land poises on the declivities, concentrated with black wrath, before rushing down in fragmentary battalions upon the plains below. But there is no ravage. The little hut of the inhabitant remains unscathed, still emitting from its rough chimney a curling smoke, and the lordly mansion, perched on some aspiring peak, stands steadfast, while the fairy maiden shrined there playfully dabbles her white fingers in the foam of the upper deep. From the dark canopy of the great giant of the Smoky range leaps the live lightning, and a thunder roll bellows or crackles or mutters in a myriad strange defiles, but we know that behind this lowering front, hinting of God’s smile behind the tempest, our winsome Lady of the Sky is laughing still, with the spring in her brilliant eyes, and the wild flowers, smitten by sunshine in her golden hair. Anon, as the seasons are made mutable, another phase is disclosed. The air grows cold as if in the clutch of some Siberian intruder, and feathery flakes pour down their “snow storm of stars,” and the mighty monsters of the mountain world yield placidly to their chill, pallid cerements, but we feel that this is one of our enchanter’s displays of infinite variety, and that our spirits are held in thrall for another transformation. And what a valiant exaltation the chill breath of the ozone-ladened breeze fixes in our blood, and what roses in our cheeks! How we dominate with resistless stride the pedestrian paths, or how we credit the fable of the Centaur, when, in the fervor of environment, we partake of the joy and very existence of the nimble steed we have bestrode adventurously! In other climes and with other surroundings we have felt languor, or dullness, or restive incapacity, but here, with the potent inspiration of the panorama and the atmosphere, our whole being bounds with daring briskness and mastering activity. In the overwhelming sense of powerful forces put in play, we do not ask if life be worth living, but thank God that we are alive and filled with the alchemy of Sky Land. When these agencies react and demand the unbent bow, we lounge, it may be on the porches of the grand hotel, with eyes restful upon Pisgah and the enormous petrifaction of the rat that never budges from its lair. Perchance, with appetite made robust and undeniable, we attack the toothsome repast provided, but ever and anon we glance through the big windows at the splendid pictures beyond, as if we were afraid that some stray expression of the amphitheatre would escape us unaware. We stroll, happy and satisfied, to the piazza, and loll in an easy chair, puffing at pipe or cigar, but never ceasing to confront admiringly the scenes that intoxicated us from the first. The sun has driven its fiery, glowing chariot beyond the vast barrier of loam and basalt, but left a sparkling, glowing, radiant wake behind. The clouds are blushing like traditional brides, and the sorcerer of the sky has grouped them among shining lakes and islands and the watching perspective that this inimitable artist alone can fashion and dissolve. You presently understand how the poet merely revealed what he had seen when Night dropped her crimson mantle and pinned it with a star. And it was no exaggeration when the grim Carlyle bade us witness how Bootes drags his reluctant dogs in a leash of sidereal fire, or how mailed Orion flames his plumes ’mid bright-battalioned planets. As the mystic dusk robes the familiar scenery with a pall, we hear the insect world, if it be the proper season, conversing in a thousand tongues, startled anon by the shrill cry of a night bird, and possibly we wonder if the momentary shadow on the orb of the moon was the vagrant pinion of Minerva’s bird, or the flashing stroke of the eagle, put to flight from his eyry slumber. Then the vision fades, and some drowsy sprite, circling in the atmosphere, infects us with somnolency. We cannot resist it, unless perchance strong coffee or some such insidious decoction has violated, for a time, the blessed ministering of sleep that men, who have betrayed or lost it, would give millions to enjoy. We move to our apartment in amiable indolence, and hardly has our head touched the inviting pillow when we reach that condition wherein, as Lew Wallace says, even the wicked cease to sin. And if we have scientifically and rationally allowed the wholesome air to enter a little at the top and a little at the bottom of our window, what slumber we enjoy, unless we have deliberately assailed and violated every law conducive to repose! We know that while we rest no noxious thing can enter our lungs, but the pure, sweet, invigorating wind from the heights is visiting our whole system and repairing what other atmospheres may have put in peril. What a blessing, after such refreshment, to rise in the earlier morning and prayerfully go to the window for another glance at the wonderland that has made us a willing prisoner to its enticements! We salute the mountains as loyal friends, and they, after a vogue of their own, appear to reciprocate our salute. They, too, appear renovated with the dews of night, and their variegated vestments glitter with adornment. The fascinating curves of the French Broad river cleave the landscape, and the swift, clear tide laves the feet of the giant peaks, whose fertile valleys, smiling it may be with agricultural abundance, betoken that this is a fertile as well as a grand and attractive region. How that fine farm called Tahkeostee projects itself like an immense backbone upon the undulating piedmont, and how you scheme about the happiness of a proprietor who holds the title to such a domain! But you need a nearer view, and, as all manner of vehicles or horses are at disposal, you take an excursion there, crossing the railway track and handsome bridge to emerge upon a firm country road. You look back, and the prospect is brave with splendid hotels, villas of all manner of architecture, and the city of Asheville, which, because chiefly of the tourist travel, is rapidly taking rank with the first cities of the State, by manufacturing, by drainage and by the discovery that all of the pure air on earth cannot make amends for water contamination. And so, with generous, innocent fountain sources everywhere at the bidding of man, Asheville and all Western Carolina have nothing to crave for in the way of physical health and happiness.

Wooed by the spirit of adventure, you spur your horse higher and higher up the ascent, and find that some rich man has fixed his abode in more or less of grandeur atop the alpine plateau, and you look down upon humbler mountains and far away into the vista, where the locomotive is pushing its path from Henderson, or it may be Hickory Gap. Descending the road you follow along the bright, rippling stream, passing habitations of various kinds, now rude or humble, and now comfortable or charming. At last you reach a spot that the poet Moore would have raved about in undying song, for it is worthy of any singer, who, however tuneful, might well despair of bringing justice to the realm of so much beauty. The dwelling there is not a palace, but evidently the abode of taste and wealth. The garden is what you have dreamed about, when young and addicted to Lalla Rookh. What a wealth of flowers and how artistically displayed! The air is perfumed all about this fairy kingdom and you instinctively look askance for the apparition of Prince Charming, or the Fair One with the Golden Locks. The Prince I have not seen, but the Fair One was visible and, with her guidance, I am permitted, in a luxurious nook, to scan the surrounding glories. There is no other just such site for perfect habitation, for it is at the meeting of the waters, which glisten far below. Here the impetuous French Broad rushes to the embrace of the gentle Swannanoa, and here their mingled tides laughingly and pellucidly hasten to kiss the awaiting and absorbing sea. The mountains are marshalled on dress parade in one mighty ring around this centre of loveliness, and the dream you have fallen voluntarily into is only dissolved, and not unpleasantly, by the matter-of-fact tracks of steel that glisten at the base of the hill, and the snorting or clanging or whistling engine that plunges, with its train, toward the station, which is now, by local significance, well known as the place where our modern Kubla Khan, Mr. George Vanderbilt, must alight to visit the matchless pleasure dome he has decreed on the heights beyond the summer lodge of the Fair One with the Golden Locks, where, in imagination, we are now spectator. It is needless to repeat how much Mr. Vanderbilt has spent or will continue to spend upon what fame heralds as the most complete and magnificent estate owned by any private gentlemen, and one that few royal personages could obtain. Without summing up the oft-repeated and dry statistics of the dimension of his residence, out-houses, stables, barns and acres, it is enough to understand that, after the method of another marvelous man who has metamorphosed St. Augustine, unstinted opulence and modern art have met for material transformation. No amount of money could reproduce the natural splendor of the location, but science and skill and Aladdin’s lamp, which is ready money and a superabundance of it, can rear castles and improve grounds in a way to be worthy of such scenes of Arcadian majesty and beauty all around. It speaks well for the rich young man, who is highly educated, most accomplished, and a lover of literature in all of its development, while kind and gentle and benignant, that he should have determined upon this place of all the places in the world to rear his incomparable home and be a veritable monarch of much that he surveyed, though not all. And yet, having once had vision of this alluring sphere, it would be indeed a source of astonishment if it failed to exercise upon him the sorcery I so feebly portray. The fancy takes flight and pictures to itself what may be the result of such a scheme. Will he, when the palace is completed and everything exhausted to fashion it as he aspired, be any more content than he was before? Will he abandon the mighty Babylon of the East and abide at his gorgeous Southern hermitage, with its imperial setting? Will he simply flit there, from time to time, and, at other seasons, leave his domain, like a haunted palace, a stupendous show-place or proverbial folly? Will he settle there, and perchance wed the Fair One with the Golden Locks, becoming racy of the soil of the Old North State, dispensing joy, hospitality, munificence and rational bounty? Will he, having more than emulated the author of Vathek in construction, live, like Beckford, to behold the ruin of his aspiration? But what is the use of tossing these gilded juggler balls in the air of imagination, and making inquiries of that future which does not belong to any mortal? Suffice it practically, that young Mr. Vanderbilt has appreciated the South, yielded homage to her natural magnetism, and made his deeds speak louder than words of praise. Let us take for granted that he will never weary of his designs and that Providence has in store for him and his surroundings special and exceptional benedictions.

Adjacent to Mr. Vanderbilt’s principality are the grounds of the Kenilworth Inn, which would have delighted Amy Robsart and disarmed her enemies. Never did British beauty of any country preceding this command, even at the hands of royalty, so many comforts as the Kenilworth lavishly displays for the delectation of the most exacting creature. When this is said, what need of multiplying words or measuring with yard-sticks the magnificence of the various compartments of the house or its broad baronial park? Unless you are impervious to all enticement, you will be impelled to see these marvels through your own eyes and then compare your impressions with mine.

Perhaps you who visit Western North Carolina find instinct within you some of the fiery blood of Orion or Nimrod or Buffalo Bill, and wish to exercise it in the slaughter of beasts and birds. Well, with your improved weapon, with all modern lethal devices, in dear old clothes that are already creased in the seams and baggy at the knees, you may, with the rugged father of Esmeralda, or one of her tough, nimble brothers, follow the black bear to his cave or track partridges, grouse or squirrels to their leafy haunts, and make them acquainted with death or anguish. You may, even without having conned the pages of Isaak Walton, be impassioned for snaring diplomatic and pugnacious trout, with an insect engendered by the artificer or with the native minnow; and, if so, your selection of streams will be easy and your game-bag should be bulging with trophies when you homeward wend your way, with appetite of a ploughman for the fare of a French chef who has been beguiled by Col. Coxe as the presiding genius of his kitchen and larder. And the Colonel will, after supper, make merry with you, as becomes an elegant gentleman, who has carried his accomplishments all over the world, and who laughingly declares that he is “the only man extant who was killed on both sides during the war.” He had possessions at the North and South, and his respective substitutes were among the unreturning brave. So, by proxy, he was slain twice, and yet is still alive to the gratification of a host of friends and admirers. You will be sure to get an invitation from him to drive, with a jocund company of both sexes, in his tally-ho-coach, which is as well appointed as any in the land, and it is a memorable thing to see him handle the ribbons over four thoroughbreds that were nurtured on bluest and most succulent of Kentucky grass. A drive with Colonel Coxe and such ladies and gentlemen as he groups around him is an experience that you will fondle, some day, when business or a kindred commonplace tie fetters you to a dull or smoky town. You will then comprehend that poor girl, a rustic heroine and living martyr, when she could forgive the miserable man who had repaid her with ingratitude and desertion, but could not divine how, though he left her, he could leave “The Mountings.”

In a rollicking mood you may venture to pay a pop-call on Bill Nye, who, though he pokes perfunctory, periodical fun at the Sky Land, clings to it, when he can, like a fellow does to his skin, and, in serious interludes, loves even its occasionally disreputable roads, which are, at any rate, picturesque and informal. He may escort you to a friend’s place of concealment, the den of “the chemist,” the alchemist of moonshine whiskey, warranted, no doubt, to kill at three hundred yards. I have always pitied these proscribed brethren, the victims of our internal, or what no less a person than Thomas Jefferson is credited with denominating “infernal” law. The moonshiner naturally has as much right to boil his fruit or grain into spirits as the farmer has to put hominy hot in the caldron, but the law places a negative upon his claim, and fosters and pampers the trusts that so much trouble the Democratic conscience, but are ingeniously utilized to pay pensions or run the government. So the mountain chemist is given to hiding and, at times, when hunted too persistently, to shooting his pursuers. This is all wrong, because unlawful, but it is hard to instruct the grey matter of his brain on such subjects. It is grewsome to see these lank, leathery, unkempt, semi-barbarous brethren brought into court with manacles on their limbs and summarily consigned to doleful exile in distant dungeons. You will, when you see them and their wives and their progeny, wonder how such a country can produce such specimens of humanity, but it is easily understood when explanation is at hand. In that region are reared the best of cattle, sheep, poultry and fruits, but the moonshiner disdains them. He prefers, or habit and poverty compel him to prefer, soggy, hot biscuit, excessive coffee, cadaverous, greasy bacon, assassinated in a frying pan. He drinks too much of his own fiery decoction and too little of the salubrious water that leaps, gushes and sparkles on every hand. If one could capture young moonshiner girls and boys, feed them on civilized diet, girdle them with proper comfort, garment them decently, treat them amiably and educate them wholesomely, the transformation would be thorough, startling and supreme. It would be an object lesson conveying its own moral, and this would be the evolution of many Esmeraldas off the mimic stage, and many a sturdy, comely, valiant, intellectual man, who might succeed in the Senate such typical Carolinians as Vance and Ransom.

Speaking of Vance, if you loitered in Sky Land, in midsummer, you might make your way to Gombroon, his highland roost, and be sure of an old-fashioned welcome. No man has a heartier nature and no man is more of an adorer, so to speak, of Western North Carolina. He would tell you characteristic anecdotes of his wonderful career and hold you, as the ancient mariner did the wedding guests, with wit and wisdom, such as Master Coleridge never “dreamt of in his philosophy.” So you would understand from him what potent possibilities this clime possesses, and how from the very elements there is distilled a subtle essence that holds in solution the formation of noble men and beautiful women.

If, for instance, you had an agreeable, harmonious company of friends and acquaintances at Battery Park Hotel, and longed for an ideal trip, not too long, and which would entertainingly add to your stock of enchantment, I doubt not that Mr. McKissick, who is young and genial and intelligent, as becomes a cavalier South Carolinian and manager of a great caravanserai, would suggest a trip to the Hot Springs, which, by rail, is not many miles away. If you could prevail upon McKissick to join your party, it would be an accentuated treat, for he has been an ardent, expert, accomplished newspaper man, and is bubbling over with high health and fresh humor. This maroon is altogether delicious. From the car window you get rapid but incessantly changing views of the French Broad, which, crossed and recrossed and paralleled, is never out of sight. It is mild and clear flowing; it is turbulent, swift and vocal; it is free from impediment; it is vexed with rapids and frustrated with boulders as if a battle of Titans had been contested to stormy demolition; it is always charming. The time consumed in the passage has never for an instant tormented you, and even the most voluble talker is content to let his tongue “keep Sunday”—as an old darkey said—in the presence of this water course which descends in glory through the mountain defiles. These mountains enclose you, but they are not like their Swiss family bare and bleak and tawny, but lush with emerald foliage or cultivated to their very brows. The Mountain Park Hotel at Hot Springs, like all first-class establishments hereabout, is equipped sumptuously. It has miles of piazzas. It nestles in a happy valley. The river runs hard by, and, at this point, is narrow but energetic. It is a cold stream, but here, a few feet from the surface, hot fountains are latent, and any positive disturbance of the earth-crust is followed by vaporous exhalations. The baths are seductive, the more so, perhaps, because you are immersed in dazzling marble tanks and the liquid purrs you like velvet in motion. You can drink vast quantities of this fluid for it has amazing lightness and makes a delicate stomach feel “like a gentleman.” Wondrous tales are told of its curative faculties, and I take for granted that a rheumatic or dyspeptic man or woman soon gets ashamed, in such ablution and bibulation, of racking muscles and azure imps. By what volcanic agency this phenomenon occurs we can only conjecture. The probability is that the central fires are nearer than usual to the surface, or that the boiling waters that can ordinarily be reached by hard, pertinacious mining toil, thousands of feet deep, find here some propulsion and channel of their own and need only a touch to make them disclose their virtues. If they do not “create a spirit under the ribs of death,” they spur on an appetite that may have lost all zest, and when a man is impatient for his meals and partakes of them with satisfaction, disease has small hold upon him.

One of the weird sights of this region is a mountain fire. On a dark night such conflagrations are, of course, more spectacular, and when belts of flame cover large areas and are detached fiercely from one another, the resemblance to Kilauea, the burning lake of the Sandwich Island, is startling. In these days of Hawaiian perturbation and discussion one could easily imagine that he was in the Eden Isle of the Pacific ocean, and might look for dusky maidens darting by on horseback with red hybiscus flowers blushing in their lustrous black hair.

This enchanted region is reached by the Richmond & Danville railroad, whose lines furnish approach also to many other places in the alpine location of South Carolina and Georgia that merit equal attention with these scenes so imperfectly described or sketched from memory. CÆsar’s Head, near Greenville, is a genuine curiosity, and even the old European or Rocky Mountain traveller admits that the prospect from this precipitous elevation is awesome and inspirational. At the old town of Clarksville, in North Georgia, the scenery is transcendent. Once you have seen Mount Yonah you will never forget it, and when will ever fade from your recollection the prodigious carving, by witchery in distant perspective, of the Cherokee chief stretched gigantically upon his sky-line bier? From the porches of Roseneath villa you best discern this strange conformation. There he extends, in tremendous dimensions, graven on the horizon, a distinct and spectral Indian shape, with drooping plumes. The people thereabout know him familiarly as Skiahjagustah. You may, in quest of gold, for the region is full of it, seek to penetrate this mysterious personage, but he will vanish as you approach him, transformed to common rock and tree and shrub, and yet reappear by enchantment when you go back to Roseneath and summon him from beyond the Soquee river. Here asthma has no clutch and rheumatism ceases to torment. A German workman came here crippled from New Jersey, and presently grew perfectly well in this climate. He is busily at work in wood and iron in a shop of his own, and happy in possession of a little farm, which has a famous vineyard like unto those which gem the banks of the Rhine or Moselle.

Just beyond Clarksville is one of the most beautiful valleys in all this world—the Vale of Nacoochee—with Yonah dominating the fertile plain, and the upper Chattahoochee river purling around it. Here the mound builders of the continent had cherished habitation, and here they left monumental signs of their existence. Here the Cherokee loved to dwell, and just on the banks of the river and circumjacent to the mound, where clover and corn attain exceptional proportions, is a cemetery fat with Indian death. From Clarksville to Toccoa and Tallulah Falls is a mere jaunt of an hour or so. But why attempt to portray the graceful cascade and the terrible torrent? Ben Perley Poore, who had roamed in many lands and had adoration of all sights of nature of a high and exceptional kind, once told me that after all of his wanderings the scenes that lingered longest and fondest in his memory were those around Clarksville and Tallulah. Oh, you must see for yourself the unrivalled Georgia waterfall, with its tremendous chasm and precipitous descent, not in one roar of waters, but by successive leaps and bounds and plunges, alternately divided in swirling pools before dashing headlong down to the palpitating plain. Each fall is distinct in itself and of varied fury, as you will perceive either from the brink of the abyss or in touch with the vital torrent. This, too, is the Sky Land—glorious land—and here, in the coming time, as elsewhere in the alpine region of the South, many thousands will come ecstatically. St. Augustine waited long for a Flagler and Asheville for a Coxe, but they came in the ripeness of time and amazingly well did they perform the work appointed for them. If some men like these should, in their opulence, propose to magnify Clarksville, Nacoochee and Tallulah, what new splendors will come to the Land of the Sky, and what blessings will be lavished upon thousands of human beings who only need to know the South to love it, and who are beckoned back to health and strength and happiness where