nd splendid river, which was now running crimson and gold and
with a steely glitter, reflecting the sunset, in the midst of the dusky,
dull-blue landscape, with the languor of evening slipping down upon it.

There it lay in primeval beauty,--the land of hope. Oh, for the spirit
of a soothsayer; for one prophetic moment! What did that land
hold,--what days should dawn upon it; what hearthstones should be
alight; who should be the victor in the conquests of the future, and
what of the victim?

But they loved this country--the Cherokees; their own, they said, for
the Great Spirit gave it them. They even sought to associate with those
splendid eastern mountains the origin of the Cherokee people by the
oft-reiterated claim that the first of their race sprung from the soil
of those noble summits or dropped from the clouds that hover about the
lofty domes. And now Willinawaugh broke from the silence that the lack
of a common tongue had fostered, and despite that embargo on the
exchange of ideas he grew fluent and his enthusiasm seemed to whet the
understanding of his listeners, who could realize in some sort the
language that they could not speak. They caught the names of the great
landmarks. The vast range, on an outlier of which they pitched their
camp, as insignificant in proportion as an atom to the universe, he
called the Wasioto Mountain, and one of the rivers was the Hoho-hebee,
and others were the Coot-cla, the Agiqua, the Canot, the Nonachuckeh.
Hamish remembered these names long after they were forgotten by others,
and the re-christened Clinch and Holston and French Broad flowed as
fairly with their uncouth modern nomenclature as when they were
identified by as liquid musical syllables as the lapsing of their own
currents; for never did he lose the impression of this night;--never
faded the mental picture of the Cherokee chief, the war-paint, vermilion
and black and white, on his face as he sat before the fire, the waving
of the eagle-feathers on his tufted scalp-lock blotting out half the
dull-blue landscape below, which had the first hour of the night upon
it, and the moon, blooming like a lily, with a fair white chalice
reflected in the dark deeps of the Tsullakee River. And in this hour
while Odalie reached out with all tender, tremulous hope to the future
the savage told of the past.

Of the past,--mysterious, mythical. Of the strange lack of tradition of
this new world that was yet so old. For here, in the mi