ountry is from 2,000 to 7,000 feet above sea level and
is, in fact, a mountain region with a southern exposure.

Strange stories are told here of people who came five, ten, twenty or
more years ago, with a view of dying here, but who afterward decided to
live on, and they are living yet. One man who was a survivor of the
Samso-Philistine war, if I am not mistaken, came here at last from the
mouth of the Amazon, full of malaria. He had been kind of "down in the
mouth"--of the Amazon for some years, and they say his liver looked
like a rubber door-mat and his skin was like the cover of a sun-kissed
ham.

He picked up his spirits here and recovered his youth, and though he was
very old when he came, he is still older now and in pretty good health.
I went to see him the other day. He is so old that there is moss on the
north side of him and hieroglyphics on his feet. When I made some
facetious remarks to him and told him a story I had recently acquired,
he brightened up a good deal and emitted a dry, cackling laugh like a
xylophone, and said that he believed he enjoyed that story just as well
as he did when they used to tell it in the rifle-pits in front of Troy.

He said he liked Asheville very much indeed.

Asheville is called the Switzerland of America. It has been my blessed
privilege during the past twenty years to view nearly all the
Switzerlands of America that are here, but this is fully the equal if
not the superior of any of them.

You can climb to the top of Beaucatcher Mountain and see a beautiful
sight in any direction, and on most any day of the year. Every where the
eye rests on a broad sweep of dark-blue climate. Up in the gorges, under
the whispering pines, along the rhododendron bordered margins of the
Swannonoa, or the French Brood, out through the Gap, and down the
thousand mountain brooks, you will find enough climate in twenty minutes
to last a week.

The chief products of Western North Carolina are smoking tobacco and
climate. If you do not like the climate you can keep yourself to the
smoking tobacco.

Here you will find old Mr. Ozone with his coat off and a feather duster
in his hand, prepared to dust the cobwebs from the catacombs of the
asthmatic or the consumptive. There is enough climate wasted here every
year to supply a city the size of Chicago. Moreover, there is now a
handsome hotel here called the Battery Park--that has been full ever
since it was built and you can get good saddle h