eshed
in a labyrinth that has deflected and repelled the march of our nation
for three hundred years.

In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd, of Westover, was running the
boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, he finally was
repulsed by parallel chains of savage, unpeopled mountains that rose
tier beyond tier to the westward, everywhere densely forested, and
matted into jungle by laurel and other undergrowth. In his _Journal_,
writing in the quaint, old-fashioned way, he said: "Our country has now
been inhabited more than 130 years by the English, and still we hardly
know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhere above 250
miles from the sea. Whereas the French, who are later comers, have
rang'd from Quebec Southward as far as the Mouth of Mississippi, in the
bay of Mexico, and to the West almost as far as California, which is
either way above 2,000 miles."

A hundred and thirty years later, the same thing could have been said of
these same mountains; for the "fierce and uncouth races of men" that Poe
faintly heard of remained practically undiscovered until they startled
the nation on the scene of our Civil War, by sending 180,000 of their
riflemen into the Union Army.

If a corps of surveyors to-day should be engaged to run a line due west
from eastern Virginia to the Blue Grass of Kentucky, they would have an
arduous task. Let us suppose that they start from near Richmond and
proceed along the line of 37 deg. 50'. The Blue Ridge is not especially
difficult: only eight transverse ridges to climb up and down in fourteen
miles, and none of them more than 2,000 feet high from bottom to top.
Then, thirteen miles across the lower end of The Valley, a curious
formation begins.

As a foretaste, in the three and a half miles crossing Little House and
Big House mountains, one ascends 2,200 feet, descends 1,400, climbs
again 1,600, and goes down 2,000 feet on the far side. Beyond lie steep
and narrow ridges athwart the way, paralleling each other like waves at
sea. Ten distinct mountain chains are scaled and descended in the next
forty miles. There are few "leads" rising gradually to their crests.
Each and every one of these ridges is a Chinese wall magnified to
altitudes of from a thousand to two thousand feet, and covered with
thicket. The hollows between them are merely deep troughs.

In the next thirty miles we come upon novel topography. Instead of wave
following wave in orderly procession, we f