search of the picturesque? Let the reader ride from Abingdon through a
wilderness of cornpone and rusty bacon, and then judge. There were,
to be sure, novels lying about, and newspapers, and fragments of
information to be picked up about a world into which the travelers
seemed to emerge. They, at least, were satisfied, and went off to their
rooms with the restful feeling that they had arrived somewhere and no
unquiet spirit at morn would say "to horse." To sleep, perchance to
dream of Tatem and his household cemetery; and the Professor was heard
muttering in his chamber,

"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expir'd."

The morning was warm (the elevation of the hotel must be between
twenty-five hundred and three thousand feet), rainy, mildly rainy; and
the travelers had nothing better to do than lounge upon the veranda,
read feeble ten-cent fictions, and admire the stems of the white
birches, glistening in the moisture, and the rhododendron--trees, twenty
feet high, which were shaking off their last pink blossoms, and look
down into the valley of the Doe. It is not an exciting landscape,
nothing bold or specially wild in it, but restful with the monotony of
some of the wooded Pennsylvania hills.

Sunday came up smiling, a lovely day, but offering no church privileges,
for the ordinance of preaching is only occasional in this region.
The ladies of the hotel have, however, gathered in the valley a
Sunday-school of fifty children from the mountain cabins. A couple
of rainy days, with the thermometer rising to 80 deg., combined with
natural laziness to detain the travelers in this cottage of ease. They
enjoyed this the more because it was on their consciences that they
should visit Linville Falls, some twenty-five miles eastward, long held
up before them as the most magnificent feature of this region, and on no
account to be omitted. Hence, naturally, a strong desire to omit it. The
Professor takes bold ground against these abnormal freaks of nature, and
it was nothing to him that the public would demand that we should see
Linville Falls. In the first place, we could find no one who had ever
seen them, and we spent two days in catechizing natives and strangers.
The nearest we came to information was from a workman at the furnace,
who was born and raised within three miles of the Falls. He