had heard
of people going there. He had never seen them himself. It was a good
twenty-five miles there, over the worst road in the State we'd think it
thirty before we got there. Fifty miles of such travel to see a little
water run down-hill! The travelers reflected. Every country has a local
waterfall of which it boasts; they had seen a great many. One more would
add little to the experience of life. The vagueness of information,
to be sure, lured the travelers to undertake the journey; but the
temptation was resisted--something ought to be left for the next
explorer--and so Linville remains a thing of the imagination.

Towards evening, July 29, between showers, the Professor and the Friend
rode along the narrow-gauge road, down Johnson's Creek, to Roan Station,
the point of departure for ascending Roan Mountain. It was a ride of
an hour and a half over a fair road, fringed with rhododendrons, nearly
blossomless; but at a point on the stream this sturdy shrub had formed
a long bower where under a table might have been set for a temperance
picnic, completely overgrown with wild grape, and still gay with bloom.
The habitations on the way are mostly board shanties and mean frame
cabins, but the railway is introducing ambitious architecture here
and there in the form of ornamental filigree work on flimsy houses;
ornamentation is apt to precede comfort in our civilization.

Roan Station is on the Doe River (which flows down from Roan Mountain),
and is marked at 1265 feet above the sea. The visitor will find here a
good hotel, with open wood fires (not ungrateful in a July evening), and
obliging people. This railway from Johnson City, hanging on the edge of
the precipices that wall the gorge of the Doe, is counted in this region
by the inhabitants one of the engineering wonders of the world. The
tourist is urged by all means to see both it and Linville Falls.

The tourist on horseback, in search of exercise and recreation, is not
probably expected to take stock of moral conditions. But this Mitchell
County, although it was a Union county during the war and is Republican
in politics (the Southern reader will perhaps prefer another adverb to
"although"), has had the worst possible reputation. The mountains
were hiding-places of illicit distilleries; the woods were full of
grog-shanties, where the inflaming fluid was sold as "native brandy,"
quarrels and neighborhood difficulties were frequent, and the knife
and pistol were u