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PART FIRST.

THE BALD AND THE ROAN.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

R. L. HOKE, A Critical Writer

Brutus.

G.H.BASKETTE, Editor Nashville Banner - Gid H. Panier. H. M. DOAK, Clerk U. S. Circuit Court A. T. Ramp.

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THE WAGONAUTS ABROAD.

THE

CHAPTER I.

The wagon cheered, Jonesboro cleared,

Merrily did we drop,

Below the hill, below the kirk,

Below the courthouse top. (Coleridge.)

three wagonauts-R. L. Brutus, Gideon II. Panier, and A. T. Ramp, the historiographer of the wagonautic search for golden fun and the self-constituted Jason, quartermaster and commissary of the wagonautic expedition-reached the historic town of Jonesboro at 6 o'clock Monday morning. Panier and Brutus were given leave to gaze upon the architectural treasures of this, the oldest town in Tennessee, where Andrew Jackson held court and John Sevier-"Nola Chucky Jack"-entertained gaping crowds of admirers at street corners, while he rested from the hardships of the wild warpath. Ja

son stirred up a livery stable and a hotel, and by 8 o'clock the Wagonauts were on their way to the blue mountains, whose azure summits pierced the skies eight miles distant. Our equipment consisted of Ben, the driver, two strong roadsters, a stout two-seated wagon, fishing rods and lines, a book of trout flies, a box of provisions for a cruise of ten days, consisting of potted meats, boiled ham, beaten biscuits, cheese, coffee, sugar, pepper, salt, a coffee pot, tin cups, knives and forks, and a five-gallon demijohn of old rye as a preventive of snake bites, a corkscrew for drawing obstinate fish, a quart bottle wherein to store provision of snake medicine upon brief fishing jaunts away from the demijohn base of operations. As to the value of this kind of snake preventive, it is enough to say that, in a jaunt of two hundred miles in the worst serpent regions of North Carolina, our party failed to encounter a single snake more venomous than a water moccasin.

Passing southeast along the low Buffalo Ridge, through the old Cherokee county into the beautiful valley of the Nola Chuckee, we

entered Bumpass Cove by an old metal road, which wound steeply along the clear, dashing Nola Chuckee, over high precipices, overlooking deep pools and roaring rapids. At a point opposite Embreeville we paused to gaze from a rugged backbone of a projecting rock upon the remains of the old village and of Blair's furnace, one of the oldest in the State, generally known as Bumpass Cove furnace. Below us lay broad, calm reaches of clear water, alternating with long, steepdown rapids, where the waters foamed and bubbled and roared and gleamed in the westering sunlight as they dashed down over great quartz and granite rocks, rough and rugged, or round and polished by ages of rolling and grinding of sand and pebbles. Below us, in the far, the bright river stretches out of sight behind a blue mountain. Beyond the river a broad valley-plain stretches to the outliers of Rich Mountain. On the river bank lay the old town of Embreeville, named for Elihu Embree, the founder of the first abolition newspaper in America, printed at Jonesboro, whose son, by the way, served in the Confed

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