At a delightful spring in the edge of the Bald we built a huge fire and spitted and broiled chickens, poured out libations of snake juice, and spread a meal Virgil would have delighted to describe, in verse unprofaned by invasions of foul harpies.

This grand old mountain is innocent of house or wagon way and seldom trodden by the profane foot of the tourist. It stands here in almost primitive wildness, to delight the soul of the lover of undisturbed nature. It is not to be confounded with a Bald Mountain of the Blue Ridge, further east in North Carolina-a pigmy namesake, which posed a few years ago as a volcano. The Great Bald is a healthy adult, not given, like its molehill namesake to hives, or pains under the apron, or in need of paregoric, or soothing syrup. It is a staid, settled old mountain, of good, steady habits and fixed ways, spending its nights at home with its family of little mountains around it, and always up with the sun.

The views from the Great Bald mountain and valley-hill and river, farms and farm

houses, and the distant plains of East Tennessee-spread out like a map, are grand, and the sentiments inspired glorious; but there is a sublimer sentiment than these inspire. There is an awe-inspiring silence upon the ocean, when one stands upon the forecastle of a calm morning with one frail plank between poor mortality and fathomless gulfs beneath, and gazes at the limitless expanse of blue ocean and azure sky. There is an awful silence in the hush of bird and beast and all the voices of earth and air that goes before a storm in the deep recesses of a tropical forest upon a summer's night, when all nature seems to hold its breath, in dread anticipation, as the storm gathers.

To me there is a sublimer hush when I stand upon the Great Bald's green dome, with the overarching blue above, the haunts of men blue in the far distance below, and no voice of man, bird, beast, insect, or whispering summer breeze, to touch the ear of the appalled listener at that awful silence. Then one feels truly near to the vast Spirit of earth, air, and ocean, and feels His infinite vastness

and his own infinite littleness. Then one feels like Faust when the earth-spirit came at his call and he stood face to face with a dread unknown.

After consultation to-day, at the hour of six bells, which is "Grogo," the world over, it was resolved that A. T. Ramp should write a genuine Italian sonnet to be read at six bells each day, beginning on the morrow.

Just below the summit, as we entered the timber-line fringe of dwarf beeches, our guide suggested a visit to a "wildcat still," which he said was kept by a desperate "moonshiner" down the mountain to our right.

"He'll take you-uns fer the 'revenues,' but I reckon I kin keep him from shootin'."

Out for adventure, here was a fine chance for a bit of diversion with a spice of danger. Concealing our tremors from the guide, with cold shivers creeping down our heroic backs, we turned off to the right and soon struck a blind trail, which led to the beginning of a brook, which flowed from a spring a few yards above us and went singing gleefully down a broad glade of open dwarf woods,

which gradually grew into taller timber as we descended. The gentle slope which led us down for a half hour was covered with scattered granite blocks, that seemed to have been hewn for building, they were so square and regular; and some hewn for Titanic castle building, they were of such huge proportions.

Soon the glade narrowed into a gorge and the slope became precipitous, so that we had to pick our way down a rugged chasm, climbing from stone to stone, holding on by loose boulders or by the trunks of trees and saplings, or the gnarled roots and stems or laurels and ivy shrubs. The rock-bound gorge kept narrowing as we went; and the brook grew, by continual accessions of streamlets from either side, until it became a roaring, foaming torrent, where speckled trout leaped at roving flies, and darted back and forth through the crystal waves, flashing in the sunlight, tempting to sportsman whom time denied the privilege of casting a fly.

Not content with its steep-down descent, every few yards the stream descended some

more precipitous rapids and ran, bubbling and boiling over and among great granite rocks, rough and rugged, to calmer reaches and peacefuller flowing, to pause on the brink of some wild chasm, upon the crest of some up-edged ledge, for a wild leap into the deep gorge below. We had to wade down the rapids, or to creep along the sides, clinging to ferns and ivies that scraggily grew along the edges of the torrent. The perilous descent of the falls was often only to be made by sheer climbing and clinging like cats to root, crag, and crevice and rough noses of sharp rocks. The falls were sometimes sheer-down leaps of fifty feet or more, making the descent very dangerous.

The views at the bottom amply repaid the toil and peril. Here, at the foot of a lovely fall, we halt and refresh the physical man from the canteen, stow away a biscuit or two with ham accompaniment, light our pipes and sit upon mossy roots of old hemlocks, beneath the dark shadows of tall spruces, that reach their giant arms into the upper air and sunlight. Overhead the rugged granite walls