the general effect heightened by the free employment of decorative sculpture. From the grand esplanade the outlook is upon the "wild tumult of mountains stretching away in every direction." There are various other fine houses in the Asheville suburbs, and the locality is steadily improving through the attractions it has for men of wealth who love a home amid the grandest charms of Nature. Routes have been opened in various directions from Asheville to develop the mountain district. One railroad goes for a hundred miles through the gorges and valleys southwestward along the base of the Great Smoky range. Another route is southeast through the romantic pass of the Hickory-nut Gap, where the Rocky Broad River penetrates the Blue Ridge, a splendid canyon of nine miles, with cliffs rising fifteen hundred feet and having the remarkable Chimney Rock built on high alongside the gorge, where it stands up an isolated sentinel. Bald Mountain, rising opposite, is celebrated in Mrs. Burnett's Esmeralda. Cæsar's Head, to the southward, is an outlier of these mountain ranges, bordering the lowlands; and standing on top of its southern brow, upon a precipice rising almost sheer for fifteen hundred feet, one can overlook the lower regions of South Carolina and Georgia for more than a hundred miles away.

The French Broad River, the chief stream of this charming region, got its name from the early hunters who came up from the settled regions of Carolina

nearer the coast, and penetrating the mountains explored it. The Cherokees called it Tselica, or "The Roarer," a not inappropriate name. The hunters who came through the Blue Ridge by the Hickorynut Gap in colonial times followed down the Rocky Broad that flowed out of it into this river, which was much larger, and as the region beyond the mountains was then controlled by the French, they named it the French Broad. It rises in the Blue Ridge range almost on the South Carolina boundary, and nearly interlocks its headwaters with those of the Congaree flowing out to the Atlantic. Its upper waters wind for forty miles through a beautiful and fertile valley, but in approaching Asheville the scenery changes, the hills press more closely upon the stream, its course becomes more rapid, and after a swift turmoil it plunges down the cataract at Mountain Island. Here a knob-topped rock rises fifty to seventy feet high, the stream forcing its way on either hand by a channel cut through the enclosing ridge, and it descends a cataract of forty-five feet, running away through a deep abyss. The river passes Asheville and flows in a most picturesque gorge through the high mountains, everywhere disclosing new beauties, the water rushing and roaring over ledges and boulders, going around sharp bends, receiving gushing tributaries coming down the mountain side or trickling over the face of some broad high cliff. Massive rocks rise on high,

and the road is often on a shelf cut into their face, the river boiling along far down below. Then the valley broadens, and here, in a lovely vale surrounded by the mountains, are the North Carolina Hot Springs, a popular resort, with a climate even milder in winter than at Asheville, as the Great Smoky range protects it from the northern blasts. The curative properties of these springs are efficacious in rheumatic and cutaneous diseases. Beyond, the bold precipices overhang the road and river that are known as the Paint Rocks, where the rushing torrent forces its way through a gorge between the Great Smoky and Bald Mountains and then emerges in Tennessee, to finally fall into the Tennessee River at the junction with the Holston just above Knoxville. These rocks received their name from Indian pictures and signs painted upon them. William Gillmore Simms, the Carolina author, tells in Tselica the legend of this spot, founded on the tradition of the Cherokees that a siren lives on the French Broad who allures the hunter to the stream and strangles him in her embrace. Thus have the American aborigines reproduced in their way on this beautiful river the romantic legends of the Lurelie Rock on the Rhine, where, the ancient German legend tells us so interestingly, there dwelt another beautiful siren whose seductive music lured her lovers to the rock, when she drowned them in the waves washing its base.