It was a glorious prospect; even solemn and majestic. A prodigious sweep of country was laid bare before me. I hesitate to say how many miles I could see, for distance is most deceptive at great altitudes. But it was the topography, more than the far reaching view, which impressed me. I was standing in the midst of a world newly created, the only living creature. Leagues upon leagues of virgin forest flowed back from my point of vantage till the perspective ended in a misty blur. East and west stretched the mighty ranges, with constantly diverging spurs, each clothed with its own garment of green and glistening glory. Anon the ancient hills valleyed into troughs whose length had no visible limit, and it did not require the imagination of a poet to behold beneath me the effect of an immense sea which had suddenly been frozen into permanent form. How illimitable! How overpowering! Slowly I turned to the different points of the compass. Far to the north a smudge of smoke fouled the tender bosom of the sky, and I quickly looked another way. Cedarton lay in that direction. For a half-hour I stood and gazed, and wondered, and thought. Here was incentive for rumination, and when I at length withdrew my eyes from the bewildering panorama I felt infinitesimally puny, and weak, and small. What was I? A mote in a sunbeam; an atom of matter; no more. The point upon which I stood was an irregular circle, approximating thirty feet in diameter. An imperfect stone formation marked its outer boundaries; the effect of some Titanic convulsion in forgotten time. In one place--toward the southwest--the rim of rock broke, and here the earth had sloughed away before the ages-long war of the elements, the result being a broad, flume-like chute leading downward. Instinctively I drew back from this place, for it suggested unknown terrors. A sort of sandy, granular deposit covered the top of the knob; the grinding caused by years upon years of wind and rain.