ASHEVILLE, N. C.--As soon as I saw in the papers that my health was failing, I decided to wing my way South for the winter. So I closed up my establishment at Slipperyelmhurst, told the game-keeper not to monkey with the preserves and came here, where I am now writing. At first it seems odd to me that I should be writing from where I now am, but the more I think it over the better I am reconciled to it, for what better place can a man select from which to write a letter than the point where he is located at the time. Asheville is an enterprising cosmopolitan city of six or seven thousand people and a visiting population during the season of sixty thousand more. It is situated in the picturesque valley of the French Brood and between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies. Asheville is the metropolis of Western North Carolina, and has no competition nearer than Knoxville, Tenn., one hundred and sixty miles away, and, in fact, not in any way competing with Asheville, for it is in another county altogether. This region of country is from 2,000 to 7,000 feet above sea level and is, in fact, a mountain region with a southern exposure. Strange stories are told here of people who came five, ten, twenty or more years ago, with a view of dying here, but who afterward decided to live on, and they are living yet. One man who was a survivor of the Samso-Philistine war, if I am not mistaken, came here at last from the mouth of the Amazon, full of malaria. He had been kind of "down in the mouth"--of the Amazon for some years, and they say his liver looked like a rubber door-mat and his skin was like the cover of a sun-kissed ham. He picked up his spirits here and recovered his youth, and though he was very old when he came, he is still older now and in pretty good health. I went to see him the other day. He is so old that there is moss on the north side of him and hieroglyphics on his feet. When I made some facetious remarks to him and told him a story I had recently acquired, he brightened up a good deal and emitted a dry, cackling laugh like a xylophone, and said that he believed he enjoyed that story just as well as he did when they used to tell it in the rifle-pits in front of Troy. He said he liked Asheville very much indeed. Asheville is called the Switzerland of America. It has been my blessed privilege during the past twenty years to view nearly all the Switzerlands of America that are here, but this is fully the equal if not the superior of any of them. You can climb to the top of Beaucatcher Mountain and see a beautiful sight in any direction, and on most any day of the year. Every where the eye rests on a broad sweep of dark-blue climate. Up in the gorges, under the whispering pines, along the rhododendron bordered margins of the Swannonoa, or the French Brood, out through the Gap, and down the thousand mountain brooks, you will find enough climate in twenty minutes to last a week.