blow which broke the Confederate power and hastened the war to its end. [Illustration: SIEGE OF VICKSBURG.] The National Cemetery on the bluffs, just north of the corporate limits of the city, is, taken all in all, perhaps the most attractive patriotic cemetery in the South. The visitor to the city always seeks it first. Nature has given to it sublimity; art and landscape-engineering have imparted all the freshness and loveliness that flower and shrub and tree can give. Here rest sixteen thousand soldiers who lost their lives in the service of their country in and around Vicksburg. Such care and veneration for those who fell under the national flag while a grateful tribute to valor and heroism serve at the same time to keep ever fresh and active sentiments of martial valor and a warmer pride in all that adds glory to the country and illustrates its military prowess. Nothing could more strongly and nobly testify to the fact that all the issues and controversies which culminated in a long and bloody war have been closed and settled and relegated to the past than the measures now in process of execution to convert the trenches and bastions around the city of Vicksburg into a park beautified by all that landscape-engineering and art can do to make the place attractive. That which appeals to-day with so much force to the sensibilities of Americans is not so much the mere transformation of the rugged hills, as that the place so wonderfully transformed is and will ever be a perpetual witness that sectional discords and strifes have disappeared from our national life, and that henceforth the great family of States and Territories, with their seventy or eighty millions of people, are members and citizens of a common country, protected by the same flag, the emblem of sovereignty to all. [Illustration] [Illustration] KNOXVILLE THE METROPOLIS OF EASTERN TENNESSEE BY JOSHUA W. CALDWELL The beginnings of Knoxville were Scotch-Irish. Its founder was James White, a Scotch-Irishman from North Carolina. Its first place of worship was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Church, wherein the faith of the Covenant was preached without mitigation, to the edification and uplifting of the community. The dominant element of its population until after the Civil War was Presbyterian, and it is still strong. The first effort of the white men to possess themselves of any part of Tennessee was in 1756, when old Fort Loudon was erected about thirty miles west of where Knoxville now stands. Fort Loudon did not long resist the Cherokees. Its short story is one of the most romantic and one of the most tragic in the early history of the Southwest. [Illustration: JOHN SEVIER, FIRST GOVERNOR OF TENNESSEE.]