The civilization, the picturesqueness of our country lies always between the mountains and the seaboard. Trace the Appalachian summits from their first uprearing at Tracadiegash or Gaspé, to that last laurel-hill near Tupelo in Mississippi--on the left of you lies history, character, local identity; on the right that great common place, that vast central prairie, lying stolidly spread out between the Rockies and the Blue Ridge, producing food. Heaven keep us above that central plain, one would say, and from the men and moods and motives that it breeds--but that out of it, in the very unidentified middle of it, the Lord upreared a Lincoln. However, my beat lay so well to the south of it, lurked so far up in the mountain alleyways and southern river-cañons, that I found much to study and more to see. The railway did little more than take me to the field of labor; the saddle or the wagon or the country stage must do the rest. My first trip was to the east of my dominions; my headquarters were at Knoxville, and from there I rode through some thousand miles of mountain and of cove; and different enough and remote enough it was from all that I had known before, and from all that might know me or look askance upon a travelling-merchant selling snuff by sample. But this was but a breather, as it were; and on my second journey I was ordered to replace my predecessor, Jerry Sullivan, at his headquarters in Chattanooga, and take entire charge of that country. Already I had contracted a prejudice for the slow and unconventional modes of travelling; and after I had seen Jerry Sullivan, a genial Irishman, and had formal delivery of his office, and he had gone back with evident delight to his beloved New York, and I had sat there alone a day or two, I thought that I would open out the business westward. And looking at the map, it occurred to me that the Tennessee River was the natural avenue to my domains in that direction. Luckily, I made the acquaintance of a young land-prospector, with romantic instincts like my own; and the second evening after this idea came to me he and I were seated in a wooden dug-out canoe, my parcels of samples and his instruments in the waist of the boat, drifting swiftly down the brown stream at sunset, under the lofty shadow of the Lookout Mountain.