Our first look into Big Creek Gap was a startling and pleasurable surprise which has remained indelibly fixed in memory. Clouds had been hanging about the top of the mountain, and as we ascended the last slope and reached the crest, they hung so low over us that we could almost touch them. It was not like going into a fog, as is usually the case in climbing mountains, but these seemed smooth as silk on the under surface and hung over us as well defined as the covering of a tent. This gave to the prospect an accidental and very peculiar effect that one might not see again in crossing the pass a hundred times. As we looked eastward from the depression in the crest in which our roadway ran, a great circling amphitheatre lay before us, almost perfect in the symmetry of its curves. The ridge on right and left which formed its outer margin was higher than the spot on which we stood, and the silky clouds over our heads rested on it as on the walls of a natural coliseum, like the _velum_ of canvas of the ancient gigantic structure in Rome, except that here, nature outdoing all art, spread the lovely awning over the whole vast and cavernous auditorium a mile or more across. The gloom of the interior threw the retreating slopes into a mysterious shadow in which it were easy to imagine them peopled with ranks of ghostly auditors gazing upon the stage. It was there, full in our faces, that the most startling and almost incredible effect was visible. The circle of the mountains was there broken by an opening flanked on either side by stupendous perpendicular cliffs, and we looked through it upon a charming landscape bathed in glorious sunshine. A blue stream dashed foaming through the great gap and wandered off to join the river beyond. The broad and undulating valley fifty miles across was backed by another mountain wall which towered opposite to that from whose battlements we were gazing, not a long and level ridge like so many of those in the Alleghanies, but a picturesque Alpine mountain scene, with peaks snow-clad and dazzling in the sunlight,--the Great Smokies, the noblest of all the mountain groups of the Appalachian chain. The gloom and shadow of our vast amphitheatre held us in awe, while the brilliancy of the scene beyond the great stage opening seemed to draw us to it as to a promised land. We sat upon our horses, spellbound, gazing upon what seemed at once too grand and too beautiful to be real. Had we been superstitious like soldiers of an ancient time, we might have seen a miraculous portent in it; and even as it was, such sentiment as may be permitted in the sceptical spirit of our own day could find a happy omen in the scene. We were entering upon a new chapter in our military lives, and it was cheering to us, in entering East Tennessee, through the great gate that opened before us, to have so charming a picture to lure us on. We wound down the mountain side, happy but quiet. There was no one among us so lacking in earnest