Whenever in the night-wrapped gorge a shrill cry is heard from the woods, or the wind strikes a piercing key, or the train thunders over the bridge with a wild shriek of whistles, and the rocks repeat it with a human tone in the echo, the simple foresters are wont to turn a trifle pale and to bar up the doors, declaring that the sound “air Painter Brice a-callin’ fur his brothers.” THE EXPLOIT OF CHOOLAH, THE CHICKASAW The victorious campaign which Lieutenant-Colonel James Grant conducted in the Cherokee country in the summer of 1761, and which redounded so greatly to the credit of the courage and endurance of the expeditionary force, British regulars and South Carolina provincials, is like many other human events in presenting to the casual observation only an harmonious whole, while it is made up of a thousand little jagged bits of varied incident inconsistent and irregular, and with no single element in common but the attraction of cohesion to amalgamate the mosaic. Perhaps no two men in the command saw alike the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains hovering elusively on the horizon, now purple and ominous among the storm clouds, for the rain fell persistently; now distant, blue, transiently sun-flooded, and with the prismatic splendors of the rainbow spanning in successive arches the abysses from dome to dome, and growing ever fainter and fainter in duplication far away. Perhaps no two men revived similar impressions as they recognized various localities from the South Carolina coast to the Indian town of Etchoee, near the Little Tennessee River, for many of them had traversed hundreds of miles of these wild fastnesses the previous year, when Colonel Montgomery, now returned to England, had led an aggressive expedition against the Cherokees. Certain it is, the accounts of their experiences are many and varied--only in all the character of their terrible enemy, the powerful and warlike Cherokee, stands out as incontrovertible as eternity, as immutable as Fate. Hence there were no stragglers, no deserters. In a compact body, while the rain fell, and the torrents swelled the streams till the fords became almost impracticable, the little army, as with a single impulse, pressed stanchly on through the mist-filled, sodden avenues of the primeval woods. To be out of sight for an instant of that long, thin column of soldiers risked far more than death--capture, torture, the flame, the knife, all the extremity of anguish that the ingenuity of savage malice could devise and human flesh endure. But although day by day the thunder cracked among the branches of the dripping trees and reverberated from the rocks of the craggy defiles, and keen swift blades of lightning at short intervals thrust through the lowering clouds, almost always near sunset long level lines of burnished golden beams began to glance through the wild woodland ways; a mocking-bird would burst into song from out the dense coverts of the laurel on the