Something of this was in Teck Jepson’s thoughts, as he stood on the river bank at the baptizing in the valley, and looked about him at the close-circling purple heights. He remembered many who had known them, and whom they would know no more; and he fancied that others—half fact, half figment of his ignorant imagination—had made their homes here, who had never trod these rugged ways. And he took note, too, of the vanishing presence of the Indian and those dim traditional pygmy dwellers in Tennessee, far back in the fabulous perspectives of time, still vaguely known in rural regions as the “little people.” A dusky bloom was upon the vast slopes, for a black cloud overspread their summits and portended rain. All the landscape was in the sullen shadow, and wore this dull purple, or a deep, indefinite gray and brown, save that upon one of the minor ridges about the base of the Great Smoky the sun’s rays fell diverging from a rift in the clouds,—a yellow fibrous slant on the illuminated emerald tint of the foliage below, indescribably brilliant in the sudden contrast. The stream, closely begirt on one side by frowning crags and lower rock-bound banks on the other, was black and swift and sinister, with here and there a white flash of foam. It might have suggested Styx rather than Jordan, but for the congregation standing on the pebbly margin where the county road came down in a cleft in the rocks to a doubtful ford,—the landing being effected on the opposite side, so far up stream that it was barely visible,—and but for the weird baptismal hymns and the echoing psalmody of the heathen rocks. The assemblage had a melancholy guise: the elder men grizzled and grim, with broad-brimmed hats and clad in jeans, and the women with pallid, ascetic faces, barely glimpsed under their long tunnel-like sun-bonnets, and wearing straight-skirted homespun dresses. Only in the rear of the crowd some of the languid young mountaineers showed signs of latent but fitful levity. There were always voices enough to carry on the sonorous hymn, though under its cover remarks in an undertone were often exchanged. Above on the slope were hitched the ox-wagons and saddle-horses that had conveyed the company hither, but in the defile between the crags were two horsemen, still mounted, gravely watching the rite administered. It was an impressive moment when the old preacher, his white hair and his lined face ghastly in the unnatural light of the day, forged out into the current, leading a young girl by the hand, and crying out in the silence,—for the song had ceased,—“This is the river o’ death! Come down, my sister, and be buried with Christ in baptism.”