“The sperit hev been with me strong,—mighty strong, ter-day,” said Teck Jepson suddenly. “I hev been studyin’ on Moses, from the time he lef’ the saidges by the ruver bank,” he added, bridling with a sentiment that was strikingly like the pride of earth. Then, as he gazed down at the landscape, his face softened and grew pensive. The great ranges were slowly empurpled against the pale eastern horizon, delicately blue, for the sun was in the western skies. How splendidly saffron those vast spaces glowed! What purity and richness of tint! Here and there were pearly wing-like sweeps of an incomparable glister; and the clouds, ambitious, must needs climb the zenith, with piled and stately mountainous effects, gleaming white, opaque and dazzling. The focal fires of the great orb were unquenched, and still the yellow divergent rays streamed forth; yet in its heart was suggested that vermilion smouldering of the sunset, and the western hills were waiting. “’Twar tur’ble hard on Moses,” said Teck Jepson dreamily, “when the Lord shut him out’n Canaan, arter travelin’ through the wilderness. Tur’ble, tur’ble hard!” There was naught in the scene to suggest to a mind familiar with the facts an Oriental landscape,—naught akin to the hills of Judæa. It was essentially of the New World, essentially of the Great Smoky Mountains. Yet ignorance has its license. It never occurred to Teck Jepson that his Biblical heroes had lived elsewhere. Their history had to him an intimate personal relation, as of the story of an ancestor in the homestead ways and closely familiar. He brooded upon these narrations, instinct with dramatic movement, enriched with poetic color, and localized in his robust imagination, till he could trace Hagar’s wild wanderings in the fastnesses; could show where Jacob slept and piled his altar of stones; could distinguish the bush, of all others on the “bald,” that blazed with fire from heaven, when the angel of the Lord stood within it. Somehow, even in their grotesque variation, they lost no dignity in their transmission to the modern conditions of his fancy. Did the facts lack significance because it was along the gullied red clay roads of Piomingo Cove that he saw David, the smiling stripling, running and holding high in his hand the bit of cloth cut from Saul’s garments, while the king had slept in a cave at the base of Chilhowee Mountain? And how was the splendid miracle of translation discredited because Jepson believed that the chariot of the Lord had rested in scarlet and purple clouds upon the towering summit of Thunderhead, that Elijah might thence ascend into heaven?