The vicinity of Blowing Rock is a summer resort. It is a lofty plateau of the Blue Ridge, covered with dense forests, level farms, and crossed by smooth highways. Good country accommodations are offered here for the tourist. From the edge of the mountain wall, which overhangs Caldwell county, two points--Blowing Rock and Fairview--afford admirable stands, for overlooking the piedmont country. The views are similar in character. From Fairview the valley of the John’s river, embosomed in green mountains, lies in the low foreground; while rolling back, spread ranges, picturesque in outline and purple coloring. In the morning or evening, when the sunlight is thrown aslant across them, bathing the fronting slopes in fire, and leaving, under the opposite brows, gloomy shadows, so long drawn out that many of the valleys are as dark as they are silent, the scene is such that one can never tire of viewing it, or ever lose the impressions that even one sight of it will awaken. A ride of eight miles from the center of the plateau resort, will bring the traveler to Boone, the county seat of Watauga. Along the way several sweeping landscape prospects are afforded. In one of the dense woods I passed men engaged in clearing a laurel thicket. The soil where the laurel springs being generally rich, it requires, after its clearing, nothing but a slight plowing, and enough corn for planting, to have the [Illustration: WATAUGA FALLS.] expanse, which, during the last season, was blooming with white and purple rhododendron flowers, transformed into a green and tasseled corn-field. Boone, the most elevated county seat east of the Rocky mountains, is 3,222 feet above the sea. Its population numbers about 200, and lives along a street rising and falling with the hills. Due to the fact of no majestic mountains arising round it, there is, in its surroundings, less of the attractive features that distinguish the most of the mountain county seats. Near the stream which flows on one side of the town, Daniel Boone, the famous hunter, is said to have encamped while on a hunting tour. It is from this tradition of the camp that the village took its name.