If thou art worn and hard beset With sorrows that thou would’st forget, If thou would’st read a lesson that will keep Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep, Go to the woods and hills!--No tears Dim the sweet look that Nature wears. _Longfellow._ [Illustration: V]ainly the mountaineers beside the ancient stage-road, up the Blue Ridge from McDowell county into Buncombe may listen for the old-time winding of the driver’s bugle, the rumbling of strong-spoked wheels, and the rattling of trace-chains; or wait to see the familiar outlines of four gray horses, hallooing reinsman and loaded Concord stage swinging round some bold cliff, and drawing nearer up the rich green avenue of the forest: the days of staging by this route into Asheville are over. But “Jehu” with his prancing steeds and swaying coach is not, in this region, a being of the past; for the whistle of the locomotive has only served to drive him further into the mountains. To those who are little familiar with stage-riding, there is in it something of pleasing novelty. I never see the old red vehicle lumbering along without having awakened in my mind some one of Dickens’ many vivid pictures of rapid drives, where, in his words:--“Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings, dye-works, tanneries and the like, open country, avenues of leafless trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft deep mud on either side. Sometimes, we strike into the skirting mud, to avoid the stones that clatter us and shake us; sometimes, we strike into ruts and stick there. The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us.” One of the stage routes, now in operation, is from the present terminus of the Western North Carolina railroad at Pigeon River, to Waynesville, ten miles distant. If the time-table is the same it was when we last traveled over the new-laid rails from Asheville, up the Hominy valley, over dizzy trestle-works, and burst through a narrow mud-cut between the hills into the wide valley of the Pigeon;--if it is this way, I say, the tourist will take a late dinner at a large brick farm-house beside the station, and then secure a place with the colored driver on the top of the stage. A jolly crowd is packed away inside. Perhaps, if you are an agreeable fellow, one of the young ladies may prefer a perch outside with you, and thus help to fill up the boot and hinder the spread of the reinsman’s elbows as he rounds some of the coming curves. Trunks and band-boxes are piled up behind you. You wave your hand to the landlord; the driver gives a parting wink at the cook who is peering through the shutters of the kitchen; and then, responsive to the crack of the whip, the horses start, and whirling behind it a cloud of dust, the stage begins its journey.