The overcoat was not recovered by its owner; and fortunately the fall, of which forewarning had been given, did not occur. We easily ascended the Ridge. Luxuriant forests--perfect tropical tangles--spread over the last portion of the way. A stream with water the color of a pure topaz flows under the rich green rhododendron hedges. Down the slope toward Cashier’s Valley the road is of white sand, beaten as level as a floor. A drive in easy carriage over it with the broad-sweeping limbs of the cool trees overhead, would be delightful. These woods were filled with insects termed “chatteracks” by the natives. Their shrill chirping toward evening is much louder than the noise of the locust, and fairly deafens the traveler. Locusts also joined in the chorus, giving a concert as melodious as it was singular and primeval. Cashier’s Valley is a mountain plateau of the Blue Ridge, 3,400 feet in altitude, from four to five miles long and a mile and a half wide. Attracted by its climate, freedom from dampness, its utter isolation from the populated haunts of man, the rugged character of its scenery, and deer and bear infested wildwoods, years since, wealthy planters of South Carolina drifted in here with each recurring summer. Now, a few homes of these people are scattered along the highland roads. One residence, the pleasant summer home of Colonel Hampton, the earliest settler from South Carolina, is situated, as it appears from the road, in the gap between Chimney Top and Brown mountain, through which, twenty miles away, can be seen a range of purple mountains. A grove of pines surrounds the house. Governor Hampton formerly spent the summers here, engaged, among other pastimes, in fishing for trout along the head streams of the Chatooga, which have been stocked with this fish by the Hampton family. The sun had hidden himself behind the western ranges, but daylight still pervaded the landscape, when through a break of the forest of the hill-side around which the road winds, we came out before the massive front of a peculiar mountain. Whiteside, or in literal translation of the Cherokee title, Unakakanoos, White-mountain, is the largest exposure of perpendicular, bare rock east of the Rockies. It is connected, without deeply-marked intervening gaps, with its neighboring peaks of the Blue Ridge; but from some points of observation it appears isolated--a majestic, solitary, dome-shaped monument, differing from all other mountains of the Alleghanies in its aspect and form. The top line of its precipitous front is 1,600 feet above its point of conjunction with the crest of the green hill, which slopes to the Chatooga, 800 feet lower. The face of the mountain is gray, not white; but is seared by long rifts, running horizontal across it, of white rock. With the exception of a single patch of green pines, half-way up its face, no visible verdure covers its nakedness.