After breakfast we started on the backbone of the Balsam range for the Rich mountain, distant about eight miles. It was a picturesque body of men, that in single file waded in the snow under the burdened balsams, and crawled over the white-topped logs. The head youth from Caney Fork had his hat pulled down so far over his ears, to protect them from the cold, that half of his head, flaunting yellow locks, was exposed above the tattered felt, and only the lower portion of his pale, weak face appeared below the rim. His blue, homespun coat hardly reached the top of his pantaloons; and his great, horny hands, and arms half way to the elbows protruded from torn sleeves. There was no necessity for him to roll up his pantaloons; for so short were they that his stork-like legs were not covered by fifteen inches from the heels. Next behind him came Wid, with his face as red as ever, and his long hair the color of the snow. Then followed Allen, a thick-set, sturdy youth from the Richland. He gloried in his health and vigor, and to show it, wore nothing over his back but a thin muslin shirt. He whistled as he walked, and laughed and halloed till the forests responded, whenever a balsam branch dislodged its snow upon his head and shoulders. Noah Harrison, another valley farmer, who likes hunting better than farming, came next. He was a matter-of-fact fellow, and showed his disrelish to the snow by picking, with his keen eyes, his steps in the foot-prints of those ahead. Jonas Medford, a stout, mustached son of the old hunter, followed behind the three young fellows who wore store clothes and carried breech-loading shot-guns, instead of the rifles borne by the natives. When half-way round the ridge, we caught faint echoes from the hounds below. The sound was as stirring in tone as the reveille of the camp. A minute after, our party was broken into sections, every one being left to pick his way as best he could to the scene of the fight between the dogs and bear. Naturally, the three young fellows in store clothes stayed together. A balsam slope is the roughest ever trodden by the foot of man. The rhododendrons and kalmias are perfect net-works. In them a man is in as much danger of becoming irrecoverably entangled unto death as a fly in a spider’s web; but, in the excitement caused by that faint chiming of the hounds, no one seemed to think of the danger of being lost in the labyrinths.