The State road crosses the river on a bridge just below the fork of the road to Hayesville, the county seat of Clay. A mill and several houses are clustered near the bridge; but a moment after passing them you ascend the Valley River mountains. It is a well graded road, through chestnut and oak woods, for five miles to the lowest dip in the mountains. There is no view to be had, except of one wild valley that presents no striking features, but in the utter loneliness brooding over it. Down the slope you go through one of the densest and most luxuriant forests of the mountain region. It is a tremendous labyrinth of monarch hemlocks and balsams, so heavily burdened with foliage that their greenness approaches blackness, and renders the air so cold that the traveler riding through them, even in the middle of the morning, shivers in his saddle. The laurel grows to twice its customary height, affording safe coverts for the bear and wolf. The ground is black. A stream flows along by and in the road, the only noisy occupant of the solitude visible and audible at all times. Wild scenes appear as the base of the mountain is neared. As you advance under the shadows, around the foot of a steep ridge, bounded by a stream making mad music over the boulders, suddenly before you will tower a vine-mantled wall with top ragged with pines, cleaving the blue sky. Then, after lingering along the foot of this wall, as though loath to leave the cool greenness of its mossed rocks and woods, the road issues into a small circle of cleared land, where the ranges, drawing apart for a short distance, have allowed man to secure a foothold. In most of these confined dells it is, however, a feeble foothold; due, principally, to the indolence of the occupant. These homes are pictures of desolation;--a miserable log cabin with outside chimney crumbled to one-half its original height, and the end of the house blackened and charred from the flames and smoke poured upward along it; the roof heaped with stones to keep it in place; the door off its wooden hinges; the barn an unroofed ruin, and the clearing cultivated to the extent of one small patch of weed-strangled corn. The family who live in such a place will be alive, however, and outside as you go by. The man on the bench before the door will shout “howdy,” and continue smoking his pipe with as much complacency as if he had a hundred acres of golden wheat within his sight, a well filled granery, and cows weighing 1,200 instead of 500 pounds. From four to ten children, all about the same size, clustered along the fence, will excite wonder as to how they have lived so long.