This dust was Daniel Smith. He came from Tennessee, up the Nolechucky and the Toe to this dale. His widowed daughter and her baby boy were with him when he built a log cabin, and formed a clearing. On the same side of the creek, fifty steps from the grave, there is a space of several acres grown with trees of fewer years and lesser height than the surrounding pristine forest. In the center of this fresh wood, amid the brambles and briers, the straggler, by pulling them aside, will perceive a few crumbling stones piled in a heap like the ruin of a chimney. If there is a single timber concealed under the bushes, the foot will sink through it without resistance. It is the site of Smith’s cabin. A lofty locust with wide-spread branches springs, from where once was the hearth-stone. Where the babe crept on the puncheon floor, tree-sprouts, with thorns and thistles, are entangled. It is a desolate spot rendered doubly so by the knowledge, had from sight of the chimney stones, of what once was there; and by the black balsams which appear along the steep above it. It seems that Hood had seen it before he wrote the verse: “For over all there hung a cloud of fear, A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, The place is haunted!” The old man showed no liking for outside associations, and scarcely ever appeared at the cabins of the settlers far below him. This disposition became more marked after the death of his daughter when the boy was about ten years old. He was a bright, blue-eyed, curly-haired, little fellow, and always went a-fishing with the old man, who was an ardent angler. Never was father more wrapped up in his child, than this venerable fisherman in his grandson. He was never seen without the boy; and the stray hunter coming down the trail, often saw their forms before him,--the silver-haired man with his fishing rod, and the merry, laughing boy with his hand clasping his grandsire’s. But Death came. During a heavy flood the boy was accidentally drowned, and his body was never recovered. The old man was now thought to be crazy. He allowed no one to enter his cabin, and some said he fished from morning till night, in the insane hope of catching his boy, whom he imagined, was transformed to a trout. One who had watched him from his concealment in a thicket, said that every fish the old man caught, he examined carefully, as if searching for some peculiar mark, and mumbled to himself: “No, no, not Will this time. Strange where the boy is!”