Clingman’s dome, 6,660 feet high, the most elevated summit in the range, is 372 feet higher than Mount Washington of the White Mountains, and only 47 feet lower than the loftiest peak of the Appalachian system. From its dome-shaped summit, in close communion with the clouds, and encircled by a dense grove of balsams, high above the line of scrubby oak and beech, and higher still above the majestic forests of cherry, locust, chestnut and the walnut, which clothe its lower slopes, the observer, as from the basket of a balloon, looks down upon a varied world spread wide and rolling beneath his feet. To the north lies that level and fertile portion of East Tennessee, watered by the French Broad and the Holston. Villages dot the plains; and, afar, the crests of the Cumberland mountains and their spurs form with the transparent sky a purple horizon. On the other hand, the lofty heights of the Bald, Black, Blue Ridge, Balsam, Cowee and Nantihala ranges, with lapping ends and straggling summits, make a distant, circling, boundary line to a central ocean of rolling mountains. Directly south, one obtains a wide-spread prospect of the most wild and picturesque portion of the eastern United States--that land embraced by the counties of Swain and Macon--the once romantic habitation and hunting ground of the Cherokee Nation. Here lies the fertile valley of the upper Little Tennessee, and its picturesque but almost uninhabited lower reaches; the emerald green Ocona Lufta with its rich lands; the Indian reservation on the banks of the Soco; the beautiful Tuckasege, and the narrow and wildly romantic vale down which courses the Nantihala. A noticeable feature of these mountains is their smooth, bald summits; not a sterile baldness like that of ranges higher or in more rigorous climates, but only bald as far as concerns the growth of trees and underwood. Atmospheric forces have played their parts on the pinnacles. What once must have been sharp crowns of rock, have, with time, storm, and frost, become rounded hillocks. Due, perhaps to the sweeping winds, the dense balsam forests--the characteristic tree of the loftier heights of the Smoky, Black, Balsam and Blue Ridge--stop around the brows of the extreme tops, leaving, oftentimes, perfectly level tracts of treeless land, in some instances of 1,000 acres in extent. The soil is a black loam. A heavy sward, green, even in winter, covers these meadows. On them, around occasionally exposed surfaces of rock, the scarlet, blossom-bearing rhododendron, and clumps of heather, similar to that on the Scottish hills, are found. Every spring, thousands of cattle, branded, and sometimes hung with bells, are turned out on these upland pastures. It is an unequalled grazing land. Water wells forth even from the extreme higher edges of the forests, and on every slope are crystal streams.