I laugh (to myself) over this statement. I have heard something like it on several similar occasions, though I am forced to admit that the breach between these two seems wider and more serious now than ever before. They treat each other with a politeness that is overpowering, but their merry warfare of words is at an end, and on our various expeditions it is no longer Charley who rides at Sylvia’s side, but always Mr. Lanier. At the end of a week we go to Cæsar’s Head, which place of resort lies over the border of South Carolina. Four thousand five hundred feet above the ocean stands the mountain—an outlying spur of the Blue Ridge—which bears this name because on the abrupt precipice that forms its southern face the jagged rocks wear the rude outline of a profile, supposed (no man can say why) to resemble that of Cæsar. On the summit, open to all the airs of heaven, stands an excellent hotel, where from June to October a stream of visitors come and go. From Buck Forest to this point the distance is short. We leave the former place in the afternoon, and drive five or six miles along the road leading to Jones’s Gap, the principal highway between Transylvania and Upper South Carolina. This gap is said to be one of the most beautiful and the most easily crossed along the line of the Blue Ridge; but we do not follow it far enough to judge how well its reputation is deserved. By the time that we are fairly hemmed between the walls of the gorge, a road turns off, ascending a mountain, and a sign-board says “Cæsar’s Head.” We follow the road and wind upward for two or three miles, with greenness surrounding us, through which scarcely a ray of sunlight steals, with the musical dash of unseen water in the glens below, with feathery ferns lining the road, and glancing streams dashing brightly across our way. So gradual is the ascent that there is very little strain on the horses, and now and then there are level stretches where they trot easily, and the equestrians canter so far ahead that we only catch an occasional gleam of Sylvia’s blue veil through the interlacing foliage. As we mount higher, the sun’s level lines of gold stream into the forest-depths and make a quivering mystery of delight through the wide-spreading boughs, among the brown, mossy boles, in the beds of tall ferns—the woods seem spellbound into silence by the mellow glory of the waning afternoon. Involuntarily Eric murmurs those lines which, old and well known as they are, some days of this matchless season bring ever to one’s mind: “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky! The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must die.” “I call it insufferable to remind one of that fact,” says Mrs. Cardigan. “As if we did not know it, or as if we cared to remember it!”