It is very beautiful. There is an alabaster glow all over the eastern sky, against which the trees on the distant hilltops stand distinctly defined, and the great cross on Beaucatcher is thrown into relief by the broad, yellow shield of the moon herself. The circle of mountains all around the horizon are bathed in radiance, while Asheville— which we partly overlook—still lies in shadow. Lights gleam here and there from the houses, foliage is darkly massed in every direction, overhead the stars shine in the dark-blue sky with a brilliance which almost seems to equal the advancing moonlight. From the field below us rises a dewy odor of sweet, fresh grass. “Come out and hear the waters shoot, the owlet hoot, the owlet hoot; Yon crescent moon—a golden boat—hangs dim behind the tree, O! The dropping thorn makes white the grass, O sweetest lass and sweetest lass, Come out and smell the ricks of hay adown the croft with me, O!” It is Ralph Lanier who repeats this as he stands by Sylvia, and we think the application, despite a few trifling inaccuracies, very good. The “sweetest lass” looks up with her brightest smile. “How charming!” she says. “What a picture those four lines paint!” “Not any prettier picture than this,” says Rupert. He is standing erect on the wall, despite a suggestion from Charley that people may fancy the Cardiff giant has arrived in their midst. “Or perhaps they will think that some imprudent person has found and opened one of King Solomon’s bottles,” says Sylvia. “Rupert always reminds me of those remarkable genii in the ‘Arabian Nights.’ He is so very long in proportion to his width— just as if he had shot up out of a bottle suddenly—and he can double himself into such a small compass, that I think he could go back again, if necessary.” “I’m slim—that’s the reason I look so tall,” says Rupert. “But I shouldn’t think any thing in the way of height could astonish people here, after some of the men I’ve seen. There! now she’s over the trees!” (This remark applies to the moon.) “Let us go on to Battery Porter.—Brother Eric, hadn’t we better open our knives?” These weapons prove unnecessary. The dogs rush out and bark at us, making night hideous with their uproar, but, deterred probably by the imposing appearance of our phalanx, they make no attack. We pass the point of danger and reach the open summit of the hill in safety. Then what a picture is spread around us! North, south, east, and west, the eye sweeps over an apparently limitless prospect, bounded only by far, faint mountain-lines, and bathed in a flood of enchantment. It is not night, but sublimated day—white, lustrous, magical—and so still that we hear the refrain which the French Broad is chanting as it takes its way between the hills that overshadow it. “How distinctly one hears that river!” says Lanier. “It can’t be far away.” “Not more than half a mile, I suppose,” answers Victor Dupont.