The order of our going is soon arranged. Sylvia, Charley, and Mr. Lanier are on horseback; Aunt Markham, Rupert, and I, together with John, fill the phaeton; Eric—who cannot endure that anyone else should hold the reins while he sits by—drives the “jersey,” which serves as a baggage-wagon, with Harrison (its nominal driver) by his side. “So you have lent Charley your horse?” I say to him just before we start. “It is more than he deserves after having refused to bring his own.” “I thought it would be too cruel to sentence the poor fellow to the carriage, with Lanier by Sylvia’s side,” he answers, “but, of course, we will vary our modes of travel. If it does not rain, I shall invite you to share my seat in the baggage-wagon, by way of relief from the carriage.” The clouds, however, are determined that this pleasure shall be indefinitely deferred. As we drive down the long, muddy hill that leads out of Asheville, we observe that they hang low on the mountains—always a threatening sign—and, before we have traveled three miles, a white rain is upon us. Much to her disgust, Sylvia is forced to enter the carriage, while Rupert mounts her horse; there is a general enveloping in water-proof cloaks and coats, a consultation as to whether we shall turn back, a unanimous vote to go on, and a resolute setting forward in the teeth of the storm. It does not last very long; then there is a slight interlude: the clouds cease to rain, though they still curtain the sky in watery grayness. We are by this time immediately on the banks of the river, following that famous “Buncombe turnpike” which for more than fifty years was the great highway of travel between North Carolina and the Southwestern States. Originally an Indian trail, it has been and still remains the most picturesque road in the mountains. The fall of the river from Asheville to the Warm Springs—a distance of thirty-six miles—is seven hundred feet, from which the rapidity of its current may be conceived, and the height of the hills that overshadow it. As the gorge deepens they tower higher and yet higher, these beautiful mountains, sometimes round and swelling, at other times broken into cliff-like escarpments, with great masses of rock overhanging the narrow pass, and tropical verdure feathering every ledge and point. What studies of form and color are here for a future generation of artists, no words can fitly say. The road, as it stretches before us, is a picture never to be forgotten. On one side the whirling, tumultuous river leaps and races over the rocks that strew its channel; on the other steep hillsides hang, dark with shade, green with ferns, damp with trickling streams. The road turns, and lo! there is a fairy glen, down which a white cascade comes leaping over its rocks “to join the brimming river,” or a narrow stretch of valley, planted generally in tall, rustling corn.