banks of the Rhine or Moselle. Just beyond Clarksville is one of the most beautiful valleys in all this world--the Vale of Nacoochee--with Yonah dominating the fertile plain, and the upper Chattahoochee river purling around it. Here the mound builders of the continent had cherished habitation, and here they left monumental signs of their existence. Here the Cherokee loved to dwell, and just on the banks of the river and circumjacent to the mound, where clover and corn attain exceptional proportions, is a cemetery fat with Indian death. From Clarksville to Toccoa and Tallulah Falls is a mere jaunt of an hour or so. But why attempt to portray the graceful cascade and the terrible torrent? Ben Perley Poore, who had roamed in many lands and had adoration of all sights of nature of a high and exceptional kind, once told me that after all of his wanderings the scenes that lingered longest and fondest in his memory were those around Clarksville and Tallulah. Oh, you must see for yourself the unrivalled Georgia waterfall, with its tremendous chasm and precipitous descent, not in one roar of waters, but by successive leaps and bounds and plunges, alternately divided in swirling pools before dashing headlong down to the palpitating plain. Each fall is distinct in itself and of varied fury, as you will perceive either from the brink of the abyss or in touch with the vital torrent. This, too, is the Sky Land--glorious land--and here, in the coming time, as elsewhere in the alpine region of the South, many thousands will come ecstatically. St. Augustine waited long for a Flagler and Asheville for a Coxe, but they came in the ripeness of time and amazingly well did they perform the work appointed for them. If some men like these should, in their opulence, propose to magnify Clarksville, Nacoochee and Tallulah, what new splendors will come to the Land of the Sky, and what blessings will be lavished upon thousands of human beings who only need to know the South to love it, and who are beckoned back to health and strength and happiness where “Far, vague and dim, The mountains swim.” THE SOUTH BEFORE THE WAR. _By Richard H. Edmonds._ I.