The fussy little engine had at last completed its task and the train was ready to start. A crowd of small boys was hanging around it—the greatest marvel of the world to the mountain lads. Its big funnel-shaped smoke-stack sent wonder’s own thrills down their backs, and when the wheels slipped on the cast iron rails they shook with delight. “What a engine!” one of them said. “It’s ’most as tall as a man!” The engineer was busy pulling off a sliver that had started from one of the rails, which experience had taught him might creep upward, farther and farther, till a car wheel caught it, and sent it through the bottom of a passenger coach, for it was but cast iron, after all. Helen Preston turned to go, and her eyes caught sight of the Attacoa—highest of all the Blue Ridge, save the forehead of Grandfather’s Mountain. The stranger coming to the village sees it first, and the inhabitant turns invariably as to an old friend to say good-bye when he leaves. “I love old Attacoa,” she said. “It was there that Light conquered Darkness.” One by one the mountains sank away behind her, and the forest gave way to the wheat. Pines and chunky oats ran the fuzzy-fingered spruce and slender limbed larches away, and at last when night was settling down over all, after a record-breaking run, averaging twelve miles per hour, she reached Charlotte, and the queer little passenger coach with its twelve-paned window sashes was abandoned. It was early morning when she left for Charleston, and from the window of her car she watched the red embankments, last semblances of things familiar, become fewer and fewer, and the soft, gray soil of the low country take its place. The harsh blowing of the engine became mellower as the rolling hillocks flattened into fertile plains and juniper trees hastened to claim place by black, sluggish streams. As she neared the city, interminable cypress swamps closed in round them, and long festoons of gray moss hung from every limb. Forests of long leaved pines took their places when the track left the river bottoms, and all the rocks crumbled into sand. When the engine stopped for wood, she heard a bob-white calling his mate, and she fell asleep to dream of the ruffed grouse in the Silver Creek valley. The depot was a long, low wooden building, and Helen soon found a colored driver who knew where the _Chronicle_ office was, knew Colonel Masters and was sure he was in the city. The cold of the mountain had vanished, and the air was soft and balmy as she drove through the streets. At last they stood before a two-storied building that faced the bay, and over the door the sign of the _Chronicle_ could be deciphered. Underneath was the simple legend, “What is it but a map of busy life?” Tremblingly mounting the steps, she found herself looking through the open door of the office. An old man sat before the fireplace, holding a tattered flag in his hand. His lips seemed moving slowly, but Helen could not hear his words, as he muttered: