The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains

The shadows of the great dead trees in the midst of the Settlement were at their minimum in the vertical vividness of the noontide. They bore scant resemblance to those memorials of gigantic growths which towered, stark and white, so high to the intensely blue sky; instead, they were like some dark and leafless underbrush clustering about the sapless trunks. The sandy stretch of the clearing reflected the sunlight with a deeply yellow glare, its poverty of soil illustrated by frequent clumps of the woolly mullein-weeds. The Indian corn and the sparse grass were crudely green in the enclosures about the grey, weather-beaten log-houses, which stood distinct against the dark, restful tones of the forest filling the background. The mountains with each remove wore every changing disguise of distance: shading from sombre green to a dull purple; then overlaid with a dubious blue; next showing a true and turquoise richness; still farther, a delicate transient hue that has no name; and so away to the vantage-ground of illusions, where the ideal poises upon the horizon, and the fact and the fantasy are undistinguishably blended. The intermediate valleys appeared in fragmentary glimpses here and there; sometimes there was only the verdure of the tree-tops; one was cleft by a canary-coloured streak which betokened a harvested wheat-field; in another blazed a sapphire circle, where the vertical sun burned in the waters of a blue salt 'lick.'

The landscape was still -- very still; not the idle floating of a cloud, not the vague shifting of a shadow, not the flutter of a wing. But the Settlement on the crags above had known within its experience no similar commotion. There were many horses hitched to the fences, some girded with blankets in lieu of saddles. Clumsy waggons stood among the stumps in the clearing, with the oxen unyoked and their provender spread before them on the ground. Although the log-cabins gave evidence of hospitable proceedings within, family parties were seated in some of the vehicles, munching the dinner providently brought with them. All the dogs in the Great Smoky, except perhaps a very few incapacitated by extreme age or extreme youth, were humble participants in the outing, having trotted under the waggons many miles from their mountain homes, and now lay with lolling tongues among the wheels. About the store lounged a number of men, mostly the stolid, impassive mountaineers. A few, however, although in the customary jeans, bore the evidence of more worldly prosperity and a higher culture; and there were two or three resplendent in the 'b'iled shirt and store clothes' of civilization, albeit the first was without collar or cravat, and the latter showed antique cut and reverend age.