So we rode away, in the blazing heat, no poetry exuding from the Professor, eight miles to Banner’s Elk, crossing a mountain and passing under Hanging Rock, a conspicuous feature in the landscape, and the only outcropping of rock we had seen:  the face of a ledge, rounded up into the sky, with a green hood on it.  From the summit we had the first extensive prospect during our journey.  The road can be described as awful,—­steep, stony, the horses unable to make two miles an hour on it.  Now and then we encountered a rude log cabin without barns or outhouses, and a little patch of feeble corn.  The women who regarded the passers from their cabin doors were frowzy and looked tired.  What with the heat and the road and this discouraged appearance of humanity, we reached the residence of Dugger, at Banner’s Elk, to which we had been directed, nearly exhausted.  It is no use to represent this as a dash across country on impatient steeds.  It was not so.  The love of truth is stronger than the desire of display.  And for this reason it is impossible to say that Mr. Dugger, who is an excellent man, lives in a clean and attractive house, or that he offers much that the pampered child of civilization can eat.  But we shall not forget the two eggs, fresh from the hens, whose temperature must have been above the normal, nor the spring-house in the glen, where we found a refuge from the flies and the heat.  The higher we go, the hotter it is.  Banner’s Elk boasts an elevation of thirty-five to thirty-seven hundred feet.

We were not sorry, towards sunset, to descend along the Elk River towards Cranberry Forge.  The Elk is a lovely stream, and, though not very clear, has a reputation for trout; but all this region was under operation of a three-years game law, to give the trout a chance to multiply, and we had no opportunity to test the value of its reputation.  Yet a boy whom we encountered had a good string of quarter-pound trout, which he had taken out with a hook and a feather rudely tied on it, to resemble a fly.  The road, though not to be commended, was much better than that of the morning, the forests grew charming in the cool of the evening, the whippoorwill sang, and as night fell the wanderers, in want of nearly everything that makes life desirable, stopped at the Iron Company’s hotel, under the impression that it was the only comfortable hotel in North Carolina.

II

Cranberry Forge is the first wedge of civilization fairly driven into the northwest mountains of North Carolina.  A narrow-gauge railway, starting from Johnson City, follows up the narrow gorge of the Doe River, and pushes into the heart of the iron mines at Cranberry, where there is a blast furnace; and where a big company store, rows of tenement houses, heaps of slag and refuse ore, interlacing tracks, raw embankments, denuded hillsides, and a blackened landscape, are the signs of a great devastating American enterprise.  The Cranberry iron is in great esteem, as it has the peculiar quality of the Swedish iron.  There are remains of old furnaces lower down the stream, which we passed on our way.  The present “plant” is that of a Philadelphia company, whose enterprise has infused new life into all this region, made it accessible, and spoiled some pretty scenery.