and the laminae, of as large size as can be obtained, are trimmed with shears and tied up in packages for market.  The quantity of refuse, broken, and rotten mica piled up about the factories is immense, and all the roads round about glisten with its scales.  Garnets are often found imbedded in the laminae, flattened by the extreme pressure to which the mass was subjected.  It is fascinating material, this mica, to handle, and we amused ourselves by experimenting on the thinness to which its scales could be reduced by splitting.  It was at Bakersville that we saw specimens of mica that resembled the delicate tracery in the moss-agate and had the iridescent sheen of the rainbow colors—­the most delicate greens, reds, blues, purples, and gold, changing from one to the other in the reflected light.  In the texture were the tracings of fossil forms of ferns and the most exquisite and delicate vegetable beauty of the coal age.  But the magnet shows this tracery to be iron.  We were shown also emeralds and “diamonds,” picked up in this region, and there is a mild expectation in all the inhabitants of great mineral treasure.  A singular product of the region is the flexible sandstone.  It is a most uncanny stone.  A slip of it a couple of feet long and an inch in diameter each way bends in the hand like a half-frozen snake.  This conduct of a substance that we have been taught to regard as inflexible impairs one’s confidence in the stability of nature and affects him as an earthquake does.

This excitement over mica and other minerals has the usual effect of starting up business and creating bad blood.  Fortunes have been made, and lost in riotous living; scores of visionary men have been disappointed; lawsuits about titles and claims have multiplied, and quarrels ending in murder have been frequent in the past few years.  The mica and the illicit whisky have worked together to make this region one of lawlessness and violence.  The travelers were told stories of the lack of common morality and decency in the region, but they made no note of them.  And, perhaps fortunately, they were not there during court week to witness the scenes of license that were described.  This court week, which draws hither the whole population, is a sort of Saturnalia.  Perhaps the worst of this is already a thing of the past; for the outrages a year before had reached such a pass that by a common movement the sale of whisky was stopped (not interdicted, but stopped), and not a drop of liquor could be bought in Bakersville nor within three miles of it.

The jail at Bakersville is a very simple residence.  The main building is brick, two stories high and about twelve feet square.  The walls are so loosely laid up that it seems as if a colored prisoner might butt his head through.  Attached to this is a room for the jailer.  In the lower room is a wooden cage, made of logs bolted together and filled with spikes, nine feet by ten feet square and perhaps seven