It was here that we encountered again the political current, out of which we had been for a month.  The Judge himself was reticent, as became a public man, but he had conspicuously posted up a monster prospectus, sent out from Augusta, of a campaign life of Blaine and Logan, in which the Professor read, with shaking knees, this sentence:  “Sure to be the greatest and hottest [campaign and civil battle] ever known in this world.  The thunder of the supreme struggle and its reverberations will shake the continents for months, and will be felt from Pole to Pole.”

For this and other reasons this seemed a risky place to be in.  There was something sinister about the murky atmosphere, and a suspicion of mosquitoes besides.  Had there not been other travelers staying here, we should have felt still more uneasy.  The house faced Bald Mountain, 4000 feet high, a hill that had a very bad reputation some years ago, and was visited by newspaper reporters.  This is, in fact, the famous Shaking Mountain.  For a long time it had a habit of trembling, as if in an earthquake spasm, but with a shivering motion very different from that produced by an earthquake.  The only good that came of it was that it frightened all the “moonshiners,” and caused them to join the church.  It is not reported what became of the church afterwards.  It is believed now that the trembling was caused by the cracking of a great ledge on the mountain, which slowly parted asunder.  Bald Mountain is the scene of Mrs. Burnett’s delightful story of “Louisiana,” and of the play of “Esmeralda.”  A rock is pointed out toward the summit, which the beholder is asked to see resembles a hut, and which is called “Esmeralda’s Cottage.”  But this attractive maiden has departed, and we did not discover any woman in the region who remotely answers to her description.

In the morning we rode a mile and a half through the woods and followed up a small stream to see the celebrated pools, one of which the Judge said was two hundred feet deep, and another bottomless.  These pools, not round, but on one side circular excavations, some twenty feet across, worn in the rock by pebbles, are very good specimens, and perhaps remarkable specimens, of “pot-holes.”  They are, however, regarded here as one of the wonders of the world.  On the way to them we saw beautiful wild trumpet-creepers in blossom, festooning the trees.

The stream that originates in Hickory Nut Gap is the westernmost branch of several forks of the Broad, which unite to the southeast in Rutherford County, flow to Columbia, and reach the Atlantic through the channel of the Santee.  It is not to be confounded with the French Broad, which originates among the hills of Transylvania, runs northward past Asheville, and finds its way to the Tennessee through the Warm Springs Gap in the Bald Mountains.  As the French claimed ownership of all the affluents of the Mississippi, this latter was called the French Broad.