It was a great relief the next morning, on our return, to rise out of the lifeless atmosphere of the Gap into the invigorating air at the Widow Sherrill’s, whose country-seat is three hundred feet higher than Asheville.  It was a day of heavy showers, and apparently of leisure to the scattered population; at every store and mill was a congregation of loafers, who had hitched their scrawny horses and mules to the fences, and had the professional air of the idler and gossip the world over.  The vehicles met on the road were a variety of the prairie schooner, long wagons with a top of hoops over which is stretched a cotton cloth.  The wagons are without seats, and the canvas is too low to admit of sitting upright, if there were.  The occupants crawl in at either end, sit or lie on the bottom of the wagon, and jolt along in shiftless uncomfortableness.

Riding down the French Broad was one of the original objects of our journey.  Travelers with the same intention may be warned that the route on horseback is impracticable.  The distance to the Warm Springs is thirty-seven miles; to Marshall, more than halfway, the road is clear, as it runs on the opposite side of the river from the railway, and the valley is something more than river and rails.  But below Marshall the valley contracts, and the rails are laid a good portion of the way in the old stage road.  One can walk the track, but to ride a horse over its sleepers and culverts and occasional bridges, and dodge the trains, is neither safe nor agreeable.  We sent our horses round—­the messenger taking the risk of leading them, between trains, over the last six or eight miles,—­and took the train.

The railway, after crossing a mile or two of meadows, hugs the river all the way.  The scenery is the reverse of bold.  The hills are low, monotonous in form, and the stream winds through them, with many a pretty turn and “reach,” with scarcely a ribbon of room to spare on either side.  The river is shallow, rapid, stony, muddy, full of rocks, with an occasional little island covered with low bushes.  The rock seems to be a clay formation, rotten and colored.  As we approach Warm Springs the scenery becomes a little bolder, and we emerge into the open space about the Springs through a narrower defile, guarded by rocks that are really picturesque in color and splintered decay, one of them being known, of course, as the “Lover’s Leap,” a name common in every part of the modern or ancient world where there is a settlement near a precipice, with always the same legend attached to it.

There is a little village at Warm Springs, but the hotel—­since burned and rebuilt—­(which may be briefly described as a palatial shanty) stands by itself close to the river, which is here a deep, rapid, turbid stream.  A bridge once connected it with the road on the opposite bank, but it was carried away three or four years ago, and its ragged butments stand as a monument of procrastination, while