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OUR LORDLY DOMAIN. Lying between the Blue Ridge on the East and the Iron, Great Smoky and Unaka mountains on the West, is, in North Carolina, a lordly domain. It varies in width from about forty miles at the Virginia line to about seventy-five when it reaches Georgia on the Southerly side. Running Northeast and Southwest it borders the State of Tennessee on the West for about two hundred and thirty miles, following the meanderings of the mountain tops, and embraces approximately eight thousand square miles. Nowhere within that entire area is there a tract of level land one thousand acres in extent; for the mountains are everywhere, except in places where a limpid stream has, after ages of erosion, eaten out of the hills a narrow valley. Between the Grandfather on the east and the Roan on the west, the distance in a straight line is less than twenty miles, while from Melrose mountain, just west of Tryon, to the corner of North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, is over one hundred and fifty miles.

THE APPALACHIANS. According to the Smithsonian Institution, the name Alleghany is from the language of the Delaware Indians, and signifies a fine or navigable river.^[1] It is sometimes applied to the mountain ranges in the eastern part of the United States, but the Appalachians, first applied by De Soto to the whole system, is preferred by geographers.^[2]

THE GRANDFATHER MOUNTAIN. The Blue Ridge reaches its culmination in this hoary pile, with its five-peaked crown of archaean rocks, and nearly six thousand feet of elevation.

Of this mountain the following lines were written in 1898:

TO THE GRANDFATHER MOUNTAIN.^[3] Oldest of all terrestrial things-still holding Thy wrinkled forehead high;