But The Grape Also Can Be
Grown In All This Mountain Region.
Nothing but lack of enterprise
prevents any farmer from enjoying abundance of fruit.
The industry
carried on at the moment at the Widow Sherrill's was the artificial
drying of apples for the market. The apples are pared, cored, and
sliced in spirals, by machinery, and dried on tin sheets in a
patented machine. The industry appears to be a profitable one
hereabouts, and is about the only one that calls in the aid of
invention.
While our dinner was preparing, we studied the well-known pictures of
"Jane" and "Eliza," the photographs of Confederate boys, who had
never returned from the war, and the relations, whom the traveling
photographers always like to pillory in melancholy couples, and some
stray volumes of the Sunday-school Union. Madame Sherrill, who
carries on the farm since the death of her husband, is a woman of
strong and liberal mind, who informed us that she got small comfort
in the churches in the neighborhood, and gave us, in fact, a
discouraging account of the unvital piety of the region.
The descent from the summit of the Gap to Judge Logan's, nine miles,
is rapid, and the road is wild and occasionally picturesque,
following the Broad River, a small stream when we first overtook it,
but roaring, rocky, and muddy, owing to frequent rains, and now and
then tumbling down in rapids. The noisy stream made the ride
animated, and an occasional cabin, a poor farmhouse, a mill, a
schoolhouse, a store with an assemblage of lean horses tied to the
hitching rails, gave the Professor opportunity for remarks upon the
value of life under such circumstances.
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