am dead!) clamoring for their graves and the honors of sepulture due to
them and denied. And this was a grief to the head men of the town, for
of all tribes the Cherokees loved and revered their dead. Thus when
other cheera-taghe kindled for the municipality the "sacred fire" for a
new year it was distributed to hearths far away, and Nilaque Great,
deserted and depopulated, had become a "waste town."

A fair place it had been in its prime, and so it had seemed one
afternoon in June, 1734, when for the first time the two white strangers
had entered it. Mountains more splendid than those which rose about it
on every hand it would be difficult to imagine. The dense, rich woods
reach in undiminished vigor along the slopes covering them at a height
of six thousand feet, till the "tree line" interposes; thence the great
bare domes lift their stately proportions among the clouds. Along these
lofty perspectives the varying distance affords the vision a vast array
of gradations of color,--green in a thousand shades, and bronze, and
purple, and blue,--blue growing ever fainter and more remote till it is
but an illusion of azure, and one may believe that the summits seen
through a gap to the northeast are sheer necromancy of the facile
horizon.

In the deep verdant cove below, groups of the giant trees common to the
region towered above the stanchly constructed cabins that formed the
homes of the Indians, for the Cherokees, detesting labor and experts in
procrastination, builded well and wisely that they might not be forced
to rebuild, and many of the distinctive features of the stout frontier
architecture were borrowed by the pioneers from aboriginal example. Out
beyond the shadows were broad stretches of fields with the lush June in
the wide and shining blade and the flaunting tassel. The voices of women
and young girls came cheerily from the breezy midst as they tilled the