foothills. Different, indeed, is this adventure of the
Governor of Virginia and his chosen band from the old push afoot into
frowning hostile woods by the men of a hundred and odd years before!

Spotswood rode westward with a company drawn largely from the colonial
gentry, men young in body or in spirit, gay and adventurous. The
whole expedition was conceived and executed in a key both humorous and
knightly. These "Knights"* set face toward the mountains in August,
1716. They had guides who knew the upcountry, a certain number of
rangers used to Indian ways, and servants with food and much wine in
their charge. So out of settled Virginia they rode, and up the long,
gradual lift of earth above sea-level into a mountainous wilderness,
where before them the Aryan had not come. By day they traveled, and
bivouacked at night.

* On the sandy roads of settled Virginia horses went unshod,
but for the stony hills and the ultimate cliffs they must
have iron shoes. After the adventure and when the party had
returned to civilization, the Governor, bethinking himself
that there should be some token and memento of the exploit,
had made in London a number of small golden horseshoes, set
as pins to be worn in the lace cravats of the period. Each
adventurer to the mountains received one, and the band has
kept, in Virginian lore, the title of the Knights of the
Golden Horseshoe.

Higher and more rugged grew the mountains. Some trick of the light made
them show blue, so that they presently came to be called the Blue Ridge,
in contradistinction to the westward lying, gray Alleghanies. They were
like very long ocean combers, with at intervals an abrupt break, a gap,
cliff-guarded, boulder-strewn, with a narrow rushing stream making way
between hemlocks and pines, sycamore, ash and beech, walnut and linden.

Towards these blue mountains Spotswood and his knights rode day after
day and came at last to the foot of the steep slope. The long ridges
were high, but not so high but that horse and man might make shift to
scramble to the crest. Up they climbed and from the heights they looked
across and down into the Valley of Virginia, twenty miles wide, a
hundred and twenty long--a fertile garden spot. Across the shimmering
distances they saw the gray Alleghanies, fresh barrier to a fresh west.
Below them ran a clear river, afterwards to be called the Shenandoah.
They gazed--they predicted colo