till
more precise, Cowan is thirty-five or forty miles from Chattanooga,
and now you begin to know where you are. Chattanooga, as you know, is
in Tennessee, and sits beside the superb Moccasin Bend of the
Tennessee River, under the shadow of Lookout Mountain, entirely
surrounded by freight trains. It runs Schenectady, New York, a close
race for the title of the noisiest city in the United States. But
after you have taken a west-bound train in the quaint old station of
the N. C. & St. L. railroad you pass rapidly into silence, down the
gorge of the splendid river, and then into the broken, ragged hills.
At Cowan a pig meets you on the platform, with the amiable curiosity
of the small-town resident toward the arriving stranger. Here you
change to the little branch line which runs north, up the side of the
gorge, to the coal mines. Up and up the train climbs, puffing and
straining, through a tall forest of hardwoods, and eventually reaches
an almost level plateau. Once on this plateau, you lose all sense of
mountain country and if you had not been aware of the steep climb to
get here, you would not believe that you were on the southern nose of
the Cumberland Range. Presently you reach a station--and that is
Sewanee.

There are no academic squatters at Sewanee, in their $100,000
cottages, as there are at Princeton. It is too far removed from any
cities, in the midst of its timbered mountain domain. There is a
little hotel, much frequented in summer, to be sure, but for the most
part the town is the university and its preparatory academy, and the
university is the town. Here is the Gothic chapel, the ivy-clad
scholastic buildings, the tree-shaded campus walks, the wandering
groups of hatless boys, the encircling street lined with professors'
houses--all the traditional flavor of a college, in a setting of
forest. For it is one of the unique charms of Sewanee that a walk of
a mile in any direction is a walk back into the ancient order, into
the wilderness of the southern mountaineer, into the eighteenth
century. A class that studies Shaw's plays in the morning may even
catch the vocabulary of Shakespeare in the afternoon, repeated
unconsciously by the lips of mountain children in the coves.

The word _cove_ is omnipresent here. Even the mountain folk are called
cove-ites. It needs but a short walk to show you why. The lower
Cumberlands, on the southern border of Tennessee, are unlike any other
mountain region, with a charm