arrated, carefully conveyed him to his own lodgings at the
village-inn of Chestatee.

The village, or town--for such it was in the acceptation of the time and
country--may well deserve some little description; not for its intrinsic
importance, but because it will be found to resemble some ten out of
every dozen of the country towns in all the corresponding region. It
consisted of thirty or forty dwellings, chiefly of logs; not, however,
so immediately in the vicinity of one another as to give any very
decided air of regularity and order to their appearance. As usual, in
all the interior settlements of the South and West, wherever an eligible
situation presented itself, the squatter laid the foundation-logs of his
dwelling, and proceeded to its erection. No public squares, and streets
laid out by line and rule, marked conventional progress in an orderly
and methodical society; but, regarding individual convenience as the
only object in arrangements of this nature, they took little note of any
other, and to them less important matters. They built where the land
rose into a ridge of moderate and gradual elevation, commanding a long
reach of prospect; where a good spring threw out its crystal waters,
jetting, in winter and summer alike, from the hillside or the rock; or,
in its absence, where a fair branch, trickling over a bed of small and
yellow pebbles, kept up a perpetually clear and undiminishing current;
where the groves were thick and umbrageous; and lastly, but not less
important than either, where agues and fevers came not, bringing clouds
over the warm sunshine, and taking all the hue, and beauty, and odor
from the flower. Those considerations were at all times the most
important to the settler when the place of his abode was to be
determined upon; and, with these advantages at large, the company of
squatters, of whom Mark Forrester, made one, by no means the least
important among them, had regularly, for the purposes of gold-digging,
colonized the little precinct into which we have now ventured to
penetrate.

Before we advance farther in our narrative, it may be quite as well to
say, that the adventurers of which this wild congregation was made up
were impelled to their present common centre by motives and influences
as various as the differing features of their several countenances. They
came, not only from parts of the surrounding country, but many of them
from all parts of the surrounding world; oddly and con