winds through them, with many a
pretty turn and "reach," with scarcely a ribbon of room to spare on
either side. The river is shallow, rapid, stony, muddy, full of rocks,
with an occasional little island covered with low bushes. The rock seems
to be a clay formation, rotten and colored. As we approach Warm Springs
the scenery becomes a little bolder, and we emerge into the open space
about the Springs through a narrower defile, guarded by rocks that are
really picturesque in color and splintered decay, one of them being
known, of course, as the "Lover's Leap," a name common in every part
of the modern or ancient world where there is a settlement near a
precipice, with always the same legend attached to it.

There is a little village at Warm Springs, but the hotel--since burned
and rebuilt--(which may be briefly described as a palatial shanty)
stands by itself close to the river, which is here a deep, rapid, turbid
stream. A bridge once connected it with the road on the opposite bank,
but it was carried away three or four years ago, and its ragged butments
stand as a monument of procrastination, while the stream is crossed by
means of a flatboat and a cable. In front of the hotel, on the slight
slope to the river, is a meager grove of locusts. The famous spring,
close to-the stream, is marked only by a rough box of wood and an
iron pipe, and the water, which has a temperature of about one hundred
degrees, runs to a shabby bath-house below, in which is a pool for
bathing. The bath is very agreeable, the tepid water being singularly
soft and pleasant. It has a slightly sulphurous taste. Its good effects
are much certified. The grounds, which might be very pretty with care,
are ill-kept and slatternly, strewn with debris, as if everything was
left to the easy-going nature of the servants. The main house is
of brick, with verandas and galleries all round, and a colonnade
of thirteen huge brick and stucco columns, in honor of the thirteen
States,--a relic of post-Revolutionary times, when the house was the
resort of Southern fashion and romance. These columns have stood through
one fire, and perhaps the recent one, which swept away the rest of
the structure. The house is extended in a long wooden edifice, with
galleries and outside stairs, the whole front being nearly seven hundred
feet long. In a rear building is a vast, barrack-like dining-room, with
a noble ball-room above, for dancing is the important occupation of
visito