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At the State line the mountain begins to lose that bold, 

 smooth front that has characterized it for seventy-five 

 miles north of the Alabama line — a solid wall, as it were 

 — but here it begins to break up into innumerable spurs 

 that jut out toward the Tennessee River, with deep, long 

 gorges between them — a veritable paradise for the bot- 

 anist. These narrow defiles are from one to six miles 

 long, from a mile wide to as narrow as a hog trough. It 

 is up one of these narrow defiles we will go. This par- 

 ticular one is very narrow, leading up into the mountain 

 in a northwest direction, as all of them do. After follow- 

 ing a timber road along the winter run for about a mile, 

 we have reached a point where the bed of the ravine is 

 our road. From this we turn to our left up a steep, and 

 reach a little plateau, about 100 feet long and thirty or 

 forty feet wide, that is nearly level. Looking to the west 

 and up the steep, you see a bold stream meeting you that 

 is pouring over the rocks, ten and twenty feet at a jump. 

 Advance across this little plateau and you are on the edge 

 of a chasm, fault, or rift in the rock, of a triangular 

 shape, the sides of which are about 25 yards long and 

 the depth about 40 feet. The walls on the three sides 

 are perpendicular, except the little wear of the stream as 

 it approches the chasm. There you have the Scolopen- 

 drium in the hole where few intruders dare to go. This 

 place is wild and weird, even to a mountain man. The 

 water pouring down in this abyss and disappearing is 

 common in these mountain gorges, but this rift is a little 

 unusual. The flow of it inclines to the northwest and 

 grows deeper as it approaches the little pool made by the 

 falling stream. In this hole, shut out from the sun, grows 

 the fern. I think there must be 100 plants. Instead of 

 standing upright, they are inclined to spread out, on the 

 ground particularly, the outside leaves. On the left is a 

 shelf, some three or four feet from the floor and three or 

 four feet wide, with numerous plants on it. A majority 

 of the plants are small, many of their fronds not more 

 than four or five inches long. The largest I estimated 



