262 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
many seems essential to its perfection. The lakes 
have been finished long enough to have settled into 
the landscape like works of nature, so that to visit 
these sheets of water, that lie like jewels in their 
beautiful setting of trees and flowering shrubs, 
leads one to the reflection that man can make as 
fine a lake, on a small scale, as can the cosmic glacier, 
he following nature's method of clearing out the 
bottom — but with quick-working shovels of steel 
instead of the slow push of ice — and of damming 
up the exit with a symmetrical stone wall instead of 
an irregular haphazard moraine. 
The outlet of Lake Toxaway is Toxaway River, 
that, rising west of the Blue Ridge, breaks through 
that barrier — the only river, unless it may be the 
Linville, that does this — and joins the Horse Pas- 
ture part-way down the mountain. For the Horse 
Pasture, although so close to Toxaway River, rises 
on the western slopes of the Blue Ridge that makes 
several sudden curves in this region, the Sapphire 
and Fairfield lakes lying on its eastern slope, and 
Lake Toxaway west of it. To the east of Lake Tox- 
away the streams run to the French Broad Valley 
that begins just below here, and along which a road 
leads from Toxaway down to Brevard, lying so pleas- 
antly on its slopes just above the level river bottom. 
This upper part of the French Broad, although less 
impressive than where the river breaks through the 
mountains beyond Asheville, has a gracious beauty 
of its own, possessing that indefinable charm of 
level spaces below uprising hills. The French Broad, 
