THE SAPPHIRE COUNTRY 273 
well as agates, green chrysoprase, and red and yellow 
jasper. And there are choice building stones to be 
found almost everywhere, among them serpentine 
and beautiful marbles, in some places the marble 
being white and fine enough for the sculptor's chisel. 
So that one who should, like Kubla Khan, a stately 
pleasure dome decree, could find choice materials for 
its construction close at hand, with beautiful and 
rare stones to ornament the interior and even en- 
crust it with jewels — all from the rocks that other- 
wise adorn the earth with their covering of beautiful 
plant growths. 
And beyond the minerals that are beautiful, there 
are many that are curious or useful, among them 
asbestos, that seems so little like stone and which is 
here found of the finest quality; and there is pure 
talc from which our best toilet powders are made, 
and soapstone, a form of talc, and graphite, and the 
queer flexible sandstone, a bar of which bends when 
you lift it ; and kaolin is mined for the making of fine 
white china. Indeed, almost everything one can ask 
from the rocks — even to the newly valued "rare 
earths" — here await man's pleasure. 
Crystals and the other rare minerals from the 
North Carolina mountains are treasured in the 
greatest collections of the world, in this country very 
fine ones being on exhibition in the Metropolitan 
Museum of Art and the American Museum of Nat- 
ural History, both in New York, in the United 
States National Museum at Washington, in the 
Field Columbian Musuem at Chicago, as well as in 
