38o THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
his two cars on request of any lady passenger who 
wished to gather a few wild flowers, willing to please 
so long as he could get in before dark. 
Since then, like a cosmic spider, the Southern 
Railroad has woven its meshes below the Carolina 
mountains on either side, and thrown its steel threads 
across them in several places, while now yet another 
line is being surveyed across the Blue Ridge to the 
north of Tryon Mountain, up the Broad River 
Valley, past Chimney Rock, and on as far as Bat 
Cave where it follows a devious route of escape by 
way of the Pigeon River Gorge. The Blue Ridge 
that looks so ethereal in the distance presents almost 
insuperable obstacles to the civil engineer, as do also 
the guarding ramparts of the valleys of the plateau, 
but the great transcontinental line, that is to reach 
from the Atlantic coast of North Carolina to Seattle 
on the Pacific, will doubtless find a way. 
Occasionally one sees an old-fashioned, boat- 
shaped wagon covered with a canopy of white cloth, a 
survivor of those trains that crossed from Tennessee 
to the Carolinas over the hard-won roads where no 
longer move trains of wagons, droves of cattle, hogs, 
and sheep, all these now passing over another form 
of highway behind the iron horse that pulls the con- 
tents of a hundred caravans in one load. 
And what means that sudden appearance of two 
dozen automobiles on Traumfest's modest "Trade 
Street" the other day? Two or three of these won- 
ders of the age belong to people living here, and those 
others came on a mission, which was, to further their 
