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178
MEMOIRS OF TRAVEL

scale by the people in these mountains, such as Podophyllum, and when I stopped at a wayside store a day or two afterwards I found the people bartering these drugs for coffee, sugar and other goods, just as Indians would trade furs. The old man also told me that the people of this section had never been slave-owners, and had sympathised with the North during the Civil War. They were forced by the Confederates to serve as team¬ sters with tlieir own mules and horses during the greater part of the war, being allowed only a month in the spring to plant their corn and another month in the fall to harvest it. He had during one of these visits home hidden two Federal officers who were escaped prisoners of war, and at last enabled them to rejoin their own side. I should much have liked to stop here the night, but my driver was for some reason very unwilling to do so, and it is not easy to get these mountain-men to do anything against their will; so we drove on to a small country town where I got lodgings in a private house, as there was no hotel.

The next day I got a guide and horses to ride up to the top of the Blue Ridge, where there is a mountain hotel where I meant to stop. It was a lovely ride and the forest very fine, reminding me more of the temperate Himalayan forest than of anything in Europe, though without the mass of climbing plants, ferns and epiphytes which cover the trees there. Some of the magnolias (here called cucumber tree) were live or six feet round, with clean trunks up to about fifty or sixty feet. Most of the best black walnut had here been cut out and sold to lumber merchants, who employ agents to travel about the country and buy fine and valuable trees. Only the very best will in most places pay to haul out, and there are still great tracts of virgin forest quite untouched; I met a timber merchant's agent, who gave me glowing accounts of a block of forest 160,000 acres in extent which he had got the option to purchase at a dollar an acre, and he said that in many parts of it there was timber stand¬ ing on one acre which would pay for a hundred more. Such a speculation might be very profitable if managed by a company of Americans, but as a matter of fact no large enterprise of this kind can be carried out in the Southern States until you have a controlling interest in the railways or other means of transport. The value of any produce depends on what it costs to get it to market, and if it does not suit the railway companies’ interest to have a particular section of country opened up, they can and often do, by heavy rates of transport, cripple any enterprise in which they are not interested. All over the States one cannot help observing how much more development of the country depends on railways than in. other countries, and how entirely the settlers are at the mercy of a railway company when there is no competing line; even when there is competition, it is usual for combination to be made in the interest of the companies, whereas any combination of the agricultural interests is almost impossible. The farmer, who has created the wealth, and to a great extent the commerce of the country, seems to get always the hardest part of the work and to receive the least share of the profit, and the know¬ ledge of this drives most of the really clever young men off the land into business. I believe that the greater part of this forest land, which has since been opened up by big lumber companies, is now worth from ten