Ar a little distance from the locality known as Bird's Mill, in Northern Georgia, and not far from the Tennessee line, there stands, among tangled underbrush, a massive yet simple monument. Around it the envious brier has crept, and the humbler headstones which here and there dot the thicket are also hedged about with weeds and creepers. Neglect and oblivion seem, to the hasty observer, to have so effectually covered the spot, with their wings, that even the dwellers in the neighborhood hardly know whom or what the marble and the stone represent.

Yet these obscure memorials call to mind some of the most touching and remarkable episodes in our history as a nation. They point backward, through the miraculous years of the last half century, to the time when the Cherokee held all the country about them; to the time of the mission-schools, and the heroic efforts of the "American Board" to establish them. A weather-beaten inscription on the marble monument discloses the fact that beneath it is the resting place of the good Dr. Worcester, first secretary

of the Board, and a most enthusiastic laborer among the Cherokees. A hundred rods away stands one of the old missionhouses, now a decaying ruin, inhabited by a horde of negroes. Cherokee and missionary have gone their ways together; there is not one to be encountered in any nook of the forest; the current of Fate has swept the Indian to the West, and the priests who labored for him into almost forgotten graves.

At the beginning of the present century the Indian still held the territory of North- . western Georgia secure against the intrusion of the white man's laws, and also roamed over extensive tracts in Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina. In the deep coves between the parallel ranges of the Cumberland, along the vast palisades by the winding Tennessee, and through the furrowed and ridgy lands extending towards Virginia and Kentucky, he wandered unrestrained. But the paleface was on his track, anxious first to gain his good-will, and then to reason him into a cession of his beautiful lands. It was with the bitterness of despair in his heart

that one of the chieftains said he had "learned to fear the white man's friendship more than his anger."

But the Cherokees did not seem to dread or detest the missionaries of the American Board. They knew them for men without guile or desire for personal gain, and they learned to love them. When good Cyrus Kingsbury founded the mission of Brainard, in 1817, on the banks of that Chickamauga, whose waters, a few years since, ran red with the blood of civil war, it was with the cordial consent of all the principal chiefs. Schools and churches were founded; log mission-houses erected; even the President of the United States allowed the use of the public funds for the building of a school-house for girls. Kingsbury, Cornelius, Evarts and Worcester, became eloquent champions of the Indians when their rights were assailed, and each missiona

successively risked his liberty and life for the much wronged aborigines. At last a crisis arrived. The state of Georgia began to extend her criminal jurisdiction over the lands claimed by the Cherokees, and with scorn disregarded all efforts of the Indians to protect themselves by an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. Angered because the missionaries sided with the Cherokees in the exciting question, the officers of the Georgia government imprisoned the noble Worcester and one of his fellow-laborers in the penitentiary, for "illegal residence among the Indians," and "because they gave advice on political matters." This last charge the missionaries solemnly denied, but refused of their own will to quit their posts, and the pardon which had been offered them was withdrawn. While they spent weary months in prison, the Cherokees

were occupied with internal dissension, and with ineffectual resistance to the encroaching Georgians. At last the treaties which virtually banished the Indians from their homes were signed, and in 1838 the troops gathered up into one long and sorrowful procession thousands of men, women and children, and hurried them from the State. Depleted and worn down by every imaginable privation, more than four thousand of the unfortunates died on their long march of six hundred miles to their new homes west of the Mississippi,-forming a ghastly sacrifice to commemorate the white man's greed.

Leaving the brier-invaded grave-yard and the tumbiing mission-houses, and climbing to the summit of Mission Ridge, a vision of perfect beauty is before one. To the east is Chickamauga Valley, following the course of the historic creek, and dotted with pleasant farms and noble groves: westward one looks down upon a rich and broad interval, bounded by high bluffs with rocky faces, along whose bases the noble stream of the Tennessee flows with many an eccentric turn, until, as if amazed and startled at the grandeur of Lookout Mountain, which rises just within the vale to twenty-four hundred feet above the sealevel, it turns inland once more in a western course, becoming rapid and turbulent as it descends through gorges and forests, to northern Alabama. "I ookout" is an outlier of the Cumberland table-land, and extends across the Tennessee line into

Georgia. One may travel for more than forty miles along its breezy height without finding anywhere a really advantageous point at which to descend. Between Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain lies Chattanooga Valley, the "Crow's Nest," as the Indians called it, and as its name signifies. It is, indeed, not unlike a nest or cup securely set down among huge mountain barriers, through which one can discern no pass, and which only the birds can afford to despise. Everywhere ridges, sharply-projecting spurs from the Cumberland, caves, forests. rocks, bluffs! How can traffic find its way through such a country?

Far below, as you stand on Mission Ridge, with "Lookout's" shadow thrown across the brilliant sunlight, falling on the slopes up which Grant sent his men on that day of blood in 1863, you may see the city of Chattanooga, "the gate-way of the South." On the present site of the town, the south bank of the Tennessee river, there stood, in 1835, a Cherokee trading post. In 1837, a good many white families from Virginia and the Carolinas had moved there, and a post-office called Ross's Landing was established. The original lots into which the town was partitioned were disposed of by lottery, after the expulsion of the Indians, and the vast commerce that to-day uses the Tennessee's current as the chief transporting medium, soon created quite a trading post. From upper Eastern Tennessee came iron and iron

derful advantages as a railway center in one of the richest mineral regions in the world, and, when they were mustered out, settled there. The march of progress began. It was a revelation to the people of the surrounding country-that steady and rapid improvement at Chattanooga. They had always known that there were coal, iron and oil in the vicinity in such quantities that, in the words of a public speaker who once upbraided them for their lack of enterprise," within sight of the city might be found Pittsburg plows that had been worn out upon the iron ore lying loosely on the hillsides;" yet they had not dreamed that with cheap iron and cheap coal at their doors they had the elements of empire in their hands. To-day Chattanooga

trunk lines of rail, and the surveys for the sixth, and in some respects the most remarkable, have been completed. The Western and Atlantic connects the city with Atlanta and the South; the Nashville and Chattanooga line pierces the Cumberland, and gives a route to Louisville and the Ohio; the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia road reaches to Bristol, giving direct connection with Lynchburg, Washington and New York; the Alabama and Chattanooga runs through marvelous coal and iron fields to Meridian, in Mississippi, whence there is a direct line to the "Father of Waters," and the Memphis and Charleston opens up a vast fertile section in Northern Alabama and a corner of Mississippi, a section unhappily strewn at pres

ent with wrecks of once prosperous plantations. The track of the war is visible through all the beautiful Tennessee Valley, and for miles one sees nothing but ruins and neglected lands. The "Cincinnati Southern" railroad is intended to run from the Ohio metropolis to Chattanooga, and will operate as an outlet from the Ohio Valley to the south-eastern seaboard, while it will also furnish a desirable connection with the Gulf system of roads. It will penetrate some of the richest regions of Kentucky, will cross the Cumberland River at Point Burnside, and run through the Sequatchie Valley, along an almost unbroken coalfield. With so many important and really finely-built lines of land travel stretching from it in all directions, one would naturally suspect Chattanooga of an inclination to disregard her river traffic; yet she is by no means unmindful of it. Operating as the distributing point for the whole river-valley, and, indeed, for the far South, the city crowds her storehouses yearly with corn, wheat and bacon, brought hundreds of miles in flat-boats and small steamers along the winding river from Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina. At high water season the stream is crowded with rustic crafts of all kinds; and the jolly raftsmen who have been for months in the forests, and have drifted down stream on broad platforms of pine logs, make merry in highways and by-ways. Transportation of coal and iron by river would not cost more than one-fourth the sum demanded by the railways.

The surroundings of Chattanooga are of the wildest and most romantic beauty, and in gazing down from "Lookout," or from the humbler Mission Ridge, upon the lovely valley, with its majestic river and lordly ledges, one cannot repress a fear that, some day, all' these natural beauties will be hidden by the smoke from the five hundred chimneys which will be erected in honor of the god Iron. For it is to be a town of rolling mills and furnaces, giant in its traffic, like Pittsburg and St. Louis, and inhabited by thousands of hardhanded, brawny-armed artisans. There is hardly a county in Eastern Tennessee where the resurces destined to make

LOOKING OUT FROM LOOKOUT CAVE.