This region of country is from 2,000 to 7,000 feet above sea level and is, in fact, a mountain region with a southern exposure.
Strange stories are told here of people who came five, ten, twenty or more years ago, with a view of dying here, but who afterward decided to live on, and they are living yet. One man who was a survivor of the Samso-Philistine war, if I am not mistaken, came here at last from the mouth of the Amazon, full of malaria. He had been kind of "down in the mouth"—of the Amazon for some years, and they say his liver looked like a rubber door-mat and his skin was like the cover of a sun-kissed ham.
He picked up his spirits here and recovered his youth, and though he was very old when he came, he is still older now and in pretty good health. I went to see him the other day. He is so old that there is moss on the north side of him and hieroglyphics on his feet. When I made some facetious remarks to him and told him a story I had recently acquired, he brightened up a good deal and emitted a dry, cackling laugh like a xylophone, and said that he believed he enjoyed that story just as well as he did when they used to tell it in the rifle-pits in front of Troy.
He said he liked Asheville very much indeed.
Asheville is called the Switzerland of America. It has been my blessed privilege during the past twenty years to view nearly all the Switzerlands of America that are here, but this is fully the equal if not the superior of any of them.
You can climb to the top of Beaucatcher Mountain and see a beautiful sight in any direction, and on most any day of the year. Every where the eye rests on a broad sweep of dark-blue climate. Up in the gorges, under the whispering pines, along the rhododendron bordered margins of the Swannonoa, or the French Brood, out through the Gap, and down the thousand mountain brooks, you will find enough climate in twenty minutes to last a week.
The chief products of Western North Carolina are smoking tobacco and climate. If you do not like the climate you can keep yourself to the smoking tobacco.
Here you will find old Mr. Ozone with his coat off and a feather duster in his hand, prepared to dust the cobwebs from the catacombs of the asthmatic or the consumptive. There is enough climate wasted here every year to supply a city the size of Chicago. Moreover, there is now a handsome hotel here called the Battery Park—that has been full ever since it was built and you can get good saddle horses, carriages or donkeys at reasonable rates in town.
The donkey is quite a feature of this country as he is apt to be of all mountain countries in fact. I have never associated with a more genial urbane or refined donkey than we have here. He is generally a soft mouse color, about nine hands high, and delights in making small, elongated foot-prints on the sands of time.
This small animal of the mountains is frequently accompanied by a robust but poorly-modulated voice. It is very pathetic and generally needs a little oil on it. The North Carolina donkey like the Colorado burro, lives to a great age. He then dies.