At least we came to a place where even our blind path gave out but fortunately a little house was discovered hidden under the mountain bluff, and from the occupants we received directions to Mr. McClure, who lives about a mile down the road, can point it out to you.” We thanked her and moved on. “Well,” remarked the old lady, “I ‘spect if there be any Bell Mountain around here that Mr. We wasted fifteen valuable minutes expressing our denunciation of revenue officials. “You are strangers, then, in these parts?” “Yes!” “People don’t come up here often onless they be revenue officers!” she suggested. “Be younses from the lower regions?” she asked. At last a bright idea seemed to strike the old lady, who evidently pitied us. We didn’t want to turn back now, but what to do was the question. It had begun to drizzle rain: we were far off from the main road, traveling a neighborhood path right in the heart of the Blue Ridge. If there is any Bell about here I’ve never hearn of it!” We were truly in a bad box. “Well, mebbe it is stranger,” was her reply “but we always called it the knob. To our amazement she remarked that she had “never hear’n of sich a place.” We explained that Bell Mountain was a noted resort and could not be very far distant, intimating that a large mountain to the right of her house might be the Mecca in question. We started again on our journey and taking the condition of the road in question could not have gone less than eight miles, when we drew up at the house of an old lady and shot off our Bell Mountain conundrum. The distance couldn’t be more than tree and a half or four miles. He remarked that if it wasn’t for the clouds we might see its top. We had probably left the two-mile man nearly a league behind, when we halted at a store and asked the proprietor the distance to the Bell. To illustrate the truth of this we will recount our experience in reaching the top of Bell Knob. So a point that one fellow’s calculations estimates “three-quarters at a mile,” the next native will call five, seven or ten miles. In fact, we believe that each one has a measurement of his own, which none of his neighbors deem it just to infringe upon. The average mountaineer has a very singular idea of distance. The house at which we had stopped was said to be only two miles from the summit of “Old Bell,” but before we had been beguiled by those mountain miles and fully realized the fact that those two miles would require the greater part of the day to traverse. All day we had been told of this wonderful knob, until our curiosity was so wrought upon that we decided to visit it, although a former tour up Mount Yonah had wrung from our perspiring breast a vow to never attempt another ascent until our soul should soar to those blissful realms above. Our last letter left us at the foot of Bell Rock Mountain, in Towns County.
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