dotted its fertile basin with a thousand voiceless monuments of a voiceless age. Time is long. The lake was here the lake is gone. But when it went it left the sweet richness of its farewell kiss upon the lips of our valleys, and the fullness of its parting tears upon the cheeks of our hills. It made the loam and the land, the spirit and the springs, the creeks and the cream of the Middle Basin of Tennessee; the blue-grass plot of the State.

An animal is the product of the environment that surrounds him-the blossom of the soil upon which he lives. He is part of the sunlight and the grass, the rock and the water, the grain and the gravel, the air which he breathes, and the ant-hill which he crushes beneath his feet. Man is the highest animal. Then behold the Man of the Middle Basin, the highest development of the animal creation: Jackson, Crockett, Houston, Bell, Polk, Gentry, Maury, Forrest-these and thousands of others whose names and fame are fadeless.

Years have passed and yet the middle basin is as rich and beautiful today, in the green dressing of autumn's after-greenness, as she was on that memorable day years ago, when Hood's army on its march to Nashville, came thundering with thirty-five thousand men over Sand Mountain from the bloody fields around Atlanta. The Tennessee troops as a guard of honor led the advance. For days they marched among the old red hills of Georgia, the pines of North Alabama, and the blackjacks of the Highland Rim, but suddenly as they wheeled in on the plateau beyond Mt. Pleasant, a beautiful picture burst on their view. Below them like a vision, lay the borderland of the Middle Basin, a sea

of green and golden-green for the trough of the landwaves, sombre in the setting sun, had taken on the emerald hues of the pasture grasses-golden for the swelling hills, where rolled the woodlands, were studded with the bright gold foliage of the autumn-leaves nipped by the early frosts. Farmhouses and fences, orchards and open fields, meadows and meandering streams, newlyplowed wheat fields, and rustling rows of trembling corn, all basking in the quiet glory of mellow sunlight, formed a picture so restful to the eye of the tired soldier and so sweet and soothing to his homesick heart, that involuntarily his old slouched hat came off, his musket shifted to "present arms" and a genuine rebel yell rolled from regiment to regiment, from brigade to brigade, as the splendid master-piece of Nature unfolded before them.

"Have we struck the enemy's picket already?" asked the thoughtful Hood, now thoroughly aroused, and his keen eyes taking on the flash of battle.

"No, General, but we've struck God's country," shouted a ragged soldier as he saluted and joined in the swelling volume of the reverberating yell.

Even the gallant Cleburn, Honor's own soldier, the man whose matchless brigade a year before, at the retreat from Chickamauga, had stopped Grant's whole army at Ringgold Gap, tipped a soldier's salute to the quiet church-yard at Ashwood, and expressed a wish if he fell in the coming battle, he might sleep his last sleep there. Prophetic wish! With thirteen other field officers he fell, a few days afterward, around the bloody breast-works of Franklin, and yielded up his life as a holocaust to his country's cause.

But even war, the cloven-footed curse he is-could not blanch the cheek of the Middle Basin save for a moment, and as soon as the last echo of his tread had died away, she aroused again to life, with a wreath of emerald on her brow, the blush of the clover blossoms on her cheek, the sparkle of her own bright springs in her eye, and the song of the reaper in her ears.

O, the glorious middle basin,

The rose in Nature's wreath!

With her purpling sky and her hills on high

And her blue-grass underneath.

'Tis here our fathers built their homes,

"Tis here their sons are free

For the fairest land,

From God's own hand

Is the basin of Tennessee.

ON THE CONTEST OVER HIS SEAT IN

CONGRESS

BY

EDWARD W. CARMACK

From a speech delivered by Senator Carmack while he was a member of the House of Representatives.

See page 18.

Mr. Chairman: It is only a matter of justice to my constituents that I consume the time of this House. I should rather prefer that the House would proceed with all possible swiftness to the final act of this little drama and ring down the curtain as quickly as may be on the closing scene.

Whatever may be the action of this House, it will be but a trifling incident in the country's history and of no transcendent importance in my own. While the world stands, every day has its tomorrow, and I am not yet so old that I need grieve for the event of one little passing hour. If this little term in Congress represented to me the last floating fragment of a shipwrecked ambition, I might clutch at it and contemplate its loss with agony of soul. Such, I am glad to say, is not my condition.

So far as my individual political fortunes are involved in this contest, if I know my own heart, Mr. Chairman, I am absolutely indifferent to the issue. There is an

other and higher tribunal which will review these proceedings and sit in solemn judgment upon your verdict. If this House shall decide against my right, to the arbitrament of that great tribunal I shall make my appeal. It is within the power of the House by a mere act of force to strip a member of his commission. It is not within the power of the House to take from him the respect of his neighbors, his constituents, his friends. It may, by the same act of force bestow that commission as a gift from its own hands upon another, but it cannot bind up with the gift, the esteem and confidence of his people at home. That is a possession, gentlemen of this House, which it is not yours to give nor yours to take away. I had rather lose this seat than to receive it as a gift of this House, having been denied it by my people at home. I had rather be stripped bare of all official honors, and go back to the plain people from whom I sprang than to barter their respect and confidence for the meretricious splendors of a passing hour.

I had rather remain on a common level with the great mass of my countrymen than to creep and crawl to some petty eminence of official power and from there look down on an outraged and indignant people. That man, Mr. President, has lived too long who has lived to despise the plain people by whose strong arms he was lifted up, over whose shoulders he has climbed to greatness; who, in his declining years, in the evening of his life seeks to barter the honest loyalty of his life-long friends for a sordid, selfish and precarious alliance with his life-long enemies. I would that the words I have uttered were more worthy of the constituency whose cause I plead. In their name I appeal from whatever