N E W YQR] DIVISION - O'Ryan's Roughnecks

GAS
ATTACK
Taking the Air at Asheville,
the American Simla
(By Private Richard E. Connell, Co. A,
102nd M. P.)
Since Marco Polo, Doctor Cook, Elbert
PIubbard, Julian Street, nor any other
travel-writer of note had never, so far as I
could find out, pilgrimaged to Asheville,
Leff and I decided we would, so, one misty
Saturday last week, we got passes from
Lieutenant Baldwin, I borrowed Sergeant
Max Averbeek's paris-green furlough leg-
WKBm
>R.
gins, and Leff and I left for Asheville on the
4:30 train on the Southern Railroad.
The trip up was very much like any other
southern railroad trip—we were an hour
late. An oriental-looking young man shared
our section with us—it was a sort of stateroom,
the only thing we could, get for the
Saturday trains to Asheville are always
jammed—and he had a morbid dread of
fresh air, so he hermetically sealed us in
with him, while he smoked a series of black
gas-bombs, which Leff opined were called
La Incineratoros.
I mention this because any story about
Asheville must necessarily be a story about
air. This Leff and I found as soon as the
train, drawn by two engines, puffed up the
last mountain and brought us to Asheville.
We noticed the air as soon as we
stepped
out of the station. You can't help it. One
whiff of it makes a private feel like a general.
Two whiffs—and you feel sorry for
poor old John D. who has only sixty million
a year between himself and the poor house.
Three whiffs—and you ask somebody to
page Jess Willard for you to bang about.
Leff and I took about three billion whiffs!
Each!
Asheville Air.
It is hard to describe Asheville air in ordinary
terms, to compare it with ordinary
sensations.
Did you ever glide gently down a white
coral lane of a balmy moonlit night, thru
bowers of roses and sweet-peas, in a solid
gold Rolls-Royce, with J. P. Morgan as your
chauffeur, with Billie Burke fanning you
with a fan made of apple-blossoms, and with
Mary Pickford keeping your crystal goblet
filled with Moet et Chandon, while the Boston
Symphony, following in noiseless Fifth
Avenue busses, jazzily playing, "This IS
the LIFE!" That's the way Asheville air
makes you feel!
An
Ozone Jag.
Leff and I stood out in front of the station,
gulping in the atmosphere. We had
soon accumulated a regular ozone bun. The
cares of life dropped from us. The stars
~ Land of the Sky
GROVE PARK
seemed nearer. Indeed, they were, for
Asheville is half a mile high. We smiled,
and bowed at all passing Ashevillians. We
made screaming jests about everything we
saw. I wish I could remember some of
them.
We took an automobile up to the Battery
Park Hotel, which stood out on its hill
the House of a Thousand
like
Incandescents—a
great, rambling, much-piazzaed building,
with nothing stiff or formal about it.
It is
called the Battery Park because it is situated
on a hill where, in the civil war, the battery
of General Porter boomed defiance.
commands a magnificent view. Miles away
across the valley rise Mt. Pisgah and the
Rat, a mountain which gets its name from
its striking resemblance to a rodent.
One can see the wonderful Vanderbilt estate,
Biltmore, in the hazy blue distance.
Indeed, the story goes that Mrs. George
It
Vanderbilt,
while passing through Asheville
looked out from the porch of the Battery
Park and became so enchanted by the vista
that she bought thousands of acres, now
the Biltmore estate. The next morning,
Sunday, Leff and I stood on the very spot
where she stood, and regretted that we
could not buy a few square miles of landscape,
but regrets are only momentary in
Asheville, for all one needs to do is inhale
deeply and the cool, pure air chases the
glooms. Another story about the founding
of Biltmore, is that Mr. Vanderbilt hired
Immmmm
INN.
three experts to make a tour of the country
to find what place in the temperate zone
had the finest climate and could grow the
greatest variety of trees, shrubs and flowers.
This commission, so a fine old Southern
judge told us, picked out Asheville.
(Continued on page 8)