Each adventurer to the mountains received one, and the band has kept, in Virginian lore, the title of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe.
Higher and more rugged grew the mountains.

Some trick of the light made them show blue, so that they presently came to be called the Blue Ridge, in contradistinction to the westward lying, gray Alleghanies.

They were like very long ocean combers, with at intervals an abrupt break, a gap, cliff-guarded, boulder-strewn, with a narrow rushing stream making way between hemlocks and pines, sycamore, ash and beech, walnut and linden.
Towards these blue mountains Spotswood and his knights rode day after day and came at last to the foot of the steep slope.

The long ridges were high, but not so high but that horse and man might make shift to scramble to the crest.

Up they climbed and from the heights they looked across and down into the Valley of Virginia, twenty miles wide, a hundred and twenty long--a fertile garden spot.