THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

BIRDS IN THE BUSH. i6mo, $1.25.
A RAMBLER'S LEASE. i6mo, $1.25.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY. i6mo, gilt top,

$1.25.

A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. i6mo, $1.25.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.
i6mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

SPRING NOTES FROM
TENNESSEE

BY

BRADFORD TORREY

We travelled in the print of olden wars ;
Yet all the land was green.

ROBERT Louis STEVENSON.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

re£?, Camforfoge
1896

Copyright, 1896,
BY BRADFORD TORREY.

All rights reserved.

The River side Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotypad and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE 1

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN 28

CHICKAMAUGA 57

ORCHARD KNOB AND THE NATIONAL CEMETERY 89

AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVER 102

A MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS 113

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE 124

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES 183

A LIST OF BIRDS . . . 213

INDEX 221

SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

I BEACHED Chattanooga on the evening
of April 26th, in the midst of a rattling
thunder-shower, — which, to look back upon
it, seems to have been prophetic, — and the
next morning, after an early breakfast,
took an electric car for Missionary Ridge.
Among my fellow - passengers were four
Louisiana veterans fresh from their annual
reunion at Birmingham, where, doubtless,
their hearts had been kindled by much fer-
vent oratory, as well as by much private
talk of those bygone days when they did
everything but die for the cause they loved.
As the car mounted the Ridge, one of them
called his companions' attention to a place
down the valley where " the Rebels and the
Yankees " (his own words) used to meet to
play cards. " A regular gambling-hole,"
he called it. Their boys brought back lots

2 AN IDLEE ON MISSIONARY EIDGE.

of coffee. In another direction was a spot
where the Rebels once " had a regular pic-
nic," killing some extraordinary number of
Yankees in some incredibly brief time. I
interrupted the conversation, and at the
same time made myself known as a stran-
ger and a Northerner, by inquiring after
the whereabouts of Orchard Knob, General
Grant's headquarters ; and the same man,
who seemed to be the spokesman of the
party, after pointing out the place, a savin-
sprinkled knoll between us and the city,
kindly invited me to go with him and his
comrades up to the tower, — on the site of
General Bragg's headquarters, — where he
would show me the whole battlefield and
tell me about the fight.

We left the car together for that purpose,
and walked up the slope to the foot of the
observatory, — an open structure of iron,
erected by the national government; but
just then my ear caught somewhere beyond
us the song of a Bachman's finch, — a song
I had heard a year before in the pine woods
of Florida, and, in my ignorance, was un-
prepared for here. I must see the bird and
make sure of its identity. It led me a little

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 3

chase, and when I had seen it I must look
also at a summer tanager, a chat, and so on,
one thing leading to another ; and by the
time I returned to the observatory the vet-
erans had come down and were under some
apple-trees, from one of which the spokes-
man was cutting a big walking-stick. He
had stood under those trees — which were
now in bloom — thirty years before, he said,
with General Bragg himself.

I was sorry to have missed his story of
the battle, and ashamed to have seemed un-
grateful and rude, but I forget what apology
I offered. At this distance it is hard to see
how I could have got out of the affair with
much dignity. I might have heard all about
the battle from a man who was there, and
instead I went off to listen to a sparrow
singing in a bush. I thought, to be sure,
that the men would be longer upon the ob-
servatory, and that I should still be in sea-
son. Probably that was my excuse, if I
made one ; and in all likelihood the veteran
was too completely taken up with his own
concerns to think twice about the vagaries
of a stray Yankee, who seemed to be an odd
stick, to say nothing worse of him. Well,

4 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

the loss, such as it was, was mine, not his ;
and I have lost too much time in the way
of business to fret over a little lost (or
saved) in the way of pleasure. As for any
apparent lack of patriotic feeling, I suppose
that the noblest patriot in the world, if he
chanced to be also an ornithologist, would
notice a bird even amid the smoke of bat-
tle ; and why should not I do as much on a
field from which the battle smoke had van-
ished thirty years before ?

So I reason now ; at the time I had no
leisure for such sophistries. Every moment
brought some fresh distraction. The long
hill — woodland, brambly pasture, and
shrubby dooryard — was a nest of singing
birds; and when at last I climbed the
tower, I came down again almost as sud-
denly as my Louisiana friends had done.
The landscape, — the city and its suburbs,
the river, the mountains, — all this would
be here to-morrow; just now there were
other things to look at. Here in the grass,
.almost under my nose, were a pair of Be-
wick wrens, hopping and walking by turns,
as song sparrows may sometimes be found
doing; conscious through and through of

AN IDLEE ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 5

my presence, yet affecting to ignore it ; car-
rying themselves with an indescribable and
pretty demureness, as if a nest were some-
thing never dreamed of by birds of their
kind ; the female, nevertheless, having at
that moment her beak bristling with straws,
while the male, a proud young husband,
hovered officiously about her with a con-
tinual sweetly possessive manner and an
occasional burst of song. Till yesterday
Bewick's wren had been nothing but a name
to me. Then, somewhere after crossing the
state line, the train stopped at a station, and
suddenly through the open window came a
song. " That 's a Bewick wren," I said to
myself, as I stepped across the aisle to look
out ; and there he stood, on the fence beside
the track, his long tail striking the eye on
the instant. He sang again, and once again,
before the train started. Tennessee was
beginning well with a visiting bird-gazer.

There must be some wrennish quality
about the Bewick's song, it would seem :
else how did I recognize it so promptly?
And yet, so far as I am able to give an
account of my own impressions, it had in
my ears no resemblance to any wren song I

6 AN IDLER ON MISSION A E Y RIDGE.

had ever heard. I think it never suggested
to me any music except the song sparrow's.
The truth is, I suppose, that we feel resem-
blances and relationships of which the mind
takes no cognizance.

I wandered at a venture down the further
slope, turning this way and that as a song
invited me. Here were Southerners and
Northerners fraternally commingled: sum-
mer tanagers, Carolina wrens, blue -gray
gnatcatchers, cardinal grosbeaks, chats,
Bachman finches, field sparrows, chippers,
white-throated sparrows, chewinks, indigo
buntings, black-poll warblers, myrtle-birds,
prairie warblers, a Maryland yellow-throat,
a bay-breasted warbler, a black-and-white
creeper, a redstart, brown thrushes, cat-
birds, a single mocking - bird, wood
thrushes, red-eyed vireos, white-eyed vireos,
wood pewees, a quail, and, in the air, pur-
ple martins and turkey buzzards. On the
Ridge, as well as near the foot on our way
up, a mocking-bird and a wood thrush sang
within hearing of each other. Comparison as
between birds so dissimilar is useless and out
of place ; but how shall a man avoid it ? The
mocking-bird is a great vocalist, — yes, and

AN IDLEE ON MISSION ART RIDGE. 1

a great singer ; but to my Northern ears the
wood thrush carried the day with his voice.

Having climbed the Kidge again, —
though climbing might be thought rather
too laborious a word for so gradual a slope,
— and started down on the side toward the
city, I came to a patch of blackberry vines,
in the midst of which sat a thrasher on her
nest, all a mother's anxiety in her staring
yellow eyes. Close by her stood an olive-
backed thrush. There, too, was my first
hooded warbler, a female. She escaped me
the next instant, though I made an eager
chase, not knowing yet how common birds
of her sort were to prove in that Chatta-
nooga country.

In my delight at finding Missionary Eidge
so happy a hunting-ground for an opera-glass
naturalist, I went thither again the very
next morning. This time some Virginia
veterans were in the car (they all wore
badges), and when we had left it, and were
about separating, — after a bit of talk about
the battle, of course, — one of them, with
almost painful scrupulosity, insisted upon as-
suring me that if the thing were all to be
done over again, he should do just as before.

8 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

One of his comrades, seeing me a Northerner,
interrupted him more than once in a vain
attempt to smooth matters over. They had
buried the hatchet, he said ; let bygones be
bygones. But the first man was not to be
cajoled with a phrase. He spoke without
passion, with no raising of the voice, quite
simply and amicably : he too accepted the
result ; the thing never would be done over
again ; only let his position be understood,
— he had nothing to take back. It was im-
possible not to respect such conscientious-
ness. For my own part, at any rate, I felt
no prompting to argue against it, being suf-
ficiently "opinionated" to appreciate a diffi-
culty which some obstinate people experience
in altering their convictions as circumstances
change, or accepting the failure of a cause as
proof of its injustice. If a man is not too
obstinate, to be sure, time and the course of
events may bring him new light ; but that
is another matter. Once, when the men
were talking among themselves, I overheard
one say, as he pointed down the hill, " The
Eebels were there, and the Union men yon-
der." That careless recurrence of the word
" Kebel " came to me as a surprise.

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 9

The principal excitement of the morning
was a glimpse of a Kentucky warbler, a bird
most peculiarly desired. I had finished my
jaunt, and was standing beside the bramble
patch not far from the railway, where I had
seen the hooded warbler the day before, when
the splendid creature flashed into sight, saw
me, uttered a volley of quick, clear notes,
and vanished up the hillside. I ran after
him, but might as well have remained where
I was. " He is a beauty ! " I find written
in my notebook. And so he is, clothed
in lustrous olive and the most gorgeous of
yellows with trimmings of black, all in the
best of taste, with nothing patchy, nothing
fantastic or even fanciful. I was again im-
pressed with the abundance of chats, indigo-
birds, and white-eyed vireos. Bachman spar-
rows were numerous, also, in appropriate
localities, — dry and bushy, — and I noted a
bluebird, a yellow-throated vireo, and, shout-
ing from a dead treetop, a great crested fly-
catcher.

My most vivid recollection of this second
visit, however, is of the power of the sun, an
old enemy of mine, by whom, in my igno-
rance of spring weather in Tennessee, I

10 AN IDLER ON MISSION AE Y RIDGE.

allowed myself to be taken at a cruel noon-
day disadvantage. Even now, in the deep
frigidity of a Massachusetts winter, I cannot
think of Missionary Ridge without seeing
again those long stretches of burning sun-
shine, wherein the least spot of shade was
like a palm in the desert. In every such
shelter I used to stand awhile, bareheaded ;
then, marking the next similar haven, so
many rods ahead, I would hoist my umbrella
and push forward, cringing at every step as
if I were crossing a field under fire. Possi-
bly I exaggerate, but, if I do, it is very little :
and though it be an abuse of an exquisite
poem, I say over to myself again and again
a couplet of Miss Guiney's : —

" Weather on a sunny ridge,

Showery weather, far from here."

In truth, early as the season was, the exces-
sive heat, combined with a trying dog-day
humidity, sadly circumscribed all my Ten-
nessee rambles. As for my umbrella, my
obligations to it were such that nothing but
a dread of plagiarism has restrained me from
entitling this sketch " An Umbrella on Mis-
sionary Ridge." Nature never intended me
for a tropical explorer. Often I did nothing

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 11

more than seek a shady retreat and stay
there, letting the birds come to me, if they
would.

Improved after this indolent fashion, one
of the hottest of my forenoons became also
one of the most enjoyable. I left the car
midway up the Kidge, — at the angle of the
Y, — and, passing my thrasher's blackberry
tangle and descending a wooded slope, found
myself unexpectedly in a pleasant place, half
wood, half grassy field, through which ran a
tiny streamlet, the first one I had seen in
this dry and thirsty land. Near the stream-
let, on the edge of the wood, quite by itself,
stood a cabin of most forlorn appearance,
with a garden patch under the window, —
if there was a window, as to which I do not
remember, and the chances seem against it,
— the whole closely and meanly surrounded
by a fence. In the door stood an aged white
woman, looking every whit as old and for-
lorn as the cabin, with a tall mastiff on one
side of her and a black cat on the other.

" Your dog and cat are good friends," I
remarked, feeling it polite to speak even to
a stranger in so lonesome a spot.

"Yes," she answered gruffly, "they're

12 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

good friends, only once in a while he wants
to kill her."

She said nothing more, and her manner
did not encourage further attempts at neigh-
borly intercourse ; but as I passed the cabin
now and then during the forenoon, the birds
leading me about, I heard her muttering
often and at considerable length to her hens
and ducks. Evidently she enjoyed conver-
sation as well as most people, only she liked
to pick her own company. She was " Aunt
Tilly," I learned afterwards, and had lived
there by herself for many years ; one of the
characters of the city, a fortune-teller, whose
professional services were in frequent re-
quest.

In this favored nook, especially along the
watercourse, were many birds, some of them
at home for the summer, but the greater
part, no doubt, lying over for a day or two
on their long northward journey. Not one
of them but was interesting to me here
in a new country, however familiar it might
have become in New England. Here were
at least eleven kinds of warblers : black-polls
of both sexes, black-throated blues, chestnut-
sides, myrtle-birds, golden warblers, black-

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 13

and - white creepers, redstarts (have we
anything handsomer ?), Maryland yellow-
throats, blue golden-wings, chats, and Ken^
tuckies. Here were blue-gray gnatcatchers,
bluebirds, wood thrushes, veeries, an olive-
backed thrush, catbirds, thrashers, Carolina
wrens, tufted titmice, a Carolina chickadee,
summer tanagers uncounted, orchard orioles,
field sparrows, chippers, a Bachman sparrow
(unseen), a cardinal, a chewink, flocks of
indigo-birds and goldfinches, red-eyed vireos,
white-eyed vireos, a yellow-throated vireo,
kingbirds, and a crested flycatcher.

In an oak at the corner of Aunt Tilly's
cabin a pair of gnatcatchers had built a nest ;
an exquisite piece of work, large and curi-
ously cylindrical, — not tapering at the base,

— set off with a profusion of gray lichens,
and saddled upon one limb directly under
another, as if for shelter. If the gnatcatcher
is not a great singer (his voice is slender,
like himself), he is near the head of his pro-
fession as an architect and a builder. Twice,
in the most senseless manner, one of the
birds — the female, I had no doubt, in spite
of the adjective just applied to her conduct

— stood beside the nest and scolded at me ;

14 AN IDLEE ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

then, having freed her mind and attracted
nay attention, she got inside and began peck-
ing here and there at the rim, apparently
giving it the final touches. The tufted tits
whistled unseen with all their characteristic
monotony. The veeries and the olive-back
kept silence, but the wood thrushes, as was
their daily habit, made the woods ring. One
of them was building a nest.

Most admired of all were the Kentucky
warblers, of which there were at least five.
It was my first real sight of them, and, for-
tunately, they were not in the least bashful.
They spent the time mostly on the ground,
in open, grassy places, especially about the
roots of trees and thorn-bushes, — the latter
now snowy with bloom, — once in a while
hopping a few inches up the bole, as if to
pick off insects. In movement and attitude
they made me think often of the Connecti-
cut warbler, although when startled they
took a higher perch. Once I saw one of
them under a pretty tuft of the showy blue
baptisia (2?. australis), — a new bird in
the shadow of a new flower ! Who says
that life is an old story ? From the general
manner of the birds, — more easily felt than

AN IDLEE ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 15

defined, — as well as from their presence in
a group and their silence, I inferred, rightly
or wrongly, that they had but recently ar-
rived. For aught I yet knew, they might
be nothing but wayfarers, — a happy uncer-
tainty which made them only the more in-
teresting. Of their beauty I have already
spoken. It would be impossible to speak of
it too highly.

As I took the car at noon, I caught sight
of a wonderfully bright blood-red flower on
the bank above the track, and, as I was the
only passenger, the conductor kindly waited
for me to run up and pluck it. It turned
out to be a catchfly, and, like the Kentucky
warbler, it became common a little later.
" Indian pink," one of my Walden's Ridge
friends said it was called ; a pretty name,
but to me " battlefield pink " or " carnage
pink " would have seemed more appropriate.

I had found an aviary, I thought, this
open grove of Aunt Tilly's, with its treasure
of a brook, and at the earliest opportunity I
went that way again. Indeed, I went more
than once. But the birds were no longer
there. What I had seen was mainly a flock
of "transients," a migratory " wave." On

16 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

the farther side of the Ridge, however, I by
and by discovered a spot more permanently
attractive, — a little valley in the hillside.
Here was a spring, and from it, nearly dry
as it was, there still oozed a slender rill,
which trickled halfway down the slope
before losing itself in the sand, and here
and there dribbled into a basin commodious
enough for a small bird's bath. Several
times I idled away an hour or two in this
retreat, under the shadow of red maples,
sweet-gums, sycamores, and tupelos, making
an occasional sortie into the sun as an ad-
venturous mood came over me or a distant
bird-call proved an irresistible attraction.

They were pleasant hours, but I recall
them with a sense of waste and discomfort.
In familiar surroundings, such waitings
upon Nature's mood are profitable, whole-
some for body and soul ; but in vacation
time, and away from home, with new paths
beckoning a man this way and that, and a
new bird, for aught he can tell, singing be-
yond the next hill, — at such a time, I think,
sitting still becomes a burden, and the cheer-
ful practice of "a wise passiveness " a virtue
beyond the comfortable reach of ordinary

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 17

flesh and blood. Along the upper edge of
the glen a road ran downward into the val-
ley east of the Ridge, and now and then a
carriage or a horseman passed. It would
have been good to follow them. All that
valley country, as I surveyed it from the
railway and the tower, had an air of invit-
ingness : beautiful woods, with footpaths
and unfrequented roads. In them I must
have found birds, flowers, and many a de-
lightful nook. If the Fates could have sent
me one cool day !

Yet for all my complaining, I have lived
few more enjoyable Sunday forenoons than
one that I passed most inactively in this
same hillside hollow. As I descended the
bank to the spring, two or three goldfinches
were singing (goldfinch voices go uncom-
monly well in chorus, and the birds seem to
know it) ; a female tanager sat before me
calling clippity , clippity ; a field sparrow,
a mocking wren, and a catbird sang in as
many different directions; and a pair of
thrashers — whose nest could not be far
away — flitted nervously about, uttering
characteristic moaning whistles. If they
felt half as badly as their behavior indi-

18 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

cated, their case was tragical indeed; but
at the moment, instead of pitying them,
I fell to wondering just when it is that
the thrasher smacks (all friends of his are
familiar with his resounding imitation of a
kiss), and when it is that he whistles. I
have never made out, although I believe I
know pretty well the states of mind thus
expressed. The thrasher is to a peculiar
degree a bird of passion ; ecstatic in song,
furious in anger, irresistibly pitiful in lamen-
tation. How any man can rob a thrasher's
nest with that heartbroken whistle in his
ears is more than I can imagine.

Indigo-birds are here, of course. Their
number is one of the marvels of this coun-
try, — though indeed the country seems
made for them, as it is also for chats and
white-eyed vireos. A bit farther down the
valley, as I come to the maples and tupelos,
with their grateful density of shade, a wood
pewee sings, and then a wood thrush. At
the same moment, an Acadian flycatcher,
who is always here (his nest is building
overhead, as, after a while, I discover), sa-
lutes me with a quick, spiteful note. " No
trespassing," he says. Landowners are

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 19

pretty much alike. I pass on, but not far,
and beside a little thicket I take up my
stand, and wait. It is pleasant here, and
patience will be rewarded. Yes, there is
a magnolia warbler, my second Tennessee
specimen ; a great beauty, but without that
final perfection of good taste (simplicity)
which distinguishes the Kentucky. I see
him, and he is gone, and I am not to be
drawn into a chase. Now I have a glimpse
of a thrush ; an olive-back, from what I can
see, but I cannot be sure. Still I keep my
place. A blue-gray gnatcatcher is drawling
somewhere in the leafy treetops. Thence,
too, a cuckoo fires off a lively fusillade of
Jcuks, — a yellow-bill, by that token. Next
a black-poll warbler shows himself, still
far from home, though he has already trav-
eled a long way northward; and then, in
one of the basins of the stream (if we may
call it a stream, in which there is no sem-
blance of a current), a chat comes to wash
himself. Now I see the thrush again; or
rather, I hear him whistle, and by moving a
step or two I get him with my eye. He is
an olive-back, as his whistle of itself would
prove ; and presently he begins to sing, to

20 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

my intense delight. Soon two others are in
voice with him. Am I on Missionary Bidge
or in the Crawford Notch? I stand mo-
tionless, and listen and listen, but my enjoy-
ment is interrupted by a new pleasure. A
warbler, evidently a female, from a certain
quietness and plainness, and, as I take it,
a blue-winged yellow, though I have never
seen a female of that species (and only once
a male — three days ago at Chickamauga),
comes to the edge of the pool, and in an-
other minute her mate is beside her. Him
there is no mistaking. They fly away in a
bit of lovers' quarrel, a favorite pastime
with mated birds. And look! there is a
scarlet tanager ; the same gorgeous fellow,
I suppose, that was here two days ago, and
the only one I have seen in this lower coun-
try. What a beauty he is ! One of the fin-
est ; handsomer, so I think, than the hand-
somest of his all-red cousins. Now he calls
chip-cherr, and now he breaks into song.
There he falls behind ; his cousin's voice is
less hoarse, and his style less labored and
jerky.

Now straight before me, up a woody aisle,
an olive-backed thrush stands in full view

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY EIDGE. 21

and a perfect light, facing me and singing,
a lovely chorister. Looking at him, I catch
a flutter of yellow and black among the
leaves by the streamlet ; a Kentucky warbler,
I suspect, but I dare not go forward to see,
for now the thrushes are in chorus again.
By and by he comes up from his bath, and
falls to dressing his feathers: not a Ken-
tucky, after all, but a Canadian flycatcher,
my first one here. He, too, is an exquisite,
with fine colors finely laid on, and a most
becoming jet necklace. While I am admir-
ing him, a blue yellow-back begins to prac-
tice his scales — still a little blurred, and
needing practice, a critic might say — some-
where at my right among the hillside oaks ;
another exquisite, a beauty among beauties.
I see him, though he is out of sight. And
what seems odd, at this very moment his
rival as a singer of the scale, the prairie war-
bler, breaks out on the other side of me.
Like the chat and the indigo-bird, he is
abundantly at home hereabout.

All this woodland music is set off by
spaces of silence, sweeter almost than the
music itself. Here is peace unbroken ; here
is a delicious coolness, while the sun blazes

22 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

upon the dusty road above me. How amia,ble
a power is contrast — on its softer side ! I
think of the eager, bloody, sweaty, raging
men, who once stormed up these slopes, kill-
ing and being killed. The birds know no-
thing of all that. It might have been thou-
sands of years ago. The very trees have for-
gotten it. Two or three cows come feeding
down the glade, with the lazy tinkle of a bell.
And now my new friend, the blue-winged
yellow warbler, sings across the path (across
the aisle, I was going to say), but only two
or three times, and with only two insignifi-
cant lisping syllables. The chary soul ! He
sings to the eye, I suppose. I go over to
look at him, and my sudden movement star-
tles the thrushes, who, finding themselves
again in the singers' gallery, cannot refrain
from another chorus. At the same moment
the Canadian warbler comes into sight again,
this time in a tupelo. The blue-wings are
found without difficulty; they have a call
like the black-and-white creeper's. A single
rough-winged swallow skims above the tree-
tops. I have seen him here before, and one
or two others like him.

As I return to the bed of the valley, a

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 23

female cardinal grosbeak flutters suspiciously
about a thicket of tall blackberry vines. Her
nest should be there, I think, but a hasty
look reveals nothing. Again I come upon
the Canadian warbler. If there is only one
here, he is often in my way. I sit down
upon the leaning, almost horizontal, bole of
a large tupelo, — a new tree to me, but com-
mon in this country. The thick dark-colored
bark is broken deeply into innumerable geo-
metrical figures, giving the tree a noticeable,
venerable appearance, as wrinkles lend dis-
tinction and character to an old man's face.
Another species, which, as far as I can tell,
should be our familiar tupelo of Massachu-
setts, is equally common, — a smaller tree,
with larger leaves. The moisture here, slight
as it now is, gives the place a vegetation of
its own and a peculiar density of leafage.
From one of the smaller tupelos (I repeat
that word as often as I can, for the music of
it) cross-vine streamers are swinging, full of
red-and-yellow bells. Scattered thinly over
the ground are yellow starflowers, the com-
mon houstonia, a pink phlox, and some un-
known dark yellow blossom a little like the
fall dandelion, — Cynthia, I guess.

24 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

My thoughts are recalled by a strong,
sharp chip in a voice I do not recognize, —
a Kentucky warbler's, as presently turns
out. He walks about the ground amid the
short, thin grass, seemingly in the most pla-
cid of moods ; but at every few steps, for
some inscrutable reason, he comes out with
that quick, peremptory call. And all the
while I keep saying to myself, "What a
beauty ! " But my forenoon is past. I rise
to go, and at the motion he takes flight.
Near the spring the goldfinches are still in
full chorus, and just beyond them in the path
is a mourning dove.

That was a good season : hymns without
words, "a sermon not made with hands,"
and the world shut out. Three days after-
ward, fast as my vacation was running away,
I went to the same place again. The olive-
backed thrushes were still singing, to my
surprise, and the Kentucky warblers were
still feeding in the grass. The scarlet tana-
ger sang (it is curious how much oftener I
mention him than the comparatively unfa-
miliar, but here extremely common summer
tanager), the cuckoo called, the Acadian
flycatcher was building her nest, — on a hori-

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 25

zontal limb of a maple, — and a goldfinch
warbled as if he could never cease. A veery
sang, also (I heard but one other in Ten-
nessee), with a chestnut-sided warbler, two
redstarts (one of them in the modest garb
of his mother), a Carolina chickadee, a
mocking wren, a pine warbler, a prairie war-
bler, and a catbird. In time, probably, all
the birds for a mile around might have been
heard or seen beside that scanty rill.

To-day, however, my mood was less Sun-
dayish than before, and in spite of the heat
I ventured across an open pasture, — where
a Bachman's finch was singing an ingenious
set of variations, and a rabbit stamped with
a sudden loudness that made me jump, —
and then through a piece of wood, till I came
to another hollow like the one I had left,
but without water, and therefore less thickly
shaded. Here was the inevitable thicket of
brambles (since I speak so much of chats
and indigo-birds, the presence of a sufficiency
of blackberry bushes may be taken for
granted), and I waited to see what it would
bring forth. A field sparrow sang from the
hillside, — a sweet and modest tune that
went straight to the heart, and had nothing

26 AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.

to fear from a comparison with Bachman's
finch or any other. What a contrast in this
respect between him and his gentle-seeming
but belligerent and tuneless cousin whom
we call " chippy." 1 Here, likewise, were a
pair of complaining Carolina wrens and an
Acadian flycatcher. A thrush excited my
curiosity, having the look of a gray-cheek,
but showing a buff eye-ring; and while I
was coaxing him to whistle, and so declare
himself, — often a ready means of identifica-
tion, and preferable on all accounts to shoot-
ing the bird, — there came a furious out-
burst from the depths of the brier patch,
with a grand flurry of wings : a large bird
and two smaller ones engaged in sudden
battle, as well as I could make out. At
the close of the melee, which ended as ab-
ruptly as it had begun, the thicket showed
two wrens, a white-throated sparrow, and a
female cardinal. The cardinal flew away;
the affair was no business of hers, ap-
parently; but in a minute she was back
again, scolding. Then, while my back was
turned, everything became quiet ; and on my

1 If I could have my way, lie should be known as the
doorstep sparrow. The name would fit him to a nicety.

AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE. 27

stepping up to reconnoitre, there she sat in
her nest with four eggs under her. At that
moment a chat's loud voice was heard, and,
turning quickly, I caught the fellow in the
midst of a brilliant display of his clownish
tricks, ridiculous, indescribable. At a little
distance, it is hard to believe that it can be
a bird, that dancing, shapeless thing, balan-
cing itself in the air with dangling legs and
prancing, swaying motions. Well, that is
the chat's way. What more need be said ?
Every creature must express himself, and
birds no less than other poets are entitled
to an occasional " fine frenzy."

My little excursion had brought me no-
thing new, and, like all my similar ventures
on Missionary Ridge, it ended in defeat.
The sun was too much for me ; to use a word
suggested by the place, it carried too many
guns. I took a long and comfortable siesta
under a magnificent chestnut oak. Then it
was near noon, and, with. my umbrella spread,
I mounted the hill to the railway, and waited
for a car.

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN was at first a dis-
appointment. I went home discouraged.
The place was spoiled, I thought. About
the fine inn were cheap cottages, — as if
one had come to a second-class summer
resort ; while the lower slopes of the moun-
tain, directly under Lookout Point on the
side toward the city, were given up to a
squalid negro settlement, and, of all things, a
patent-medicine factory, — a shameful dese-
cration, it seemed to me. I was half ready
to say I would go there no more. The pros-
pect was beautiful, — so much there was no
denying ; but the air was thick with smoke,
and, what counted for ten times more, the
eye itself was overclouded. A few northern
warblers were chirping in the evergreens
along the edge of the summit, between the
inn and the Point, — black-polls and bay-
breasts, with black-throated greens and Car-
olina wrens ; and near them I saw with
pleasure my first Tennessee phoebes. In the

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 29

street car, on the way back to Chattanooga,
I had for my fellow-passengers a group of
Confederate veterans from different parts of
the South, one of whom, a man with an
empty sleeve, was showing his comrades an
interesting war-time relic, — a bit of stone
bearing his own initials. He had cut them
in the rock while on duty at the Point thirty
years before, I heard him say, and now, re-
membering the spot, and finding them still
there, he had chipped them off to carry home.
These are all the memories I retain of my
first visit to a famous and romantic place
that I had long desired to see.

My second visit was little more remunera-
tive, and came to an untimely and inglorious
conclusion. Not far from the inn I noticed
what seemed to be the beginning of an old
mountain road. It would bring me to St.
Elmo, a passing cottager told me ; and I
somehow had it fast in my mind that St.
Elmo was a particularly wild and attractive
woodland retreat somewhere in the valley, —
a place where a pleasure-seeking naturalist
would find himself happy for at least an
hour or two, if the mountain side should
insufficiently detain him. The road itself

30 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

looked uncommonly inviting, rough and de-
serted, with wild crags above and old forest
below ; and without a second thought I took
it, idling downward as slowly as possible,
minding the birds and plants, or sitting for
a while, as one shady stone after another
offered coolness and a seat, to enjoy the
silence and the prospect. Be as lazy as I
could, however, the road soon gave signs of
coming to an end ; for Lookout Mountain,
although it covers much territory and pre-
sents a mountainous front, is of a very mod-
est elevation. And at the end of the way
there was no sylvan retreat, but a village ;
yes, the same dusty little suburb that I had
passed, and looked away from, on my way
up. That was St. Elmo ! — and, with my
luncheon still in my pocket, I boarded the
first car for the city. One consolation re-
mained : I had lived a pleasant hour, and
the mountain road had made three additions
to my local ornithology, — a magnolia war-
bler, a Blackburnian warbler, and a hairy
woodpecker.

There was nothing for it but to laugh at
myself, and try again ; but it was almost a
week before I found the opportunity. Then

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 31

(May 7) I made a day of it on the mountain,
mostly in the woods along the western bluffs.
An oven-bird's song drew me in that direc-
tion, to begin with ; and just as the singer
had shown himself, and been rewarded with
an entry as " No. 79 " in my Tennessee cat-
alogue, a cuckoo, farther away, broke into a
shuffling introductory measure that marked
him at once as a black-bill. Till now I had
seen yellow-bills only, and though the voice
was perhaps a sufficient identification, a
double certainty would be better, especially
in the retrospect. Luckily it was a short
chase, and there sat the bird, his snowy
throat swelling as he cooed, while his red
eye-ring and his abbreviated tail-spots gave
him a clear title to count as " No. 80."

As I approached the precipitous western
edge of the mountain, I heard, just below,
the sharp, wiry voice of a Blackburnian
warbler ; a most splendid specimen, for in
a moment more his orange-red throat shone
like fire among the leaves. From farther
down rose the hoarse notes of a black-
throated blue warbler and two or three black-
throated greens.

Here were comfortable, well-shaded boul-

32 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

ders and delightful prospects, — a place to
stay in ; but behind me stood a grove of
small pine-trees, out of which came now and
then a warbler's chip ; and in May, with
everything on the move, and anything pos-
sible, invitations of that kind are not to be
refused. Warbler species are many, and
there is always another to hope for. I
turned to the pines, therefore, as a matter of
course, and was soon deeply engaged with a
charming bevy of northward-bound passen-
gers,— myrtle-birds, palm warblers, black-
throated blues (of both sexes), a female
Cape May warbler (the first of her sex that
I had seen) magnolias, bay-breasts, and
many black-polls. It makes a short story
in the telling ; but it was long in the doing,
and yielded more excitement than I dare
try to describe. To and fro I went among
the low trees (their lowness a most for-
tunate circumstance), slowly and with all
quietness, putting my glass upon one bird
after another as something stirred among the
needles, and hoping every moment for some
glorious surprise. In particular, I hoped
for a cerulean warbler ; but this was not the
cerulean's day, and, if I had but known it,

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 33

these were not the cerulean's trees. None
but enthusiasts in the same line will be able
to appreciate the delight of such innocent
"collecting," — birds in the memory instead
of specimens in a bag. Even on one's home
beat it quickens the blood ; how much more,
then, in a new field, where a man is almost a
stranger to himself, and rarities and novelties
seem but the order of the day. Again and
again, morning and afternoon, I traversed
the little wood, leaving it between whiles for
a rest under the big oaks on the edge of the
cliffs, whence, through green vistas, I gazed
upon the farms of Lookout Valley and
the mountains beyond. A scarlet tanager
called, — my second one here, — wood thrush
voices rang through the mountain side forest,
a single thrasher was doing his bravest from
the tip of a pine (our " brown mocking-
bird " is anything but a skulker when the
lyrical mood is on him), while wood pewees,
red-eyed vireos, yellow-throated vireos, black-
and-white creepers, and I do not remember
what else, joined in the chorus. Just after
noon an oven-bird gave out his famous aerial
warble. To an aspiring soul even a moun-
tain top is but a perch, a place from which
to take wing.

84 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

All these birds, it will be noticed, were
such as I might have seen in Massachusetts ;
and indeed, the general appearance of things
about me was pleasantly homelike. Here
was much of the pretty striped wintergreen,
a special favorite of mine, with bird-foot
violets, the common white saxifrage (dear
to memory as the " Mayflower " of my child-
hood), the common wild geranium (cranes-
bill, which we were told was " good for
canker "), and maple-leaved viburnum. One
of the loveliest flowers was the pink oxalis,
and one of the commonest was a pink phlox ;
but I was most pleased, perhaps, with the
white stonecrop {Sedum ternaturn), patches
of which matted the ground, and just now
were in full bloom. The familiar look of
this plant was a puzzle to me. I cannot
remember to have seen it often in gardens,
and I am confident that I never found it be-
fore in a wild state except once, fifteen years
ago, at the Great Falls of the Potomac.
Yet here on Lookout Mountain it seemed
almost as much an old friend as the saxifrage
or the cranesbill.

I ate my luncheon on Sunset Eock, which
literally overhangs the mountain side, and

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 35

commands the finest of valley prospects ;
and then, after another turn through the
pines, where the warblers were still busy
with their all-day meal, — but not the new
warbler, for which I was still looking, — I
crossed the summit and made the descent
by the St. Elmo road, as before. How long
I was on the way I am unable to tell ; I had
learned the brevity of the road, and, like a
schoolboy with his tart, I made the most
of it. Midway down I caught sudden sight
of an olive bird in the upper branch of a
tree, with something black about the crown
and the cheek. " What 's that ? " I exclaimed 5
and on the instant the stranger flew across
the road and up the steep mountain side.
I pushed after him in hot haste, over the
huge boulders, and there he stood on the
ground, singing, — a Kentucky warbler.
Seeing him so hastily, and on so high a
perch, and missing his yellow under-parts, I
had failed to recognize him. As it was, I
now heard his song for the first time, and
rejoiced to find it worthy of its beautiful
author : Iclurwee, Idurwee, Idurwee, Idurwee,
Idurwee ; a succession of clear, sonorous dis-
syllables, in a fuller voice than most warblers

36 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

possess, and with no flourish before or after.
Like the bird's dress, it was perfect in its
simplicity. I felt thankful, too, that I had
waited till now to hear it. Things should
be desired before they are enjoyed. It was
another case of the schoolboy and his tart ;
and I went home good-humored. Lookout
Mountain was not wholly ruined, after all.

The next day found me there again, to
my own surprise, for I had promised myself
a trip down the river to Shellmound. In
all the street cars, as well as in the city
newspapers, this excursion was set forth as
supremely enjoyable, a luxury on no account
to be missed, — a fine commodious steamer,
and all the usual concomitants. The kind
people with whom I was sojourning, on Cam-
eron Hill, hastened the family breakfast
that I might be in season ; but on arriving
at the wharf I found no sign of the steamer,
and, after sundry attempts to ascertain the
condition of affairs, I learned that the
steamer did not run now. The river was
no longer high enough, it was explained ; a
smaller boat would go, or might be expected
to go, some hours later. Little disposed to
hang about the landing for several hours.

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 37

and feeling no assurance that so doing would
bring me any nearer to Shellmound, I made
my way back to the Read House, and took
a car for Lookout Mountain. In it I sat
face to face with the same conspicuous pla-
card, announcing an excursion for that day
by the large and commodious steamer So-
and-So, from such a wharf, at eight o'clock.
But I then noticed that intending passen-
gers were invited, in smaller type, to call at
the office of the company, where doubtless
it would be politely confided to them that
the advertisement was a " back number."
So the mistake was my own, after all. and,
as the American habit is, I had been blam-
ing the servants of the public unjustly.

I was no sooner on the summit than I
hastened to the pine wood. At first it
seemed to be empty, but after a little, hear-
ing the drawling kree, Jcree, kree^ of a black-
throated blue, I followed it, and found the
bird. Next a magnolia dropped into sight,
and then a red-cheeked Cape May, the sec-
ond one I had ever seen, after fifteen or
twenty years of expectancy. He threaded
a leafless branch back and forth on a level
with my eyes. I was glad I had come.

38 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

Soon another showed himself, and presently
it appeared that the wood, as men speak of
such things, was full of them. There were
black-polls, also, with a Blackburnian, a bay-
breast, and a good number of palm warblers,
(typical palmarum, to judge from the pale
tints); but especially there were Cape Mays,
including at least two females. As to the
number of males it is impossible to speak ;
I never had more than two under my eye
at once, but I came upon them continually,
— they were always in motion, of course,
being warblers, — till finally, as I put my
glass on another one, I caught myself say-
ing, in a tone of disappointment, " Only a
Cape May." But yesterday I might as well
have spoken of a million dollars as "only a
million." So soon does novelty wear off.
The magnolia and the Blackburnian were in
high feather, and made a gorgeous pair as
chance brought them side by side in the
same tree. They sang with much freedom ;
but the Cape Mays kept silence, to my deep
regret, notwithstanding the philosophical
remarks just now volunteered about the ad-
vantages derivable from a bird's gradual
disclosure of himself. Such pieces of wis-

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 39

dom, I have noticed, when by chance they
do not fall into the second or third person,
are commonly applied to the past rather
than the present; a man's past being, in
effect, not himself, but another. In morals,
as in archery, the target should be set at a
fair distance. The Cape May's song is next
to nothing, — suggestive of the black-poll's,
I am told, — but I would gladly have bought
a ticket to hear it.

The place might have been made on pur-
pose for the use to which it was now put.
The pinery, surrounded by hard-wood for-
est, was like an island ; and the warblers,
for the most past, had no thought of leaving
it. Had they been feeding in the hard
wood, — miles of tall trees, — I should have
lost them in short order. At the same time,
the absence of undergrowth enabled me to
move about with all quietness, so that none
of them took the least alarm. Not a black-
throated green was seen or heard, though
yesterday they had been in force both
among the pines and along the cliffs. A
flock of myrtle warblers were surprisingly
late, it seemed to me ; but it was my last
sight of them.

40 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

The reader will perceive that I was not
exploring Lookout Mountain, and am in no
position to set forth its beauties. It is
eighty odd miles long, we are told, and in
some places more than a dozen miles wide.
I visited nothing but the northern point, the
Tennessee end, the larger part of the moun-
tain being in Georgia ; and even while there
I looked twice at the birds, and once at the
mountain itself.

At noon, I lay for a long time upon a
flat boulder under the tall oaks of the west-
ern bluff, looking down upon the lower
woods, now in tender new leaf and most
exquisitely colored. There are few fairer
sights than a wooded mountain side seen
from above ; only one must not be too far
above, and the forest should be mainly de-
ciduous. The very thought brings before
my eyes the long, green slopes of Mount
Mansfield as they show from the road near
the summit, — beauty inexpressible and
never to be forgotten ; and miles of autumn
color on the sides of Kinsman, Cannon,
and Lafayette, as I have enjoyed it by the
hour, stretched in the September sunshine on
the rocks of Bald Mountain. Perhaps the

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 41

earth itself will never be fully enjoyed till
we are somewhere above it. The Lookout
woods, as I now saw them, were less mag-
nificent in sweep, but hardly less beautiful.
And below them was the valley bottom, —
Lookout Valley, once the field of armies,
now the abode of peaceful industry : acres
of brown earth, newly sown, with no trace
of greenness except the hedgerows along the
brooks and on the banks of Lookout Creek.
And beyond the valley was Kaccoon Moun-
tain, wooded throughout; and behind that,
far away, the Cumberland range, blue with
distance.

A phoebe came and perched at my elbow,
dropping a curtsey with old-fashioned polite-
ness by way of " How are you, sir ? " and a
little afterward was calling earnestly from
below. This is one of the characteristic
birds of the mountain, and marks well the
difference in latitude which even a slight
elevation produces. I found it nowhere in
the valley country, but it was common on
Lookout and on Walden's Ridge. Then,
behind me on the summit, another north-
ern bird, the scarlet tanager, struck up a
labored, rasping, breathless tune, hearty,

42 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

but broken and forced. I say labored and
breathless : but, happily, the singer was un-
aware of his infirmity (or can it be I was
wrong?), and continued without interrup-
tion for at least half an hour. If he was
uncomfortably short-breathed, he was very
agreeably long-winded. Oven-birds sang at
intervals throughout the day, and once I
heard again the black-billed cuckoo. Yes,
Hooker was right : Lookout Mountain is
Northern, not Southern. But then, as if to
show that it is not exactly Yankee land, in
spite of oven-bird and black-bill, and not-
withstanding all that Hooker and his men
may have done, a cardinal took a long turn
at whistling, and a Carolina wren came to
his support with a cheery, cheery. A far-
away crow was cawing somewhere down the
valley, no very common sound hereabout ;
a red-eye, our great American missionary,
was exhorting, of course ; a black-poll, on his
way to British America, whispered some-
thing, it was impossible to say what ; and a
squirrel barked. I lay so still that a black-
and-white creeper took me for a part of the
boulder, and alighted on the nearest tree-
trunk. He goes round a bole just as he

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 43

sings, in corkscrew fashion. Now and then
I caught some of the louder phrases of a
distant brown thrush, and once, when every
one else fell silent, a catbird burst out spas-
modically with a few halting, disjointed ec-
centricities, highly characteristic of a bird
who can sing like a master when he will,
but who seems oftener to enjoy talking to
himself. Lizards rustled into sight with
startling suddenness ; and one big fellow
disappeared so instantaneously — in "less
than no time," as the Yankee phrase is —
that I thought " quick as a lizard " might
well enough become an adage. Here and
there I remarked a chestnut-tree, the burs
of last year still hanging; and chestnut
oaks were among the largest and handsom-
est trees of the wood, as they were among
the commonest. The temperature was per-
fect, — so says my penciled note. Let the
confession not be overlooked, after all my
railing at the fierce Tennessee sun. It
made all the pleasure of the hour, too, that
there were no troublesome insects. I had
been in that country for ten days, the mer-
cury had been much of the time above 90°,
and I had not seen ten mosquitoes.

44 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

I left my boulder at last, though, it would
have been good to remain there till night,
and wandered along the bluffs to the Point.
Here it was apparent at once that the wind
had shifted. For the first time I caught
sight of lofty mountains in the northeast;
the Great Smokies, I was told, and could
well believe it. I sat down straightway and
looked at them, and had I known how
things would turn, I would have looked at
them longer; for in all my three weeks'
sojourn in Chattanooga, that was the only
half -day in which the atmosphere was even
approximately clear. It was unfortunate,
but I consoled myself with the charm of the
foreground, — a charm at once softened and
heightened, with something of the magic of
distance, by the very conditions that veiled
the horizon and drew it closer about us.

It is truly a beautiful world that we see
from Lookout Point : the city and its sub-
urbs ; the river with its broad meander-
ings, and, directly at our feet, its great Moc-
casin Bend ; the near mountains, — Baccoon
and Sand mountains beyond Lookout Val-
ley, and Walden's Eidge across the river ;
and everywhere in the distance hills and

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 45

high mountains, range beyond range, cul-
minating in the Cumberland Mountains in
one direction, and the Great Smokies in
another. And as we look at the fair picture
we think of what was done here, — of his-
toric persons and historic deeds. At the
foot of the cliffs on which we stand is White
House plateau, the battlefield of Lookout
Mountain. Chattanooga itself is spread
out before us, with Orchard Knob, Cameron
Hill, and the national cemetery. Yonder
stretches the long line of Missionary Eidge,
and farther south, recognizable by at least
one of the government towers, is the battle-
field of Chickamauga. Here, if anywhere, we
may see places that war has made sacred.

The feeling of all this is better enjoyed
after one has grown oblivious to the things
which at first do so much to cheapen the
mountain, — the hotels, the photographers'
shanties, the placards, the hurrying tourists,
and the general air of a place given over to
showmen. Much of this seeming desecra-
tion is unavoidable, perhaps ; at all events,
it is the part of wisdom to overlook it, as,
fortunately, by the time of my third visit I
was pretty well able to do. If that proves

46 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

impossible, if the visitor is of too sensitive a
temperament, — to call his weakness by no
worse a name, — he can at least betake him-
self to the woods, and out of them see
enough, as I did from my boulder, to repay
him for all his trouble.

The battlefield, as has been said, lies at
the base of the perpendicular cliffs which
make the bold northern tip of the mountain,
— Lookout Point. I must walk over it,
though there is little to see, and after a final
look at the magnificent panorama I de-
scended the steps to the head of the " in-
cline," or, as I should say, the cable road.
The car dropped me at a sentry-box marked
" Columbus " (it was easy to guess in what
year it had been named), and thence I
strolled across the plateau, — so called in
the narratives of the battle, though it is far
from level, — past the Craven house and
Cloud Fort, to the western slope looking
down into Lookout Valley, out of which the
Union forces marched to the assault. The
place was peaceful enough on that pleasant
May afternoon. The air was full of music,
and just below me were apple and peach
orchards and a vineyard.

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 47

In such surroundings, half wild, half tame,
I had hope of finding some strange bird ; it
would be pleasant to associate him with a
spot so famous. But the voices were all
familiar : wood thrushes, Carolina wrens,
bluebirds, summer tanagers, catbirds, a
Maryland yellow-throat, vireos (red-eyes and
white-eyes), goldfinches, a field sparrow (the
dead could want no sweeter requiem than he
was chanting, but the wood pewee should
have been here also), indigo-birds, and chats.
In one of the wildest and roughest places
a Kentucky warbler started to sing, and I
plunged downward among the rocks and
bushes (here was maiden-hair fern, I remem-
ber), hoping to see him. It was only my
second hearing of the song, and it would
be prudent to verify my recollection; but
the music ceased, and I saw nothing. At the
turn, where the land begins to decline west-
ward, I came to a low, semicircular wall
of earth. Here, doubtless, on that fateful
November morning, when clouds covered the
mountain sides, the Confederate troops
meant to make a stand against the invader.
Now a wilderness of young blue-green per-
simmon-trees had sprung up about it, as

48 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

about the Craven house was a similar growth
of sassafras. I had already noticed the ex-
treme abundance of sassafras (shrubs rather
than trees) in all this country, and especially
on Missionary Ridge.

With my thoughts full of the past, while
my senses kept watch of the present, I re-
turned slowly to the " incline," where I had
five minutes to wait for a downward car. It
had been a good day, a day worth remember-
ing ; and just then there came to my ear the
new voice for which I had been on the alert :
a warbler's song, past all mistake, sharp,
thin, vivacious, in perhaps eight syllables,
— a song more like the redstart's than any-
thing else I could think of. The singer was
in a tall tree, but by the best of luck, seeing
how short my time was, the opera-glass fell
upon him almost of itself, — a hooded war-
bler ; my first sight of him in full dress (he
might have been rigged out for a masquer-
ade, I thought), as it was my first hearing
of his song. If it had been also my last
hearing of it, I might have written that the
hooded warbler, though a frequenter of low
thickets, chooses a lofty perch to sing from.
So easy is it to generalize ; that is, to tell

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 49

more than we know. The fellow sang again
and again, and, to my great satisfaction,
a Kentucky joined him, — a much better
singer in all respects, and much more be-
comingly dressed; but I gave thanks for
both. Then the car stopped for me, and we
coasted to the base, where the customary
gang of negroes, heavily chained, were re-
pairing the highway, while the guard, a
white man, stood over them with a rifle. It
was a strange spectacle to my eyes, and sug-
gested a considerable postponement of the
millennium ; but I was glad to see the men
at work.

Two days afterward (May 10), in spite of
" thunder in the morning " and one of the
safest of weather saws, I made my final ex-
cursion to Lookout, going at once to the
warblers' pines. There were few birds in
them. At all events, I found few; but
there is no telling what might have happened,
if the third specimen that came under my
glass — after a black-poll and a bay-breast
— had not monopolized my attention till I
was driven to seek shelter. That was the
day when I needed a gun ; for I suppose it
must be confessed that even an opera-glass

50 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

observer, no matter how much in love he
may be with his particular method of study,
and no matter how determined he may be to
stick to it, sees a time once in a great while
when a bird in the hand would be so much
better than two in the bush that his fingers
fairly itch for something to shoot with.
From what I know of one such man, I am
sure it would be exaggerating their tender-
ness of heart to imagine observers of this
kind incapable of taking a bird's life under
any circumstances. In fact, it may be
partly a distrust of their own self-restraint,
under the provocations of curiosity, that
makes them eschew the use of firearms alto-
gether.

My mystery on the present occasion was
a female warbler, — of so much I felt rea-
sonably assured ; but by what name to call
her, that was a riddle. Her upper parts
were " not olive, but of a neutral bluish
gray," with light wing-bars, " not conspicu-
ous, but distinct," while her lower parts
were "dirty, but unstreaked." What at
once impressed me was her "bareheaded
appearance " (I am quoting my penciled
memorandum), with a big eye and a light

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 51

eye-ring, — like a ruby-crowned kinglet, for
which, at the first glance, I mistook her.
If my notes made mention of any dark
streaks or spots underneath, I would pluck
up courage and hazard a glorious guess, to
be taken for what it might be worth. As it
is, I leave guessing to men better qualified,
for whose possible edification or amusement
I have set down these particulars.

While I was pursuing the stranger, but
not till I had seen her again and again, and
secured as many " points " as a longer ogling
seemed likely to afford me, it began thun-
dering ominously out of ugly clouds, and I
edged toward some woodland cottages not
far distant. Then the big drops fell, and I
took to my heels, reaching a piazza just in
time to escape a torrent against which pine-
trees and umbrella combined would have
been as nothing. The lady of the house and
her three dogs received me most hospitably,
and as the rain lasted for some time we had
a pleasant conversation (I can speak for one,
at least) about dogs in general and particu-
lar (a common interest is the soul of talk) ;
in illustration and furtherance of which the
spaniel of the party, somewhat against his

52 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

will, was induced to " sit up like a gentle-
man," while I boasted modestly of another
spaniel, Antony by name, who could do
that and plenty of tricks beside, — a perfect
wonder of a dog, in short. Thus happily
launched, we went on to discuss the climate
of Tennessee (whatever may be the soul of
talk, the weather supplies it with members
and a bodily substance) and the charms of
Lookout Mountain. She lived there the
year round, she said (most of the cottagers
make the place a summer resort only), and
always found it pleasant. In winter it
was n't so cold there as down below ; at any
rate, it did n't feel so cold, — which is the
main thing, of course. Sometimes when she
went to the city, it seemed as if she should
freeze, although she had n't thought of its
being cold before she left home. It is one
form of patriotism, I suppose, — parochial
patriotism, perhaps we may call it, — that
makes us stand up pretty stoutly for our
own dwelling-place before strangers, how-
ever we may grumble against it among our-
selves. In the present instance, however,
no such qualifying explanation seemed neces-
sary. In general, I was quite prepared to

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 53

believe that life on a mountain top, in a cot-
tage in a grove, would be found every whit
as agreeable as my hostess pictured it.

The rain slackened after a while, though
it was long in ceasing altogether, and I went
to the nearest railway station (Sunset Sta-
tion, I believe) and waited half an hour for
a train to the Point, chatting meanwhile
with the young man in charge of the relic-
counter. Then, at the Point, I waited again
— this time to enjoy the prospect and see
how the weather would turn — till a train
passed on " the broad gauge " below. Just
beyond Fort Cloud it ran into a fine old
forest, and a sudden notion took me to go
straight down through the woods and spend
the rest of the day rambling in that direction.
The weather had still a dubious aspect, but,
with motive enough, some things can b&
trusted to Providence, and, the steepness of
the descent accelerating my pace, I was soon
on the sleepers, after which it was but a little
way into the woods. Once there, I quickly
forgot everything else at the sound of a new
song. But was it new ? It bore some re-
semblance to the ascending scale of the blue
yellow-back, and might be the freak of some

54 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

individual of that species. I stood still, and
in another minute the singer came near and
sang under my eye ; the very bird I had been
hoping for, — a cerulean warbler in full
dress ; as Dr. Coues says, " a perfect little
beauty." He continued in sight, feeding in
rather low branches, — an exception to his
usual habit, I have since found, • — and sang
many times over. His complaisance was a
piece of high good fortune, for I saw no sec-
ond specimen. The strain opens with two
pairs of notes on the same pitch, and con-
cludes with an upward run much like the
blue yellow-back's, or perhaps midway be-
tween that and the prairie warbler's. So
I heard it, I mean to say. But everything
depends upon the ear. Audubon speaks of
it as " extremely sweet and mellow " (the
last a surprising word), while Mr. Eidgway
is quoted as saying that the bird possesses
" only the most feeble notes."

The woods of themselves were well worth
a visit : extremely open, with broad barren
spaces ; the trees tall, largely oak, — chestnut
oak, especially, — but with chestnut, hickory,
tupelo, and other trees intermingled. Here,
as afterward on Walden's Kidge, I was

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 55

struck with the almost total absence of
mosses, and the dry, stony character of the
soil, — a novel and not altogether pleasing
feature in the eyes of a man accustomed to
the mountain forests of New England, where
mosses cover every boulder, stump, and
fallen log, while the feet sink into sphagnum
as into the softest of carpets.

Comfortable lounging-places continually
invited me to linger, and at last I sat down
under a chestnut oak, with a big broken-
barked tupelo directly before me. Over the
top of a neighboring boulder a lizard leaned
in a praying attitude and gazed upon the
intruder. Once in a while some loud-voiced
tree-frog, as I suppose, uttered a grating cry.
A blue-gray gnatcatcher was complaining,
— snarling, I might have said; a red-eye, an
indigo-bird, a field sparrow, and a Carolina
wren took turns in singing; and a sudden
chat threw himself into the air, quite un-
announced, and, with ludicrous teetering
motions, flew into the tupelo and eyed me
saucily. A few minutes later, a single ci-
cada (seventeen-year locust) followed him.
With my glass I could see its monstrous red
eyes and the orange edge of its wing. It

56 LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.

kept silence; but without a moment's ces-
sation the musical hum of distant millions
like it filled the air, — a noise inconceivable.

I would gladly have sat longer, as I would
gladly have gone much farther into the
woods, for I had seen none more attractive ;
but a rumbling of thunder, a rapid blacken-
ing of the sky, and a recollection of the
forenoon's deluge warned me to turn back.
And now, for the first time, although I had
been living within sound of locusts for a
week or more, I suddenly came to trees in
which they were congregated. The branches
were full of them. Heard thus near, the
sound was no longer melodious, but harsh
and shrill.

It seemed cruel that my last day on Look-
out Mountain should be so broken up, and
so abruptly and unseasonably concluded,
but so the Fates willed it. My retreat be-
came a rout, and of the remainder of the
road I remember only the hurry and the
warmth, and two pleasant things, — a few
wild roses, and the scent of a grapevine in
bloom; two things so sweet and homelike
that they could be caught and retained by a
man on the run.

CHICKAMAUGA.

THE field of Chickamauga — a worthily
resounding name for one of the great battle-
fields of the world — lies a few miles south
of the Tennessee and Georgia boundary, and
is distant about an hour's ride by rail from
Chattanooga. A single morning train out-
ward, and a single evening train inward,
made an all-day excursion necessary, and the
time proved to be none too long. Unhap-
pily, as I then thought, the sun was impla-
cable, with the mercury in the nineties,
though it was only the 3d of May ; and as I
was on foot, and the national reservation
covers nine or ten square miles, I saw hardly
more than a corner of the field. This would
have been a more serious disappointment
had my errand been of a topographical or
historical nature. As the case was, being
only a sentimental pilgrim, I ought perhaps
to have welcomed the burning heat as a cir-
cumstance all in my favor ; suiting the spirit
of the place, and constraining me to a need-

58 CHICKAMAUGA.

f ul moderation. When a man goes in search
of a mood, he must go neither too fast nor
too far. As the Scripture saith, " Bodily
exercise profiteth little." So much may
readily be confessed now ; for wisdom comes
with reflection, and it is no great matter to
bear a last year's toothache.

From the railway station I followed, at a
venture, a road that soon brought me to a
comfortable, homelike house, with fine shade
trees and an orchard. This was the Dyer
estate, — so a tablet informed all comers.
Here, in September, 1863, lived John Dyer,
who suddenly found his few peaceful acres
surrounded and overrun by a hundred thou-
sand armed men, and himself drafted into
service — if he needed drafting — as guide
to the Confederate commander. Since then
strange things had happened to the little
farmhouse, which now was nothing less than
a sort of government headquarters, as I
rightly inferred from the general aspect of
things round about, and the American flag
flying above the roof. I passed the place
without entering, halting only to smile at the
antics of a white - breasted nuthatch, — my
first Tennessee specimen, — which was hop-

CHICKAMAUGA. 59

ping awkwardly about the yard. It was a
question of something to eat, I suppose, or
perhaps of a feather for the family nest, and
precedents and appearances went for nothing.
Two or three minutes afterward I came face
to face with another apparition, a horseman
as graceful and dignified, not to say majestic,
as the nuthatch had been lumbering and un-
gainly ; a man in civilian's dress, but visibly
a soldier, with a pose and carriage that made
shoulder-straps superfluous ; a man to look
at ; every inch a major-general, at the very
least ; of whom, nevertheless, — the heat or
something else giving me courage, — I ven-
tured to inquire, from under my umbrella, if
there were any way of seeing some of the
more interesting portions of the battlefield
without too much exposure to the sun. He
showed a little surprise (military gentlemen
always do, so far as I have observed, when
strangers address them), but recovered him-
self, and answered almost with affability.
Yes, he said, if I would take the first turn to
the left, I should pass the spot over which
Longstreet made the charge that decided the
fate of the contest, and as he spoke he pointed
out the field, which appeared to be part of

60 CHICKAMAUGA.

the Dyer farm ; then I should presently
come within sight o£ the Kelly house, about
which the fighting was of the hottest ; and
from there I should do well to go to the Snod-
grass Hill tower and the Snodgrass house.
To do as much as that would require little
walking, and at the same time I should have
seen a good share of what was best worth
a visitor's notice. I thanked him, and fol-
lowed his advice.

1 The left-hand road, of which my informant
had spoken, ran between the forest — mostly
of tall oaks and long-leaved pines — and the
grassy Dyer field. Here it was possible to
keep in the shade, and life was compara-
tively easy; so that I felt no stirrings of
envious desire when two gentlemen, whom
I recognized as having been among my fel-
low-passengers from Chattanooga, came up
behind me in a carriage with a pair of horses
and a driver. As they overtook me, and
while I was wondering where they could
have procured so luxurious a turnout, since
I had discovered no sign of a public con-
veyance or a livery stable, the driver reined
in his horses, and the older of the gentlemen
put out his head to ask, " Were you in the

CHICEAMAUGA. 61

battle, sir ? " I answered in the negative ;
and he added, half apologetically, that he and
his companion wished to get as many points
as possible about the field. In the kindness
of my heart, I told him that I was a stranger,
like himself, but that the gentleman yonder,
on horseback, seemed to be well acquainted
with the place, and would no doubt answer
all inquiries. With a queer look in his face,
and some remark that I failed to catch, my
interlocutor dropped back into his seat, and
the carriage drove on. It was only after-
ward that I learned — on meeting him again
— that he was no other than General Boyn-
ton, the man who is at the head of all things
pertaining to Chickamauga and its history.

In the open field several Bachman finches
were singing, while the woods were noisier,
but less musical, with Maryland yellow-
throats, black-poll warblers, tufted titmice,
and two sorts of vireos. Sprinkled over the
ground were the lovely spring beauty and
the violet wood sorrel, with pentstemon,
houstonia, and a cheerful pink phlox. Here
I soon heard a second nuthatch, and fell into
a kind of fever about its notes, which wer£
clearer, less nasal, than those of our New

62 CHICKAMAUGA.

England birds, it seemed to me, and differ-
ently phrased. Such peculiarities might in-
dicate a local race, I said to myself, with
that predisposition to surprise which is one
of the chief compensations of life away from
home. As I went on, a wood pewee and a
field sparrow began singing, — two birds
whose voices might have been tuned on pur-
pose for such a place. Of the petulant,
snappish cry of an Acadian flycatcher not
quite the same could be said. One of the
"unreconstructed," I was tempted to call
him.

The Kelly house, on the way to which
through the woods my Yankee eyes were
delighted with the sight of loose patches of
rue anemones, was duly marked with a tab-
let, and proved to be a cabin of the most
primitive type, standing in the usual bit of
fenced land (the smallness of the houseyards,
as contrasted with the miles of open country
round about, is a noticeable feature of South-
ern landscapes), with a corn-house near by,
and a tumble-down barn across the way.
For some time I sat beside the road, under
an oak ; then, seeing two women, older and
younger, inside the house, I asked leave to

CHICKAMAUGA. 63

enter, the doors being open, and was made
welcome with apparent heartiness. The
elderly woman soon confided to me that she
was seventy-six years old, — a marvelous
figure she seemed to consider it ; and when
I tried to say something about her compar-
ative youthfulness, and the much greater
age of some ladies of my acquaintance (no
names being mentioned, of course), she
would only repeat that she was awful old,
and should n't live much longer. She meant
to improve the time, however, — and the
unusual fortune of a visitor, — and fairly
ran over with talk. She did n't belong about
here. Oh no ; she came from " 'way up in
Tennessee, a hundred and sixty miles ! "
" 'Pears like I 'm a long way from home,"
she said, — "a hundred and sixty miles ! "
Again I sought to comfort her. That was n't
so very far. What did she think of me,
who had come all the way from Massachu-
setts ? She threw up her hands, and ejacu-
lated, " Oh, Lor' ! " with a fervor to which
a regiment of exclamation points would
scarcely do justice. Yet she had but a
vague idea of where Massachusetts was, I
fancy ; for pretty soon she asked, " Where

64 CHICKAMAUGA.

did you say you was from ? Pennsylvany ? "
And when I said, " Oh no, Massachusetts,
twice as far as that," she could only repeat,
" Oh, Lor' ! " Her grandson was at work
in the park, and she had come down to live
with him and his wife. But she should n't
live long.

The wonder of this new world was still
strong upon her. " Them moniment things
they 've put up," she said, " have you seen
'em ? Men cut in a rock ! — three of 'em ?
Have you seen 'em ? Ain't they a sight to
see ? " She referred to the granite monu-
ments of the regulars, on which are life-size
figures in high relief. And had I seen the
tower on the hill, she proceeded to ask, — an
open iron structure, — and what did I think
of that ? She would n't go up in it for a
bushel of money. " Oh yes, you would," I
told her. " You would like it, I 'm sure."
But she stuck to her story. She would n't
do it for a bushel of money. She should
be dizzy ; and she threw up her hands, lit-
erally, at the very thought, while her grand-
daughter sat and smiled at my waste of
breath. I asked if many visitors came here.
" Oh, Lor', yes ! " the old lady answered.

CHICKAMAUGA. 65

" More 'n two dozen have been here from
'way up in Chicago."

The mention of visitors led the younger
woman to produce a box of relics, and I
paid her a dime for three minie-balls. " I
always get a nickel," she said, when I in-
quired the price ; but when I selected two,
and handed her a ten-cent piece, she insisted
upon my taking another. Wholesale cus-
tomers deserved handsome treatment. She
had picked up such things herself before
now, but her husband found most of them
while grubbing in the woods.

The cabin was a one-room affair, of a sort
common in that country (" cracker-boxes,"
one might call them, if punning were not so
frowned upon), with a big fireplace, two
opposite doors, two beds in diagonally oppo-
site corners, and, I think, no window. Here
was domestic life in something like its pris-
tine simplicity, a philosopher might have
said : the house still subordinate to the man,
and the housekeeper not yet a slave to fur-
niture and bric-a-brac. But even a philoso-
pher would perhaps have tolerated a second
room and a light of glass. As for myself,
I remembered that I used to read of " poor
white trash " in anti-slavery novels.

66 CHICKAMAUGA.

By this time the sun had so doubled its
fury that I would not cross the bare Kelly
field, and therefore did not go down to look at
the " men cut in a rock ; " but after visiting
a shell pyramid which marks the spot where
Colonel King fell, — and near which I saw
my first Tennessee flicker, — I turned back
toward Snodgrass Hill, keeping to the woods
as jealously as any soldier can have done on
the days of the battle. At the foot of the
hill was a well, with a rude bucket and a
rope to draw with. Here I drank, — having
to stand in the sun, I remember, — and
then sat down in the shelter of large trees
near by, with guideboards and index-fingers
all about me, while a Bachman finch, who
occupied a small brush-heap just beyond the
well (he had no fear of sunshine), enter-
tained me with music. He was a master.
I had never heard his equal of his own kind,
and seldom a bird of any kind, that seemed
so much at home with his instrument. He
sang " like half a dozen birds," to quote my
own pencil ; now giving out a brief and sim-
ple strain, now running into protracted and
intricate warbles ; and all with the most be-
witching ardor and sweetness, and without

CHICKAMAUGA. 67

the slightest suggestion of attempting to
make a show. A field sparrow sang from
the border of the grass land at the same
moment. I wished he could have refrained.
Nothing shall induce me to say a word
against him ; but there are times when one
would rather be spared even the opportunity
for a comparison.

As I went up the hill under the tall trees,
largely yellow pines, a crested flycatcher
stood at the tip of one of the tallest of them,
screaming like a bird of war ; and further
on was a red-cockaded woodpecker, flitting
restlessly from trunk to trunk, its flight
marked with a musical woodpeckerish wing-
beat, — like the downy's purr, but louder.
I had never seen the bird before except in
the pine-lands of Florida, nor did I see it
afterward except on this same hill, at a sec-
ond visit. It is a congener of the downy
and the hairy, ranking between them in size,
and by way of distinction wears a big white
patch, an ear-muff, one might say, on the
side of its head. Its habitat is strictly
southern, so that its name, Dryobates lore-
alls^ though easily rememberable, seems but
moderately felicitous.

68 CEICKAMAUGA.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the
day — the most comfortable, certainly, but
the words are not synonymous — was a two-
hour siesta on the Snodgrass Hill tower,
above the tops of the highest trees. The
only two landmarks of which I knew the
names were Missionary Ridge and Lookout
Mountain; the latter running back for
many miles into Georgia, like a long wooded
plateau, till it rises into High Point at its
southern end, and breaks off precipitously.

Farther to the south were low hills fol-
lowed by a long mountain of beautiful shape,
— Pigeon Mountain, I heard it called, —
with elevations at each end and in the mid-
dle. And so my eye made the round of the
horizon, hill after hill in picturesque confu-
sion, till it returned to Missionary Ridge,
with Walden's Ridge rising beyond, and
Lookout Point on the left : a charming pros-
pect, especially for its atmosphere and color.
The hard woods, with dark pines everywhere
among them to set them off, were just com-
ing into leaf, with all those numberless,
nameless, delicate shades of green that make
the glory of the springtime. The open
fields were not yet clear green, — if they

CHICEAMAUGA. 69

ever would be, — but green and brown inter-
mixed, while the cultivated hillsides, espe-
cially on Missionary Ridge, were of a deep
rich reddish-brown. The air was full of
beautifying haze, and cumulus clouds in the
south and west threw motionless shadows
upon the mountain woods.

Around me, in different parts of the
battlefield, were eight or ten houses and
cabins, the nearest of them, almost at my
feet, being the Snodgrass house, famous as
the headquarters of General Thomas, the
hero of the fight, — the " Eock of Chicka-
mauga," — who saved the Union army after
the field was lost. All was peaceful enough
there now, with the lines full of the week's
washing, which a woman under a volumi-
nous sunbonnet was at that moment taking
in (in that sun things would dry almost be-
fore the clothes-pins could be put on them,
I thought), while a red-gowned child, and a
hen with a brood of young chickens, kept
close about her feet. Her husband, like the
occupant of the Kelly house, was no doubt
one of the government laborers, who to-day
were burning refuse in the woods, — invisi-
ble fires, from each of which a thin cloud

70 CHICKAMAUGA.

of blue smoke rose among the trees. The
Dyer house, in a direction nearly opposite
the Snodgrass house, stood broadly in the
open, with an orchard behind it, and dark
savins posted here and there over the outly-
ing pasture.

Even at noonday the air was full of
music : first an incessant tinkle of cow-bells
rising from all sides, wondrously sweet and
soothing ; then a continuous, far-away hum,
like a sawmill just audible in the extreme
distance, or the vibration of innumerable
wires, miles remote, perhaps, — a noise which
I knew neither how to describe nor how to
guess the origin of, the work of seventeen-
year locusts, I afterward learned; and then,
sung to this invariable instrumental accom-
paniment,— this natural pedal point, if I
may call it so, — the songs of birds.

The singers were of a quiet and unpreten-
tious sort, as befitted the hour: a summer
tanager ; a red-eyed vireo ; a tufted titmouse ;
a Maryland yellow-throat, who cried, " What
a pity ! What a pity ! What a pity ! " but
not as if he felt in the least distressed about
it; a yellow-throated vireo, full-voiced and
passionless ; a field sparrow, pretty far off ;

CHICKAMAUGA. 71

a wood pewee; a yellow-billed cuckoo; a
quail ; a Carolina wren, with his " Cherry,
cherry, cherry ! " and a Carolina chickadee,
— a modest woodland chorus, interrupted
now by the jubilant cackling of a hen at the
Snodgrass house (if a man's daily achieve-
ments only gave him equal satisfaction !)
and now by the scream of a crested fly-
catcher.

The most interesting member of the choir,
though one of the poorest of them all as a
singer, is not included in the foregoing enu-
meration. While I lay dreaming on the
iron floor of the tower, enjoying the breeze,
the landscape, the music, and, more than all,
the place, I was suddenly brought wide
awake by a hoarse drawling note out of the
upper branches of a tall oak a little below
my level. I caught a glimpse of the bird,
having run down to a lower story of the
tower for that purpose. Then he disap-
peared, but after a while, from the same
tree, he called again ; and again I saw him,
but not well. Another long absence, and
once more, still in the same tree, he sang
and showed himself: a blue-winged yellow
warbler, an exquisite bunch of feathers, but

72 CHICKAMAUGA.

with a song of the oddest and meanest, —
two syllables, the first a mere nothing, and
the second a husky drawl, in a voice like
the blue golden-wing's. Insignificant and
almost contemptible as it was, a shabby ex-
pression of connubial felicity, to say the
least, I counted myself happy to have heard
it, for novelty covers a multitude of sins.

The yellow-throated warblers were hardly
less interesting than the blue-wing, though
they threw me into less excitement. For
a long time I heard them without heeding
them. From the day of my arrival in Chat-
tanooga I had been surrounded by indigo-
birds in numbers beyond anything that a
New England mind ever dreams of. As a
matter of course they were singing here on
Snodgrass Hill, or so I thought. But by
and by, as the lazy notes were once more
repeated, there came over me a sudden sense
of difference. "Was that an indigo-bird?"
I said to myself. " Was n't it a yellow-
throated warbler?" I was sitting among
the tops of the pine-trees ; the birds had
been droning almost in my very ears, and
without a thought I had listened to them as
indigo-birds. It confirmed what I had writ-

CHICKAMAUGA. 73

ten in Florida, that the two songs are much
alike ; but it was a sharp lesson in caution.
When a prudent man finds himself thus be-
fooled, he begins to wonder how it may be
with the remainder of that precious body of
notions, inherited and acquired, to which, in
all but his least complacent moods, he has
been accustomed to give the name of know-
ledge.

Here was a lesson, also, in the close rela-
tion that everywhere subsists between the
distribution of plants and the distribution
of animals. These were the only yellow
pines noticed in the neighborhood of Chat-
tanooga ; and in them, and nowhere else, I
found two birds of the Southern pine-bar-
rens, the red-cockaded woodpecker and the
yellow-throated warbler.

At the base of the tower, when I finally
descended, I paused a moment to look at
a cluster of graves, eight or ten in all, un-
marked save by a flagging of small stones ;
one of those family or neighborhood burying-
grounds, the occupants of which — happier
than most of us, who must lie in crowded
cities of the dead — repose in decent pri-
vacy, surrounded by their own, with no

74 CHICKAMAUGA.

ugly staring white slabs to publish their im-
memorable names to every passer-by.

From the hill it was but a few steps to
the Snodgrass house, where a woman stood
in the yard with a young girl, and answered
all my inquiries with cheerful and easy po-
liteness. None of the Snodgrass family
now occupied the house, she said, though one
of the daughters still lived just outside the
reservation. The woman had heard her de-
scribe the terrible scenes on the days of the
battle. The operating-table stood under this
tree, and just there was a trench into which
the amputated limbs were thrown. Yonder
field, now grassy, was then planted with
corn; and when the Federal troops were
driven through it, they trod upon their own
wounded, who begged piteously for water
and assistance. A large tree in front of the
house was famous, the woman said ; and
certainly it was well hacked. A picture of
it had been in "The Century." General
Thomas was said to have rested under it ;
but an officer who had been there not long
before to set up a granite monument near
the gate told her that General Thomas
didn't rest under that tree, nor anywhere

CHICKAMAUGA. 75

else. Two things he did, past all dispute :
he saved the Federal army from destruc-
tion and made the SnodgAss farmhouse an
American shrine.

When our talk was ended I returned to
the hill, and thence sauntered through the
woods — the yellow-throated warblers sing-
ing all about me in the pine-tops — down to
the vicinity of the railroad. Here, finding
myself in the sun again, I made toward a
shop near the station, — shop and post-office
in one, — where fortunately there were such
edibles, semi-edibles, as are generally to be
looked for in country groceries. Meanwhile
there came on a Tennessee thunder shower,
lightning of the closest and rain by the
bucketful ; and, driven before it, an Indiana
soldier made his appearance, a wiry little
man of fifty or more. He had been spend-
ing the day on the field, he told me. In
one hand he carried a battered and rusty
cartridge-box, and out of his pockets he pro-
duced and laid on the counter a collection of
bullets. His were relics of the right stamp,
— found, not purchased, — and not without
a little shamefacedness I showed him my
three minie-balls. "Oh, you have got all

76 CHICKAMAUGA.

Federal bullets," lie said ; and on my asking
how he could tell that, he placed a Confed-
erate ball beside them, and pointed out a
difference in shape. He was a cheery, com-
municative body, good-humored but not
jocose, excellent company in such an hour,
though he had small fancy for the lightning,
it seemed to me. Perhaps he had been
under fire so often as to have lost all relish
for excitement of that kind. He was not at
the battle of Chickamauga, he said, but at
Vicksburg ; and he gave me a vivid descrip-
tion of his work in the trenches, as well as
of the surrender, and the happiness of the
half -starved defenders of the city, who were
at once fed by their captors.

All his talk showed a lively sense of the
horrors of war. He had seen enough of
fighting, he confessed ; but he could n't keep
away from a battlefield, if he came anywhere
near one. He had been to the national
cemetery in Chattanooga, and agreed with
me that it was a beautiful place ; but he had
heard that Southern soldiers were lying in
unmarked graves just outside the wall (a
piece of misinformation, I have no doubt),
and he did n't think it right or decent for

CHICKAMAUOA. 77

the government to discriminate in that way.
The Confederates were just as sincere as the
Union men ; and anyhow, vengeance ought
not to follow a man after he was dead.
Evidently he had fought against an army
and a cause, not against individuals.

When the rain was over, or substantially
so, I proposed to improve an hour of cool-
ness and freshness by paying another visit
to headquarters ; but my Indiana veteran
was not to be enticed out of shelter. It was
still rather wet, he thought. " I 'm pretty
careful of my body," he added, by way of
settling the matter. It had been through
so much, I suppose, that he esteemed it
precious.

I set out alone, therefore, and this time
went into the Dyer house, after drinking
from a covered spring across the way. But
there was little to see inside, and the three
or four officers and clerks were occupied
with maps and charts, — courteous, no doubt,
but with official and counting-house courtesy ;
men of whom you could well enough ask a
definite question, but with whom it would be
impossible to drift into random talk. There
was far better company outside. Even while

78 CHICEAMAUGA.

I stood in the back door, on my way thither,
there suddenly flashed upon me from a tree-
top by the fence a splendid Baltimore oriole.
He fairly "gave me a start," and I broke
out to the young fellow beside me, " Why,
there 's a Baltimore oriole I " The exclama-
tion was thrown away, but I did not mind.

It was the birds' own hour, — late after-
noon, with sunshine after rain. The or-
chard and shade-trees were alive with wings,
and the air was loud. How brilliant a com-
pany it was a list of names will show: a
mocking-bird, a thrasher, several catbirds, a
pair of bluebirds, a pair of orchard orioles,
a summer tanager, a wood pewee, and a
flicker, with goldfinches and indigo-birds,
and behind the orchard a Bachman finch.
For bright colors and fine voices that was a
chorus hard to beat. As for the Baltimore
oriole, the brightest bird of the lot, and the
only one of his race that I found in all that
country, he looked most uncommonly at
home — to me — in the John Dyer trees.
I was never gladder to see him.

A strange fate this that had befallen these
Georgia farms, owned once by Dyer, Snod-
grass, Kelly, Brotherton, and the rest : the

CHICKAMAUGA. 79

plainest and most ordinary of country Louses,
in which lived the plainest of country people,
with no dream of fame, or of much else, per-
haps, beyond the day's work and the day's
ration. Then comes Bragg retreating before
Kosecrans, who is manoeuvring him out of
Tennessee. Here the Confederate leader
turns upon his pursuers. Here he — or ra-
ther, one of his subordinates — wins a great
victory, which nevertheless, as a Southern
historian says, " sealed the fate of the
Southern Confederacy." Now the farmers
are gone, but their names remain; and as
long as the national government endures,
pilgrims from far and near will come to
walk over the historic acres. " This is the
Dyer house," they will say, "and this is
the Kelly house, and this is the Snodgrass
house." So Fame catches up a chance
favorite, and consigns the rest to oblivion.

My first visit to Chickamauga left so
pleasant a taste that only two days afterward
I repeated it. In particular I remembered
my midday rest among the treetops, and my
glimpse of the blue-winged warbler. It
would be worth a day of my vacation to idle
away another noon so agreeably, and hear

80 CHICKAMAUGA.

again that ridiculous makeshift of a bird-
song. Field ornithology has this for one
of its distinguishing advantages, that every
excursion leaves something for another to
verify or finish.

This time I went straight to Snodgrass
Hill through the woods, and was barely on
the steps of the tower before I heard the
blue-wing. As well as I could judge, the
voice came from the same oak that the bird
had occupied two days before. I was in
luck, I thought; but the miserly fellow
vouchsafed not another note, and I could
not spend the forenoon hours in waiting for
him. Two red-cockaded woodpeckers were
playing among the trees, where, like the blue-
wing and the yellow-throats, they were doubt-
less established in summer quarters. " Sap-
suckers," one of the workmen called them.
They were common, he said, but likely
enough he failed to discriminate between
them and their two black-and-white relatives.
Red-headed woodpeckers were not common
here (I had seen a single bird, displaying its
colors from a lofty dead pine), but were
abundant and very destructive, so my
informant declared, on Lookout Mountain.

CHICKAMAUGA. 81

Turkeys were still numerous on the moun-
tain, and only the Sunday before one had
been seen within the park limits.

The Bachman finch was again in tune at
his brush-heap near the well, and between
the music and a shady seat I was in no haste
to go further. Finally, I experimented to
see how near the fellow would let me ap-
proach, taking time enough not to startle
him in the process. It was wonderful how
he held his ground. The " Eock of Chicka-
mauga " himself could not have been more
obstinate. I had almost to tread on him be-
fore he would fly. He was a great singer,
a genius, and a poet,

" with modest looks.
And clad in homely russet brown,"

and withal a lover of the sun, — a bird never
to be forgotten. I wish I knew how to
praise him.

To-day, as on my previous visit, I re-
marked a surprising scarcity of migrants.
With the exception of black-poll warblers,
I am not certain that I saw any, though I
went nowhere else without finding them in
good variety. Had my imagination been
equal to such a stretch, I might have sus-

82 CHICKAMAUGA.

pected that Northern birds did not feel at
home on the scene of a great Southern vic-
tory. Here and there a nuthatch called,
and again I seemed to perceive a decided
strangeness in the voice. From the tip of a
fruit-tree in the Kelly yard a thrasher or a
mocker was singing like one possessed. It
was impossible to be sure which it was, and
the uncertainty pleased me so much, as a
testimony to the thrasher's musical powers,
that I would not go round the house in the
sun to get a nearer observation. Instead, I
went down to look at the monuments of the
regulars, with their "men cut in a rock."
Thence I returned to Snodgrass Hill for my
noonday rest, stopping once more at the
well, of course, and reading again some of
the placards, the number of which just here
bore impressive witness to the fierceness of
the battle at this point. One inscription I
took pains to copy : —

EN. J. B. HOOD WAS WOUNDED
11.10 A. M. 20 SEPT. '63 IN EDGE
OF TIMBER ON COVE ROAD i MILE
EAST OP SOUTH, LOOSING HIS LEG.

It was exactly eleven o'clock as I went up
the hill toward the tower, and the workmen

CHICKAMAUGA. 83

were already taking down their dinner-pails.
Standard time, so called, is an unquestioned
convenience, but the stomach of a day-
laborer has little respect for convention, and
is not to be appeased by a setting back of
the clock. For my own part, I was not
hungry, — in that respect, as in some others,
I might have envied the day-laborers, —
but as men of a certain amusing sort are
said to turn up their trousers in New York
when it rains in London, so I felt it patri-
otic to nibble at my luncheon as best I
could, now that the clocks were striking
twelve in Boston.

The hour (but it was two hours) calls for
little description. The breeze was delicious,
and the hazy landscape beautiful. The cow-
bells and the locusts filled the air with mu-
sic, the birds kept me company, and for half
an hour or more I had human society that
was even more agreeable. When the work-
men had eaten their dinner at the foot of
the tower, four of them climbed the stairs,
and my field-glass proved so pleasing a
novelty that they stayed till their time was
up, to the very last minute. One after an-
other took the glass, and no sooner had it

84 CHICEAMAUaA.

gone the rounds once than it started again ;
for meanwhile every man had thought of
something else that he wanted to look at.
They were above concealing their delight,
or affecting any previous acquaintance with
such a toy, and probably I never before
gave so much pleasure by so easy a means.
I believe I was as happy as if the blue-wing
had sung a full hour. They were rough-
looking men, perhaps, at least they were
coarsely dressed, but none of them spoke
a rude word; and when the last moment
came, one of them, in the simplest and gen-
tlest manner, asked me to accept three relics
(bullets) which he had picked up in the
last day or two on the hill. It was no great
thing, to be sure, but it was better : it was
one of those little acts which, from their
perfect and unexpected grace, can never be
forgotten.

A jaunt through the woods past the Kelly
house, after luncheon, brought me to a
superfine, spick-and-span new road, — like
the new government " boulevard " on Mis-
sionary Ridge, of which it may be a con-
tinuation, — following which I came to the
Brotherton house, another war-time land-

CHICKAMAUGA. 85

mark, weather-beaten and fast going to ruin.
In the woods — cleared of underbrush, and
with little herbage — were scattered ground
flowers : houstonia, yellow and violet oxalis,
phlox, cranesbill, bird-foot violets, rue ane-
mones, and spring beauties. I remarked
especially a bit of bright gromwell, such as
I had found first at Orchard Knob, and a
single tuft of white American cowslip (Z)o-
decatheoTi), the only specimen I had ever
seen growing wild. The flower that pleased
me most, however, was the blood-red catch-
fly, which I had seen first on Missionary
Eidge. Nothing could have been more ap-
propriate here on the bloody field of Chick-
amauga. Appealing to fancy instead of
to fact, it nevertheless spoke of the battle
almost as plainly as the hundreds of decapi-
tated trees, here one and there one, which
even the most careless observer could not
fail to notice.

From the Brotherton house to the post-
office was a sunny stretch, but under the
protection of my umbrella I compassed it ;
and then, passing the Widow Glenn's
(Eosecrans's headquarters), on the road to
Crawfish Springs, I came to a diminutive

86 CHICKAMAUGA.

body of water, — a sink-hole, — which I
knew at once could be nothing but Bloody
Pond. At the time of the fight it contained
the only water to be had for a long distance.
It was fiercely contended for, therefore, and
men and horses drank from it greedily,
while other men and horses lay dead in it,
having dropped while drinking. Now a
fence runs through it^leaving an outer seg-
ment of it open to the road for the conven-
ience of passing teams ; and when I came in
sight of the spot, two boys were fishing
round the further edge. Not far beyond
was an unfinished granite tower, on which
no one was at work, though a derrick still
protruded from the top. It offered the best
of shade, — the shadow of a great rock, —
in the comfort of which I sat awhile, think-
ing of the past, and watching the peaceful
labors of two or three men who were culti-
vating a broad ploughed field directly before
me, crossing and recrossing it in the sun.
Then I took the road again; but by this
time I had relinquished all thought of walk-
ing to Crawfish Springs, and so did nothing
but idle along. Once, I remember, I turned
aside to explore a lane running up to a hill-

CHICKAMAUGA. 87

side cattle pasture, stopping by the way to
admire the activities — and they were ac-
tivities — of a set of big scavenger beetles.
Next, I tried for half a mile a fine new road
leading across the park to the left, with
thick, uncleared woods on one side ; and
then I went back to Bloody Pond.

The place was now deserted, and I took
a seat under a tree opposite. Prodigious
bullfrogs, big enough to have been growing
ever since the war, lay here and there upon
the water ; now calling in the lustiest bass,
now falling silent again after one comical
expiring gulp. It was getting toward the
cool of the afternoon. Already the birds
felt it. A wood thrush's voice rang out
at intervals from somewhere beyond the
ploughed land, and a field sparrow chanted
nearer by. At the same time my eye was
upon a pair of kingbirds, — wayfarers here-
about, to judge from their behavior ; a
crested flycatcher stood guard at the top of
a lofty dead tree, and a rough-winged swal-
low alighted on the margin of the pool, and
began bathing with great enjoyment. It
made me comfortable to look at him. By
and by two young fellows with fishing-poles
came down the railroad.

88 CHICKAMAUGA.

" Why is this caUed Bloody Pond ? " I
asked.

"Why?"

"Yes."

" Why, there were a lot of soldiers killed
here in the war, and the pond got bloody."

The granite tower in the shadow of which
I had rested awhile ago was General
Wilder's monument, they said. His head-
quarters were there. Then they passed on
down the track out of sight, and all was
silent once more, till a chickadee gave out
his sweet and quiet song just behind me, and
a second swallow dropped upon the water's
edge. The pond was of the smallest and
meanest, — muddy shore, muddy bottom,
and muddy water; but men fought and
died for it in those awful September days
of heat and dust and thirst. There was no
better place on the field, perhaps, in which
to realize the horrors of the battle, and I
was glad to have the chickadee's voice the
last sound in my ears as I turned away.

ORCHARD KNOB AND THE NATIONAL
CEMETERY.

THE street cars that run through the open
valley country from Chattanooga to Mission-
ary Ridge, pass between two places of pecu-
liar interest to Northern visitors, — Orchard
Knob on the left, and the national cemetery
on the right. Of these, the Knob remains
in all the desolation of war-time ; unfenced,
and without so much as a tablet to inform
the stranger where he is and what was done
here ; a low, round-topped hill, dry, stony,
thin-soiled, with out-cropping ledges and
a sprinkling of stunted cedars and pines.
Some remains of rifle-pits are its only mon-
ument, unless we reckon as such a cedar
rather larger than its fellows, which must
have been of some size thirty years ago, and
now bears the marks of abundant hard usage.

The hill was taken by the Federal troops
on the 23d of November, 1863, by way of
" overture to the battle of Chattanooga,"
Grant, Thomas, Hooker, Granger, Howard,

90 OECHAED KNOB.

and others overlooking the engagement from
the ramparts of Fort Wood. The next day,
as all the world knows, Hooker's men carried
Lookout Mountain, while the multitude be-
low, hearing the commotion, wondered what
could be going on above them, till suddenly
the clouds lifted, and behold, the Confeder-
ates were in full flight. Then, says an eye-
witness, there " went up a mighty cheer from
the thirty thousand in the valley, that was
heard above the battle by their comrades on
the mountain." On the day following, for
events followed each other fast in that spec-
tacular campaign, Grant and Thomas had
established themselves on Orchard Knob,
and late in the afternoon the Union army,
exceeding its orders, stormed Missionary
Kidge, put the army of Bragg to sudden
rout, and completed one of the really deci-
sive victories of the war.

For a man who wishes to feel the memory
of that stirring time there is no better place
than Orchard Knob, where Grant stood and
anxiously watched the course of the battle,
a battle of which he declared that it was
won " under the most trying circumstances
presented during the war." For my own

ORCHARD KNOB. 91

part, I can see the man himself as I read the
words of one who was there with him. The
stormers of Missionary Kidge, as I have
said, after making the demonstration they
had been ordered to make, kept on up the
slope, thinking " the time had come to finish
the battle of Chickamauga." " As soon as
this movement was seen from Orchard
Knob," writes General Fullerton, " Grant
turned quickly to Thomas, who stood by his
side, and I heard him say angrily, ; Thomas,
who ordered those men up the ridge?'
Thomas replied in his usual slow, quiet man-
ner, 4 1 don't know; I did not.' Then, ad-
dressing General Gordon Granger, he said,
4 Did you order them up, Granger ? ' * No,'
said Granger ; ' they started up without
orders. When those fellows get started all
hell can't stop them.' " In the heat of battle
a soldier may be pardoned, I suppose, if his
speech smells of sulphur ; and after the event
an army is hardly to be censured for beating
the enemy a day ahead of time. I speak as
a civilian. Military men, no doubt, find in-
subordination, even on the right side, a less
pardonable offense ; a fact which may ex-
plain why General Grant, in his history of

92 ORCHARD KNOB.

the battle, written many years afterward,
makes no mention of this its most dramatic
incident, so that the reader of his narrative
would never divine but that everything had
been done according to the plans and orders
of the general in command.

Orders or no orders, the fight was won.
That was more than thirty years ago. It
was now a pleasant May afternoon, the
afternoon of May-day itself. The date, in-
deed, was the immediate occasion of my
presence. I had started from Chattanooga
with the intention of going once more to
Missionary Ridge, which just now offered
peculiar attractions to a stranger of ornitho-
logical proclivities. But the car was full
of laughing, smartly dressed colored people ;
they were bound for the same place, it ap-
peared, on their annual picnic ; and, being
in a quiet mood, I took the hint and dropped
out by the way.

There was much to feel but little to see at
Orchard Knob ; and yet I recall two plants
that I found there for the first time ; a low
gromwell (Lithospermum canescens), with
clustered bright yellow flowers, and an odd
and homely greenish milkweed (Asdepias

OECHAED KNOB. 93

obovata). The yarrow-leaved ragwort was
there also, and the tall blue baptisia ; but
as well as I can recollect, not one dainty
and modest nosegay-blossom ; not even the
houstonia, which seemed to grow everywhere,
though after a strangely sparse and depau-
perate fashion. As I said to begin with, the
Knob is a desolate place. It made me think
of the Scriptural phrase about " the besom
of destruction." I can imagine that mourn-
ers of the " Lost Cause," if such there still
be, might see upon it the signs of a place
accursed.

Far otherwise is it with the national cem-
etery. That is a spot of which the nation
takes care. Here are shaven lawns, which,
nevertheless, you are permitted to walk over ;
and shrubbery and trees, both in grateful
profusion, but not planted so thickly as to
make the inclosure either a wood or a gar-
den ; and where the ledge crops out, it is
pleasingly and naturally draped with vines
of the Virginia creeper. One thing I no-
ticed upon the instant ; there were no Eng-
lish sparrows inside the wall. The city is
overrun with them beyond anything I have
seen elsewhere ; within two hundred feet of

94 OECHAED KNOB.

the cemetery gate, as I passed out, there
were at least two hundred sparrows ; but
inside, on three visits, I saw not one ! How
this exemption had been brought about, I
did not learn ; but it makes of the cemetery
a sort of heavenly place. I felt the silence
as the sweetest of music (it was a Sunday
afternoon), and thought instantly of Comus
and his " prisoned soul " lapped in Elysium.
If I knew whom to thank, I would name
him.

A mocking-bird, aloft upon the topmost
twig of a tall willow near the entrance, was
pouring forth a characteristic medley, in the
midst of which he suddenly called wick-a-
wick, wich-a-wick, in the flicker's very happi-
est style. " So flickers must now and then
come to Chattanooga," I said to myself, for
up to that time I had seen none. It was
a pleasure to hear this great songster of
the South singing above these thousands of
Northern graves. It seemed right ; for time
and the event will prove, if, indeed, they
have not proved already, that the South,
even more than the North, has reason to be
glad of the victory which these deaths went
far to win.

OECHARD KNOB. 95

A tablet on one of the cannons which
stand upright on the highest knoll informs
visitors that the cemetery was " established "
in 1863. The number of burials is given as
12,876, of which nearly five thousand are of
bodies unidentified. A great proportion of
the stones bear nothing but a number. On
others is a name, or part of a name, with
the name of the State underneath. One I
noticed that was inscribed : —

JOHN

N. Y.

An attendant of whom I inquired if any
New England men were here, answered that
there were a few members of the Thirty-
third Massachusetts. I hope the New Eng-
landers resident in Chattanooga do not for-
get them on Memorial Day.

Twice in the year, at least, the place has
many Northern visitors. They arrive on
wings, mostly by night, and such of them as
came under my eye acted as if they appreci-
ated the quiet of the inclosure, a quiet which
their own presence made but the more ap-
preciable. Scattered over the lawns were
silent groups of white-throated sparrows, —

96 ORCHARD KNOB.

on their way to New Hampshire, perhaps, or
it might be to upper Michigan ; and not far
from the entrance, and almost directly under
the mocking-bird, were two or three white-
crowned sparrows, the only ones found in
Tennessee. On an earlier visit (April 29)
I saw here my only Tennessee robins —
five birds ; and most welcome they were.
Months afterward, a resident of Missionary
Ridge wrote to me that a pair had nested in
the cemetery that year, though to his great
regret he did not know of it till too late.
He had never seen a robin's nest, he added,
and was acquainted with the bird only as a
migrant. Such are some of the deprivations
of life in eastern Tennessee. May and June
without robins or song sparrows !

On the last of my three visits, a small
flock of black-poll warblers were in the trees,
and two of them gave me a pleasant little
surprise by dropping to the ground, and
feeding for a long time upon the lawn.
That was something new for black-polls, so
far as my observation had gone, and an en-
couraging thing to look at: another sign,
where all signs are welcome, that the life of
birds is less strictly instinctive — less a mat-

OECHAED KNOB. 97

ter of inherited habit, and more a matter of
personal intelligence — than has commonly
been assumed. In general, no doubt, like
human beings, they do what their fathers
did, what they themselves have done here-
tofore. So much is to be expected, since
their faculties and desires remain the same,
and they have the same world to live in ;
but when exceptional circumstances arise,
their conduct becomes exceptional. In other
words, they do as a few of the quicker-
witted among men do — suit their conduct
to altered conditions. A month ago I should
have said, after years of acquaintance, that
no birds could be more strictly arboreal than
golden-crowned kinglets. But recently, I
happened upon a little group of them that
for a week or more fed persistently on the
ground in a certain piece of wood. Then
and there, for some reason, food was plenti-
ful on the snow and among the dead leaves ;
and the kinglets had no scruples about fol-
lowing where duty called them.

At the same time a friend of mine, a
young farmer, was at his winter's work in
the woods ; and being alone, and a lover of
birds, he had taken a fancy to experiment

98 OBCHAKD KNOB.

with a few chickadees, to see how tame a
little encouragement would make them. A
flock of five came about him day after day,
at luncheon-time, and by dint of sitting
motionless he soon had two of them on terms
of something like intimacy ; so that they
would alight on his hand and help them-
selves to a feast. He was not long in discov-
ering, and reporting to me, that they carried
much of the food to the trees round about,
and packed it into crannies of the bark.

"Are you sure of that ? " I asked.

" Oh, yes," he answered ; " I saw them do
it, and then I went to the trees and found
the crumbs."

Did any one ever suspect the chickadee of
such providence ? If so, I never heard of it;
and it is more likely, I think, that the birds
had never before done anything of the sort ;
but now, finding suddenly a supply far in
excess of the demand (one day they ate and
carried away half a doughnut), they had
sense enough to improve the opportunity.
What they had done, or had not done, in
times past, was nothing to the point, since
they were creatures not of memory alone,
but of intelligence and a measure of reason.

ORCHAED KNOB. 99

Beside the unmistakable migrants, —
white-throats, white-crowns, and black-polls,
— there were numbers of more southern
birds in the national cemetery. Among
them I noticed a yellow-billed cuckoo, crow
blackbirds, orchard orioles, summer tanagers,
catbirds, a thrasher, a bluebird, wood pewees,
chippers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, yellow war-
blers, wood thrushes, and chats. All these
looked sufficiently at home except the chats ;
and it helps to mark the exceeding abun-
dance of these last in the Chattanooga region
that they should show themselves without
reserve in a spot so frequented and so want-
ing in close cover. One of the orioles sang
in the manner of a fox sparrow, while one
that sang daily under my window, on Cam-
eron Hill, never once suggested that bird,
but often the purple finch. The two facts
offer a good idea of this fine songster's qual-
ity and versatility. The organ tones of the
yellow-throated vireo and the minor whistle
of the wood pewee were sweetly in harmony
with the spirit of the place, a spirit hard
fully and exactly to express, a mingling of
regret and exultation. What mattered it
that all these men had perished, as it seemed,

100 ORCHARD KNOB.

before their time ? — that so many of them
were lying in nameless graves ? We shall
all die ; few of us so worthily ; and when
we are gone, of what use will be a name
upon a stone, a name which, after a few
years at the most, no passer-by will be con-
cerned to read ? Happy is he who dies to
some purpose. It would have been good, I
thought, to see over the cemetery gate the
brave old Latin sentence, Dulce et decorum
est pro patria mori.

The human visitors, of whom one day
there might have been a hundred, were
largely people of color. All were quiet
and orderly, in couples and family groups.
Most of them, I remarked, went to look at
the only striking monument in the grounds,
a locomotive and tender (the " General " )
on a pedestal of marble — "Ohio's Trib-
ute to the Andrews Eaiders, 1862." On
three faces of the pedestal are lists of the
" exchanged," the " executed," and the
" escaped."

One thing, one only, grated upon my feel-
ings. In a corner of the inclosure is the
Superintendent's house, with a stable and
out-buildings ; and at the gate the visitor is

ORCHARD KNOB. 101

suddenly struck in the face with this notice
in flaring capitals: KEEP OUT! THIS
MEANS You ! That is brutality beyond ex-
cuse. But perhaps it answers its purpose.
For my own part, I got out of the neighbor-
hood as quickly as possible. I liked better
the society of the graves ; at such a price a
dead soldier was better than a live superin-
tendent; and to take the unpleasant taste
out of my mouth I stopped to read again a
stanza on one of the metal tablets set at in-
tervals along the driveway : —

" On Fame's eternal camping ground

Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead."

Far be the day when these Southern fields
of Northern graves shall fall into forgetful-
ness and neglect.

AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVER.

To an idler desirous of seeing wild life on
easy terms Chattanooga offers this advan-
tage, that electric cars take him quickly out
of the city in different directions, and drop
him in the woods. In this way, on an after-
noon too sultry for extended travel on foot,
I visited a wooded hillside on the further
bank of the Tennessee, a few miles above
the town.

The car was still turning street corner
after street corner, making its zigzag course
toward the bridge, when I noticed a rustic
old gentleman at my side looking intently
at the floor. Apparently he suspected some-
thing amiss. He was unused to the ways
of electricity, I thought, — a verdancy by no
means inexcusable. But as he leaned far-
ther forward, and looked and listened with
more and more absorption, the matter — not
his ignorance, but his simple-hearted betrayal
of it — began to seem amusing. For myself,
to be sure, I knew nothing about electricity,

AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVER. 103

but I had wit enough to sit still and let the
car run; a degree of sophistication which
passes pretty well as a substitute for wisdom
in a world where men are distinguished from
children not so much by more knowledge as
by less curiosity. In the present instance,
however, as the event proved, the dunce's
cap belonged on the other head. My coun-
tryman's stare was less verdant than his
next neighbor's smile ; for in a few minutes
the conductor was taking up a trap door at
our feet, to get at the works, some part of
which had fallen out of gear, though they
were still running. Twice the car was
stopped for a better examination into the dif-
ficulty, and at last a new wedge, or some-
thing else, was inserted, and we proceeded
on our way, while the motorman who had
done the job busied himself with removing
from his coat, as best he could, the oil with
which it had become besmeared in the course
of the operation. It was rather hard, he
thought, to have to spoil his clothes in re-
pair-shop work of that kind, especially as he
was paid nothing for it, and had to find
himself. As for my rustic-looking seat-mate,
he was an old hand at the business, it ap-

104 AN AFTERNOON BY THE EIVEE.

peared, and his practiced ear Lad detected a
jar in the machinery.

We left the car in company, he 'and I,
at the end of the route, and pretty soon it
transpired that he was an old Union soldier,
of Massachusetts parentage, but born in Can-
ada and a member of a Michigan regiment.
Just how these autobiographical details came
to be mentioned I fail now to remember,
but in that country, where so much history
had been made, it was hard to keep the past
out of one's conversation. He had been in
Sheridan's force when it stormed Missionary
Kidge. As they went up the heights, he
said, they were between two fires ; as much
in danger from Federal bullets as from Con-
federate; "but Sheridan kept right on."
An old woman who lived on the Eidge told
him that she asked General Bragg if the
Yankees would take the hill. "Take the
hiU ! " said Bragg ; " they could as well fly."
Just then she saw the blue-coats coming,
and pointed them out to the General. He
looked at them, put spurs to his horse,
" and," added the woman, " I ain't seen him
since." All of which, for aught I know,
may be true.

AN AFTEENOON BY THE EIVEE. 105

The talkative veteran was now on his way
to find an old friend of his who lived some-
where around here, he did n't know just
where; and as my course lay in the same
general direction we went across lots and up
the hill together, he rehearsing the past,
and I gladly putting myself to school. In
my time history was studied from text-books ;
but the lecture system is better. By and
by we approached a solitary cabin, on the
dilapidated piazza of which sat the very
man for whom my companion was looking.
"Very sick to-day," he said, in response
to a greeting. His appearance harmonized
with his words, — and with the piazza ; and
his manners were pitched on the same key ;
so that it was in a downright surly tone that
he pointed out a gate through which I could
make an exit toward the woods on the other
side of the house. I had asked the way,
and was glad to take it. Not that I was
greatly offended. A sick man on one of his
bad days has some excuse for a little impa-
tience; a far better excuse than I should
have for alluding to the matter at this late
date, if I did not improve the occasion to
add that this was the only bit of anything

106 AN AFTEENOON BY THE RIVER.

like incivility that I have ever received at
the South, where I have certainly not been
slow to ask questions of all sorts of people.

A little jaunt along a foot-path brought
me unexpectedly to a second cabin, unin-
habited. It was built of boards, not logs,
with the usual outside chimney at one end,
a broad veranda, a door, and no window ; a
house to fill a social economist with admira-
tion at the low terms to which civilized life
can be reduced. Thoreau himself was out-
done, though the veranda, it must be con-
fessed, seemed a dispensable bit of fashion-
able conformity, with forest trees on all
sides crowding the roof. Half the floor had
fallen away ; yet the house could not have
been long unoccupied, for at one end the
wall was hung with newspapers, among
which was a Boston " weekly " less than two
years old. From it looked the portrait of a
New England college president, and at the
head of the page stood a list of " eminent
contributors." I ran the names over, but
somehow, in these wild and natural sur-
roundings, they did not seem so very impres-
sive. I think it has been said before, per-
haps by Thoreau, that most of what we call

AN AFTERNOON BY THE EIVEE. 107

literature wears an artificial and unimpor-
tant look when taken out-of-doors.

Near this cabin I struck a road ("a
sort of road," according to my note-
book) through the woods, following which I
shortly came to a grave-yard, or rather to a
bunch of graves, for there was no inclosure,
nor even a clearing. One grave — or it
may have been a tiny family lot — was sur-
rounded by a curb of stone. The others,
with a single exception, were marked only
by low mounds of gravel. The one excep-
tion was a grave with a head-board, — the
grave of " Little Theodosia," a year and
some months old. " Theodosia ! " — even
into a windowless cabin a baby brings ro-
mance. Under the name and the two dates
was this legend : " She is happy." Of ten
inscriptions on marble monuments nine will
be found less simply appropriate.

By a circuitous course the wood road
brought me to a larger cabin, in a larger
clearing. Here a pleasant-spoken, neigh-
borly woman, with a child in her arms,
called off her dog, and pointed out a path
beyond a pair of bars. That path, she
said, would carry me to the river, — to the

108 AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVEE.

water's edge. And so it did, down a pleas-
ant wooded hillside, which an unwonted
profusion of bushes and ferns made excep-
tionally attractive. At the end of the path
a lordly elm and a lordlier buttonwood, both
of them loaded with lusty vines (besides
clusters of mistletoe, I believe), gave me
shelter from the sun while I sat and gazed
at the strong eager current of the Tennessee
hurrying onward without a ripple. As my
foot touched the beach a duck — I could
not tell of what kind — sprang out of the
water and went dashing off. She had
learned her lesson. In the duck's primer
one of the first questions is : " What is a
man ? " and the answer follows : " Man is
a gun-bearing animal." In the treetops a
golden warbler and a redstart were singing.
Then I heard a puffing of steam, and by and
by a tug came round a turn, pushing labori-
ously up stream a loaded barge. It was the
Ocoee of Chattanooga, and the two or three
mariners on board seemed to find the sight
of a stranger in that unlooked-for place a
welcome break in the monotony of their in-
land voyage.

On the bushy, ferny slope, as I returned,

AN AFTEENOON BY THE EIVEE. 109

two Kentucky warblers were singing in op-
posite directions. So I called them, at all
events. But they were too far away to be
gone after, as my mood then was, and soon
I began to wonder whether I might not be
mistaken. Possibly they were Carolina
wrens, whose cherry is not altogether unlike
the Kentucky's Idurwee. The question
will perhaps seem unreasonable to readers
long familiar with the two birds ; but let
them put themselves in a stranger's place,
remembering that this was only his third
or fourth hearing of the Kentucky's music.
As the doubt grew on me (and nothing
grows faster than doubt) I sat down and
listened. Yes, they were Kentuckies ; but
anon the uncertainty came back, and I kept
my seat. Then a sound of humming-bird
wings interrupted my cogitations, and in
another moment the bird was before me,
sipping at a scarlet catchfly, — battlefield
pink. I caught the flash of his throat. It
was as red as the flower — beyond which
there is nothing to be said. Then he van-
ished (rather than went away), as humming-
birds do ; but in ten minutes he was there
again. I was glad to see him. Birds of his

110 AN AFTERNOON BY THE EIVER.

kind were rare about Chattanooga, though
afterwards, in the forests of Walden's Ridge,
they became as common as I ever saw them
anywhere. The two invisible Kentuckies
wore out my patience, but as I came to the
bars another sang near me. Him, by good
luck, I saw in the act, and for the time, at
least, my doubts were quieted.

In the woods and thickets, as I sauntered
along, I heard blue golden-winged warblers,
two more Kentuckies, a blue-gray gnat-
catcher, a Bachman's finch, a wood pewee, a
quail, and the inevitable chats, indigo-birds,
prairie warblers, and white -eyed vireos.
Then, as I drew near the car track, I de-
scended again to the river-bank and walked
in the shade of lofty buttonwoods, willows,
and white maples, with mistletoe perched in
the upper branches, and poison ivy climbing
far up the trunks ; the whole standing in
great contrast to the comparatively stunted
growth, mainly oak, — and largely black
jack, — on the dry soil of the hillside.
Across the river were broad, level fields,
brown with cultivation, in which men were
at work, and from the same direction came
loud rasping cries of batrachians of some

AN AFTERNOON BY THE EIVEE. Ill

kind. For aught that my ear could detect,
they might be common toads uttering their
mysterious, discordant midsummer screams
in full chorus. Here were more indigo-birds,
with red-eyes, white-eyes, lisping black-poll
warblers, redstarts, a yellow-billed cuckoo
(furtive as ever, like a bird with an evil
conscience), catbirds, a thrasher, a veery in
song (a luxury in these parts), orchard ori-
oles, goldfinches, and chippers. A bluebird
was gathering straws, and a carrion crow,
one of two seen in Tennessee, was soaring
high over the river.

The "pavilion," at the terminus of the
car route, was deserted, and I sat on the
piazza enjoying the really beautiful prospect
— the river, the woods, and the cultivated
fields. The land hereabout was all in the
market. In truth, the selling of building
lots seemed to be one of the principal in-
dustries of Chattanooga ; and I was not
surprised to find the good-humored young
fellow behind the counter — with its usual
appetizing display of cigars, drinks, and
confectionery — full of the glories and im-
minent possibilities of this particular " sub-
urb." He believed in the river. Folks

112 AN AFTERNOON BY THE EIVER.

would come this way, where it was high and
cool. (On that particular afternoon, to be
sure, it was neither very high nor very
cool, but of course the weather isn't always
good anywhere.) " Lookout Mountain ain't
what it used to be," he said, in a burst of
confidence. " It 's done seen its best days.
Yes, sir, it 's done seen its best days." It
was not for a stranger, with no investment
in view, to take sides in such competitions
and rivalries. I believed in the river and
the mountain both, and hoped that both
would survive their present exploitation.
I liked his talk better when it turned upon
himself. Nothing is more exhilarating than
an honest bit of personal brag. He was
never sick, he told me. He knew nothing
of aches or pains. He could do anything
without getting tired. Save for his slavery
to the counter, he seemed almost as well off
as the birds.

A MOKNING IN THE NORTH WOODS.

THE electric car left me near the Ten-
nessee,— at " Kiverview," — and thence I
walked into the woods, meaning to make
a circuit among the hills, and at my con-
venience board an inward-bound car some-
where between that point and the city. The
weather was of the kind that birds love :
warm and still, after heavy showers, with
the sun now and then breaking through the
clouds. The country was a suburb in its
first estate : that is to say, a land company
had laid out miles of streets, but as yet there
were no houses, and the woods remained un-
harmed. That was a very comfortable stage
of the business to a man on my errand.
The roads gave the visitor convenience of
access, — a ready means of moving about
with his eyes in the air, — and at the same
time, by making the place more open, they
made it more birdy; for birds, even the
greater part of wood birds, like the borders
of a forest better than its darker recesses.

114 MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS.

One thing I soon perceived : the rain had
left the roads in a condition of unspeaka-
ble adhesiveness. The red clay balled up
my heels as if it had been moist snow, till
I pitched forward as I walked. I fancied
that I understood pretty well the sensations
of a young lady in high-heeled shoes. One
moment, too, my feet were weighted with
lead ; then the mass fell off in a sudden big
lump, and my next few steps were on air.
A graceful, steady, self-possessed gait was
out of the question. As for abstaining
from all appearance of evil — well, as
another and more comfortable Scripture
says, " There is a time for everything."
However, I was not disposed to complain.
We read much about the tribulations of
Northern soldiers on the march in Virginia,
— of entire armies mud-bound and helpless.
Henceforth I shall have some better idea of
what such statements mean. In that part
of the world, I am assured, rubber overshoes
have to be tied on the feet with strings.
Mother Earth does not believe in such
effeminacies, and takes it upon herself to
pull them off.

The seventeen-year locusts made the air

MOENING IN THE NOETH WOODS. 115

ring. Heard at the right distance, the
sound has a curious resemblance, noticed
again and again, to the far-away, barely
audible buzz of an electric car. For a week
the air of the valley woods had been full of
it. I wondered over it for a day or two,
with no suspicion of its origin. Then, as I
waited for a car at the base of Missionary
Ridge, a colored man who stood beside me
on the platform gave me, without meaning
it, a lesson in natural history.

" The locuses are goin' it, this mornin',
ain't they ? " he said.

" The locuses ? " I answered, in a tone of
inquiry.

" Yes. Don't you hear 'em ? "

He meant my mysterious universal hum,
it appeared. But even then I did not know
that he spoke of the big, red-eyed cicada
that I had picked off a fence a day or two
before and looked at for a moment with
ignorant curiosity. And even when, by
dint of using my own eyes, I learned so
much, I was still unaware that this cicada
was the famous seventeen-year locust. Here
in the north woods I more than once passed
near a swarm of the insects. At short range

116 MORNING IN THE NOETH WOODS.

the noise loses its musical character ; so that
it would be easy to hear it without divining
any connection between it and the grand
pervasive hum of the universal chorus.

One of the first birds at which I stopped
to look was a Kentucky warbler, walking
about the ground and pausing now and then
to sing ; one of six or seven seen and heard
during the forenoon. Few birds are more
freely and easily observed. I mean in open
woodlands with clear margins, such as I was
now exploring. In a mountain forest, where
they haunt brookside jungles of laurel and
rhododendron, the story is different, as a
matter of course. How it happens that the
same bird is equally at home in surroundings
so dissimilar is a question I make no attempt
to answer.

All the hill woods, mostly oak, were dry
and stony ; but after a while I came unex-
pectedly to a valley, a place of another sort ;
not moist, to be sure, but looking as if it
had been moist at some time or other ; and
with pleasant grassy openings and another
set of trees — red maples, persimmons, and
sweet -gums. Here was a fine bunch of
birds, including many migrants, and I went

MORNING IN THE NOETH WOODS. 117

softly hither and thither, scanning the
branches of one tree after another, as a note
or the stirring of a leaf attracted me, ready
every minute for the sight of something
new and wonderful. I found nothing, —
nothing new and wonderful, I mean, — but I
had alLthe exhilaration of the chase. In the
company, nearly all of them in song, were
wood thrushes, a silent palm warbler (red-
poll), a magnolia warbler, three Canadian
flycatchers, many black-polls, one or two
redstarts, a chestnut-sided warbler, a black-
and-white creeper, a field sparrow, a yellow-
throated vireo, a wood pewee, an Acadian
flycatcher, and two or more yellow-billed
cuckoos. The red-poll was of a very pale
complexion (but I assert nothing as to its
exact identity, specific or sub-specific), and
seemed to me unreasonably late. It was
the llth of May, and birds of its kind had
been passing through Massachusetts by the
middle of April. Chestnut-sides were scarce
enough to be interesting, and it was good
to hear this lover of berry fields and the
gray birch singing from a sweet-gum.

When at last I turned away from the
grassy glade, — where cattle were pasturing,

118 MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS.

as I now remember, — and went back among
the dry hills (through the powdery soil of
which the almost daily showers seemed to
run as through a sieve), I presently caught
sight of a scarlet tanager, — a beauty, and,
except on the mountains, a rarity. Then I
stopped — on a street corner ! — to admire
the singing of a Bachman's finch, wishing
also to compare his plumage with that of a
bird seen and greatly enjoyed a few days
before at Chickamauga. To judge from
my limited observation, this is one of the
sparrows — the song sparrow being another
— which exhibit a strange diversity of indi-
vidual coloration ; as if the fashion were
not yet fully set, or perhaps were being
outgrown. The bird here in the north
woods, so far as color and markings went,
might well enough have been of a different
species from that of the Chickamauga singer,
yet there was no reason to suspect the pres-
ence of more than one variety of Peuccea, so
far as I knew, and the music of the two
birds was precisely the same. A wonder-
fully sweet and various tune it is; with
sometimes a highly ventriloquial effect, as if
the different measures or phrases came from

MORNING IN THE NOETH WOODS. 119

different points. It opens like the song
heard in the Florida flat-woods, but is even
more varied, both in voice and in musical
form. So it seemed to me, I mean to say ;
but hearing the two a year apart, I cannot
speak without reserve. It is pleasanter —
as well as safer — to praise both singers than
to exalt one to the pulling down of the other.
In appearance, Bachman's finch is one of
the dullest, dingiest, least prepossessing
members of its great family ; but its voice
and musical genius make it a treasure,
especially in this comparatively sparrowless
country of eastern Tennessee.

I have remarked that I found this bird
upon a street corner. Unhappily my notes
do not enable me to be more specific. It
may have been at the corner of Court and
Tremont Streets, or, possibly, at the junction
of Tremont and Dartmouth Streets. All
these names appear in my memoranda.
Boston people should have had a hand in
this business, I said to myself. It was on
Federal Street (so much I put down) that
I saw my only Tennessee rose-breasted gros-
beak. He, or rather she, was the most
interesting bird of the forenoon, and matched

120 MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS.

the one Baltimore oriole seen at Chicka-
mauga. I heard the familiar click, as of
rusty shears, and straightway took chase.
For some minutes my search was in vain,
and once I feared I had been fooled. A bird
flew out of the right tree, as I thought, but
showed yellow, and the next moment set up
the clippiticlip call of the summer tanager.
Could that bird have also a note like the
rose -breast's? It was not impossible, of
course, for one does not exhaust the vocabu-
lary of a bird in a month's acquaintance ; but
I could not think it likely, thick as tanagers
had been about me ; and soon the click was
repeated, and this time I put my eye on its
author, — a feminine rose-breast. Perhaps it
was nothing more than an accident that she
was my only specimen ; but so showy a bird,
with so lovely a song and so distinctive a
signal, could hardly have escaped notice had
it been in any degree common.

Wood thrushes sang on all sides. They
had need to be abundant and free-hearted,
since they stand in that region for the whole
thrush family. Blue golden-winged war-
blers, too, were generously distributed, and,
as happens to me now and then in Massa-

MOENING IN THE NOETH WOODS. 121

chusetts, I found one with a song so absurdly
peculiar that I spent some time in making
sure of its author. It is to be hoped that
this tendency to individual variation will
persist *and increase in the case of this spe-
cies till something more melodious than its
present sibilant monotony is evolved; till
beauty and art are mated, as they ought to
be. Who would not love to hear the music
of all our birds a few millions of years
hence? What a singer the hermit thrush
will be, for example, when his tune is equal
to his voice ! Indigo-birds, white-eyed vireos
and prairie warblers abounded. As for the
chats, they saluted me on the right and on
the left, till I said, " Chats, Chattanooga,"
and felt almost as if Nature had perpetrated
a huge fantastic pun on her own account.
If I could have had the ear of the enterpris-
ing owners of this embryo suburb, — a syn-
dicate, I dare say they call themselves, —
I would have suggested to them to name it
"Chat City."

I wandered carelessly about, now following
a bird over a rounded hill (one, I remember,
was covered literally from end to end with
the common brake, — Pteris, — which will

122 MOENING IN THE NOETH WOODS.

give the reader an idea of its sterility), now
keeping to the road. In such a soil flowers
were naturally scarce; but I noticed hous-
tonia, phlox, hieracium, senecio, pentstemon,
and specularia. Like the brake, the names
are suggestive of barrenness. The senecio
(ragwort), a species with finely cut leaves
($. millefoliwri)) was first seen on Mission-
ary Kidge. There, as here, it had a strange,
misplaced appearance in my eyes, looking
much like our familiar 8. aureus, but grow-
ing in dry woods!

So the morning passed. The hours were
far too brief, and I would have stretched
them into the afternoon, but that my trunk
was packed for Walden's Eidge. It was
necessary to think of getting back to the
city, and I took a quicker pace. Two more
Kentucky warblers detained me for a mo-
ment; a quail sprang up from under my
feet ; and on the other side of the way an
oven-bird sang — the only one found in the
valley. Then I came to the car-track ; but
somehow things wore an unexpected look,
and a preacher, very black, solemn, and
shiny, gave me to understand, in answer to
a question, that the city lay not where I

MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS. 123

thought, but in an opposite direction. In-
stead of making a circuit I had cut straight
across the country (an unusual form of
bewilderment), and had come to another
railway. But no harm was done. In that
corner of the world all roads lead to Chatta-
nooga.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

THKOUGHOUT my stay in Chattanooga I
looked often and with desire at a long, flat-
topped, perpendicular-sided, densely wooded
mountain, beyond the Tennessee River. Its
name was Walden's Ridge, I was told ; the
top of it was eighty miles long and ten or
twelve miles wide ; if I wanted a bit of wild
country, that was the place for me. Was it
accessible? I asked. And was there any
reasonable way of living there? Oh yes;
carriages ran every afternoon from the city,
and there were several small hotels on the
mountain. So it happened that I went to
Walden's Ridge for my last week in Ten-
nessee, and have ever since thanked my
stars — as New England Christians used to
say, in my boyhood — for giving me the
good wine at the end of the feast.

The wine, it is true, was a little too freely
watered. I went up the mountain in a rain,
and came down again in a rain, and of the

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 125

seven intervening days five were showery.
The showers, mostly with thunder and
lightning, were of the sort that make an
umbrella ridiculous, and my jaunts, as a
rule, took me far from shelter. Yet I had
little to complain of. Now and then I was
put to my trumps, as it were ; my walk was
sometimes grievously abbreviated, and my
pace uncomfortably hurried, but by one
happy accident and another I always escaped
a drenching. Worse than the water that
fell — worse, and not to be escaped, even by
accident — was that which saturated the
atmosphere, making every day a dogday, and
the week a seven-day sweat. And then, as
if to even the account, on the last night of
my stay I was kept awake for hours shiver-
ing with cold ; and in the morning, after
putting on all the clothing I could wear,
and breakfasting in a snowstorm, I rode
down the mountain in a state suggestive of
approaching congelation. " My feet are
frozen, I know they are," said the lady who
sat beside me in the wagon ; but she was
mistaken.

This sudden drop in the temperature
seemed to be a trial even to the natives.

126 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

As we drove into Chattanooga, it was im-
possible not to smile at the pinched and
woebegone appearance of the colored people.
What had they to do with weather that
makes a man hurry ? And the next morn-
ing, when an enterprising, bright-faced white
boy ran up to me with a " ' Times,' sir ?
Have a 6 Times ' ? " I fear he quite misap-
prehended the more or less quizzical expres-
sion which I am sure came into my face. I
was looking at his black woolen mittens, and
thinking how well he was mothered. It was
the 19th of May ; for at least three weeks,
to my own knowledge, the city had been
sweltering under the hottest of midsummer
heats, — 94° in the shade, for example ; and
now, mittens and overcoats !

I should be sorry to exaggerate, or leave
a false impression. In this day of literary
conscientiousness, when writers of fiction
itself are truth-tellers first, and story-tellers
afterwards, — if at all, — it behooves mere
tourists and naturalists to speak as under
oath. Be it confessed, then, that the fore-
going paragraphs, though true in every
word, are not to be taken too seriously. If
the weather, " the dramatic element in

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 127

scenery," happened not to suit the conven-
ience of a naturally selfish man, now ten
times more selfish than usual — as is the
rule — because he was on his annual vaca-
tion, it does not follow that it was essentially
bad. The rains were needed, the heat was
to have been expected, and the cold, un-
seasonable and exceptional, was not peculiar
to Tennessee. As for the snow, it was no
more than I have seen before now, even in
Massachusetts, — a week or two earlier in
the month ; and it lent such a glory to the
higher Alleghanies, as we passed them on
our way homeward, that I might cheerfully
have lain shivering for two nights in that
unplastered bedroom, with its window that
no man could shut, rather than miss the
spectacle. Eastern Tennessee, I have no
doubt, is a most salubrious country ; prop-
erly recommended by the medical fraternity
as a refuge for consumptive patients. If to
me its meteorological fluctuations seemed
surprisingly wide and sudden, it was per-
haps because I had been brought up in the
equable climate of New England. It would
be unfair to judge the world in general by
that favored spot.

128 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

The road up the mountain — the unew
road," as it is called — is a notable piece of
work, done, I was told, by the county chain-
gangs. The pleasure of the ascent, which
naturally would have been great, was badly
diminished by the rain, which made it neces-
sary to keep the sides of the wagon down ;
but I was fortunate in my driver. At first
he seemed a stolid, uncommunicative body,
and when we came to the river I made sure
he could not read. As we • drove upon the
bridge, where straight before his eyes was a
sign forbidding any one to drive or ride over
the bridge at a pace faster than a walk, un-
der a penalty of five dollars for each offense,
he whipped up his horse and his mule (the
mule the better horse of the two), and they
struck into a trot. Halfway across we met
another wagon, and its driver too had let
his horses out. Illiteracy must be pretty
common in these parts, I said to myself.
But whatever my driver's educational defi-
ciencies, it did not take long to discover that
in his own line he was a master. He could
hit the ear of his mule with the end of his
whip with a precision that was almost start-
ling. In fact, it was startling — to the

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 129

mule. For my own part, as often as he
drew back his hand and let fly the lash, my
eye was glued to the mule's right ear in
spite of myself. Had my own ears been en-
dowed with life and motion, instead of fast-
ened to my head like blocks of wood, I think
they too would have twitched. I wondered
how long the man had practiced his art.
He appeared to be not more than forty-five
years old. Perhaps he came of a race of
drivers, and so began life with some heredi-
tary advantages. At all events, he was a
specialist, with the specialist's motto, " This
one thing I do."

We were hardly off the bridge and in the
country before I began plying him with
questions about this and that, especially the
wayside trees. He answered promptly and
succinctly, and turned out to be a man who
had kept his eyes open, and, better still,
knew how to say, " No, suh," as well as,
" Yes, suh." (There is no mark in the
dictionaries to indicate the percussive brevity
of the vowel sound in " suh " as he pro-
nounced it.) The big tupelo he recognized
as the " black-gum." " But is n't it ever
called ' sour -gum'?" "No, suh." He

130 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

knew but one kind of tupelo, as he knew
but one kind of " ellum." There were many
kinds of oaks, some of which he named as
we passed them. This botanical catechism
presently waked up the only other passenger
in the wagon, a modest girl of ten or twelve
years. She too, it appeared, had some ac-
quaintance with trees. I had asked the
driver if there were no long-leaved pines
hereabout. " No, suh," he said. " But I
think I saw some at Chickamauga the other
day," I ventured. (It was the only place I
did see them, as well as I remember.) " Yes,
sir," put in the girl, " there are a good many
there." " Good for you ! " I was ready to
say. It was a pretty rare schoolgirl who,
after visiting a battlefield, could tell what
kind of pines grow on it. Persimmons?
Yes, indeed, the girl had eaten them.
There was a tree by the fence. Had I never
eaten them ? She seemed to pity me when
I said " No," but I fancied she would have
preferred to see me begin with one a little
short of ripe.

As for the birds of Walden's Ridge, the
driver said, there were partridges, pheasants,
and turkeys. He had seen ravens, also,

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 131

but only in winter, he thought, and never
in flocks. His brother had once shot one.
About smaller birds he could not profess
to speak. By and by he stopped the car-
riage. " There 's a bird now," he said,
pointing with his whip. "What do you
call that ? " It was a summer tanager, I
told him, or summer redbird. Did he know
another redbird, with black wings and tail ?
Yes, he had seen it ; that was the male, and
this all-red one was the female. Oh no, I
explained ; the birds were of different species,
and the females in both cases were yellow.
He did not insist, — it was a case of a
driver and his fare; but he had always
been told so, he said, and I do not flatter
myself that I convinced him to the contrary.
It is hard to believe that one man can be so
much wiser than everybody else. A Massa-
chusetts farmer once asked me, I remember,
if the night-hawk and the whippoorwill were
male and female of the same bird. I an-
swered, of course, that they were not, and
gave, as I thought, abundant reason why
such a thing could not be possible. But
I spoke as a scribe. "Well," remarked
the farmer, when I had finished my story,

132 A WEEK ON WALDEWS RIDGE.

" some folks say they be, but I guess they
ain't"

With such converse, then, we beguiled
the climb to the " Brow," — the top of the
cliffs which rim the summit of the mountain,
and give it from below a fortified look, —
and at last, after an hour's further drive
through the dripping woods, came to the
hotel at which I was to put up — or with
which I was to put up — during my stay on
the Ridge.

I had hardly taken the road, the next
morning, impatient to see what this little
world on a mountain top was like, before I
came to a lovely brook making its devious
course among big boulders with much pleas-
ant gurgling, in the shadow of mountain
laurel and white azalea, — a place highly
characteristic of Walden's Eidge, as I was
afterwards to learn. Just now, naturally,
there was no stopping so near home, though
a Kentucky warbler, with his cool, liquid
song, did his best to beguile me ; and I kept
on my way, past a few houses, a tiny box of
a post-office, a rude church, and a few more
houses, till just beyond the last one the road
dropped into the forest again, as if for good.

A WEEK ON WALVEN'S EIDGE. 133

And there, all at once I seemed to be
in New Hampshire. The land fell away
sharply, and at one particular point, through
a vista, the forest could be seen sloping down
on either side to the gap, beyond which,
miles away, loomed a hill, and then, far, far
in the distance, high mountains dim with
haze. It was like a note of sublimity in a
poem that till now had been only beautiful.
From the bottom of the valley came a
sound of running water, and between me
and the invisible stream a chorus of olive-
backed thrushes were singing, — the same
simple and hearty strains that, in June and
July, echo all day long through the woods
of the Crawford Notch. The birds were on
their way from the far South, and were
happy to find themselves in so homelike a
place. Then, suddenly, amid the golden
voices of the thrushes, I caught the wiry
notes of a warbler. They came from the
treetops in the valley, and — so I prided
myself upon guessing — belonged to a ceru-
lean warbler, a bird of which I had seen my
first and only specimen a week before, on
Lookout Mountain. Down the steep hill-
side I scrambled, — New Hampshire clean

134 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

forgotten, — and was just bringing my glass
into play when the fellow took wing, and
began singing at the very point I had just
left. I hastened back ; he flew again, far-
ther up the hill, and again I put myself out
of breath with pursuing him. Again and
again he sang, now in this tree, now in that,
but there was no getting sight of him. The
trees should have been shorter, or the bird
larger. Straight upward I gazed, till the
muscles of my neck cried for mercy. At
last I saw him, flitting amid the dense foli-
age, but so far above me, and so exactly
between me and the sun, that I might as
well not have seen him. at all.

It was a foolish half-hour. The bird, as
I afterwards discovered, was nothing but a
blue yellow-back, with an original twist to
his song. In Massachusetts, I should not
have listened to it twice, but on new hunt-
ing-grounds a man is bound to look for new
game ; else what would be the use of travel-
ing ? It was a foolish half -hour, I say ; but
I wish some moralist would explain, in a
manner not inconsistent with the dignity of
human nature, how it happens that foolish
half-hours are commonly so much more

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 135

enjoyable at the time, and so much pleas-
anter in the retrospect, than many that are
more reasonably employed.

I swallowed my disappointment, and
presently forgot it, for at the first turn in
the road I found myself following the
course of a brook or creek, between which
and myself was a dense thicket of mountain
laurel and rhododendron, with trees and
other shrubs intermingled. The laurel was
already in full bloom, while the rhododen-
drons held aloft clusters of gorgeous rose-
purple buds, a few of which, the middle ones
of the cluster, were just bursting into flower.
Here was beauty of a new order, — such
wealth and splendor of color in surroundings
so romantic. And the place, besides, was
alive with singing birds : hooded warblers,
Kentucky warblers, a Canadian warbler, a
black-throated blue, a black-throated green,
a blue yellow-back, scarlet tanagers, wood
pewees, wood thrushes, a field sparrow (on
the hillside beyond) a cardinal, a chat, a
bunch of white-throated sparrows, and who
could tell what else? It was an exciting
moment. Luckily, a man can look and
listen both at once. Here was a fringe-

136 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S BIDGE.

tree, a noble specimen, hung with creamy-
white plumes ; here was a magnolia, with
big leaves and big flowers ; and here was
a flowering dogwood, not to be put out of
countenance in any company; but espe-
cially, here were the rhododendrons ! And
all the while, deep in the thickest of the
bushes, some unknown bird was singing a
strange, breathless jumble of a song, note
tripping over note, — like an eager church-
man with his responses, I kept saying to
myself, with no thought of disrespect to
either party. It cost me a long vigil and
much patient coaxing to make the fellow
out, and he proved to be merely a "Wilson's
blackcap, after all; but he was the only
bird of his kind that I saw in Tennessee.

On this first visit I did not get far beyond
the creek, through the bed of which the
road runs, with a single log for foot-passen-
gers. I had spent at least an hour in going
a hundred rods, and it was already drawing
near dinner time. But I returned to the
spot that very afternoon, and half a dozen
times afterward. So poor a traveler am
I, so ill fitted to explore a new country.
Whenever nothing in particular offered

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 137

itself, why, it was always pretty down at
Falling Water Creek. There I saw the
rhododendrons come into exuberant bloom,
and there I oftenest see them in memory,
though I found them elsewhere in greater
abundance, and in a setting even more
romantic.

More romantic, perhaps, but hardly more
beautiful. I remember, just beyond the
creek, a bank where sweet bush ( Caly can-
thus) , wild ginger {Asarum), rhododendron,
laurel, and plenty of trailing arbutus (the
last now out of flower) were growing side
by side, — a rare combination of beauty
and fragrance. And within a few rods of
the same spot I sat down more than once to
take a long look at a cross-vine covering a
dead hemlock. The branches of the tree,
shortening regularly to the top, were draped
heavily with gray lichens, while the vine,
keeping mostly near the trunk and climbing
clean to the tip, — fifty feet or more, as I
thought, — was hung throughout with large,
orange-red, gold-lined bells. Their numbers
were past guessing. Here and there a
spray of them swung lightly from the end of
a branch, as if inviting the breeze to lend

138 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

them motion and a voice. The sight was
worth going miles to see, and yet I passed
it three times before it caught my eye, so
full were the woods of things to look at.
After all, is it a poor traveler who turns
again and again into the same path?
Whether is better, to read two good books
once, or one good book twice ?

A favorite shorter walk, at odd minutes,
— before breakfast and between showers, —
was through the woods for a quarter of a
mile to a small clearing and a cabin. On a
Sunday afternoon I ventured to pass the
gate and make a call upon my neighbors.
The doors of the house stood open, but a
glance inside showed that there was no one
there, and I walked round it, inspecting the
garden, — corn, beans, and potatoes coming
on, — till, just as I was ready to turn back
into the woods, I descried a man and woman
on the hillside not far away ; the man lead-
ing a mule, and the woman picking straw-
berries. At sight of a stranger the woman
fell behind, but the man kept on to the
house, greeted me politely, and invited me
to be seated under the hemlock, where two
chairs were already placed. After tying

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 139

the mule lie took the other chair, and we fell
into talk about the weather, the crops, and
things in general. When the wife finally
appeared, I rose, of course ; but she went on
in silence and entered the house, while the
husband said, " Oh, keep your seat." We
continued our conversation till the rain be-
gan to fall. Then we picked up our chairs
and followed the woman inside. She sat in
the middle of the room (young, pretty, newly
married, and Sunday -dressed), but never
once opened her lips. Her behavior was in
strict accordance with local etiquette, I was
afterward assured (as if all etiquette were
not local) ; but though I admire feminine
modesty as much as any man, I cannot say
that I found this particular manifestation of
it altogether to my liking. Silence is golden,
no doubt, and gold is more precious than
silver, but in cases of this figurative sort I
profess myself a bimetallist. A little silver,
I say ; enough for small change, at any rate ;
and if we can have a pretty free coinage,
why, so much the better, though as to that,
it must be admitted, a good deal depends
upon the " image and superscription." How-
ever, my hostess followed her lights, and

140 A WEEK ON WALDEWS EIDGE.

reserved her voice — soft and musical let us
hope — for her husband's ear.

They had not lived in the house very long,
he told me, and he did not know how many
years the land had been cleared. There
was a fair amount of game in the woods, —
turkeys, squirrels, pheasants, and so on, —
and in winter the men did considerable
hunting. Formerly there were a good many
deer, but they had been pretty well killed
off. Turkeys still held put. They were
gobbling now. His father had been trying
for two or three weeks, off and on, to shoot
a certain old fellow who had several hens
with him down in the valley. His father
could call with his mouth better than with
any " caller," but so far the bird had been
too sharp for him. The son laughed good-
naturedly when I confessed to an unsports-
manlike sympathy with the gobbler.

The cabin, built of hewn logs, with clay
in the chinks, was neatly furnished, with
beds in two corners of the one room, a stone
chimney, two doors directly opposite each
other, and no window. The doors, it is
understood, are always to be open, for venti-
lation and light. Such is the custom ; and

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 141

custom is nowhere more powerful than in
small rustic communities. If a native, led
away by his wife, perhaps, puts a window
into his new cabin, the neighbors say, " Oh,
he is building a glass house, is n't he ? "
It must be an effeminate woman, they think,
who cannot do her cooking and sewing by
the light of the door. None the less, in a
climate where snow is possible in the middle
of May, such a Spartan arrangement must
sometimes be found a bit uncomfortable by
persons not to the manner born. A preacher
confided to me that in his pastoral calls he
had once or twice made bold to push to a
door directly at his back, when the wind
was cold ; but the innovation was ill received,
and the inmates of the house, doubtless
without wishing to hurt their minister's feel-
ings,— since he had meant no harm, to be
sure, but was simply unused to the ways of
the world, — speedily found some excuse for
rectifying his mistake. Probably there is
no corner of the world where the question
of fresh air and draughts is not available
for purposes of moral discipline.

Beside the path to the cabin, on the 13th
of May, was a gray-cheeked thrush, a very

142 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

gray specimen, sitting motionless in the best
of lights. " Look at me," he seemed to say.
"I am no olive-back. My cheeks are not
sallow." On the same day, here and in
another place, I saw white-throated sparrows.
Their presence at this late hour was a great
surprise, and suggested the possibility of
their breeding somewhere in the Carolina
mountains, though I am not aware that such
an occurrence has ever been recorded. An-
other recollection of this path is of a snow-
white milkweed (Asclepias variegatci), —
white with the merest touch of purple to set
it off, — for the downright elegance of which
I was not in the least prepared. The queen
of all milkweeds, surely.

After nightfall the air grew loud with the
cries of batrachians and insects, an interest-
ing and novel chorus. On my first evening
at the hotel I was loitering up the road, with
frequent auditory pauses, thinking how full
the world is of unseen creatures which find
their day only after the sun goes down, when
in a woody spot I heard behind me a sound
of footsteps. A woman was close at my
heels, fetching a pail of water from the
spring. I remarked upon the many voices.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 143

She answered pleasantly. It was the big
frogs that I heard, she reckoned.

"Do you have whippoorwills here?" I
asked.

" Plenty of 'em," she answered, " plenty
of 'em." "

" Do you hear them right along the road ? "

" Yes, sir ; oh yes."

We had gone hardly a rod further before
we exclaimed in the same breath, " There is
one now ! "

I inquired if there was another bird here,
something like the whippoorwill, meaning
the chuck-will's-widow. But she said no;
she knew of but one.

"How early does the whippoorwill get
here?" said I.

" Pretty early," she answered.

" By the first of April, should you say ? "

"Yes, sir, I think about then. I know
the timber is just beginning to put out when
they begin to holler."

This mannerly treatment of a stranger
was more Christian-like than the stately
silence of my lady of the cabin, it seemed to
me. I liked it better, at all events. I had
learned nothing, perhaps ; but unless a man

144 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

is far gone in philosophy he need not feel
bound to increase in wisdom every time a
neighbor speaks to him ; and anyhow, that
expression about the "putting out of the
timber" had given me pleasure. Hearing
it thus was better than finding it upon a
page of Stevenson, or some other author
whose business in life is the picking of right
words. Let us have some silver, I repeat.
I am ready to believe, what I have some-
where read, that men will have to give
account not only for every idle word, but
for every idle silence.

The summit of the Kidge, as soon as one
leaves its precipitous rocky edge, — the
Brow, so called, — is simply an indefinite
expanse of gently rolling country, thin-soiled,
but well watered, and covered with fine open
woods, rambling through which the visitor
finds little to remind him of his elevation
above the world. I heard a resident speak
of going to the " top of the mountain," how-
ever, and on inquiry learned that a certain
rocky eminence, two miles, more or less,
from Fairmount (the little "settlement"
where I was staying), went by that name,
and was supposed to be the highest point of

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 145

the Ridge. My informant kindly made me a
rough map of the way thither, and one morn-
ing I set out in that direction. It would be
shameful to live for a week on the " summit "
of a mountain, and not once go to the u top."
The glory of Walden's Ridge, as com-
pared with Lookout Mountain, — so the
dwellers there say, — is its streams and
springs ; and my morning path soon brought
me to the usual rocky brook bordered with
mountain laurel, holly, and hemlock. To
my New England eyes it was an odd circum-
stance, the hemlocks growing always along
the creeks in the valley bottoms. Beyond
this point I passed an abandoned cabin, —
no other house in sight, — and by and by
a second one, near which, in the garden
(better worth preserving than the house, it
appeared), a woman and two children were
at work. Yes, the woman said, I was on the
right path. I had only to keep a straight
course, and I should bring up at the " top
of the mountain." A little farther, and my
spirits rose at the sight of a circular, sedgy,
woodland pond, such a place as I had not
seen in all this Chattanooga country. It
ought to yield something new for my local

146 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

ornithological list, which, up to this time in-
cluded ninety species, and not one of them
a water-bird. I did my best, beating round
the edge and " squeaking," but startled no-
thing rarer than a hooded warbler and a
cardinal grosbeak.

Next I traversed a long stretch of un-
broken oak woods, with single tall pines in-
terspersed; and then all at once the path
turned to the right, and ran obliquely down-
hill to a clearing in which stood a house, —
not a cabin, — with a garden, orchard trees,
and beehives. This should be the German
shoemaker's, I thought, looking at my map.
If so, I was pretty near the top, though
otherwise there was no sign of it ; and if I
had made any considerable ascent, it had
been as children increase in stature, — and
as the good increase in goodness, — uncon-
sciously. A woman of some years was in
the garden, and at my approach came up
to the fence, — a round - faced, motherly
body. Yes, the top of the mountain was
just beyond. I could not miss it.

" You do not live here ? " she asked.

No, I explained ; I was a stranger on the
Ridge, — a stranger from Boston.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 147

" From Washington ? "

" No, from Boston."

" Oh ! from Boston ! — Massachusetts ! —
Oh-h-h ! "

She would go part way with me, she said,
lest I should miss the path. Perhaps she
wished to show some special hospitality to
a man from Massachusetts ; or possibly she
thought I must be more in danger of getting
bewildered, being so far from home. But
I could not think of troubling her. Was
there a spring near by, where I could drink?

"I have water in the house," she an-
swered.

" But is n't there a creek down in the val-
ley ahead?"

Oh yes, there was a creek ; but had I any-
thing to drink out of ? I thanked her. Yes,
I had a cup. " My husband will be at home
by the time you come back," she said, as I
started on, and I promised to call.

The scene at the brook, halfway between
the German's house and the top, would of
itself have paid me for my morning's jaunt.
I stood on a boulder in mid-current, in the
shadow of overhanging trees, and drank it
in. Such rhododendrons and laurel, now in

148 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

the perfection of their beauty ! One rho-
dodendron bush was at least ten feet high,
and loaded with blooms. Another lifted its
crown of a dozen rose-purple clusters amid
the dark foliage of a hemlock. A magnolia-
tree stood near ; but though it was much
taller than the laurel or the rhododendron,
and had much larger flowers, it made little
show beside them. Birds were singing on
all hands, and numbers of gay-colored but-
terflies flitted about, sipping here and there
at a blossom. I remember especially a fine
tiger swallow-tail; the only one I saw in
Tennessee, I believe. I remember, too, how
well the rhododendron became him. Here,
as in many other places, the laurel was
nearly white ; a happy circumstance, as it
and the rhododendron went the more har-
moniously together. Even in this high
company, some tufts of cinnamon fern were
not to be overlooked ; the fertile cinnamon-
brown fronds were now at their loveliest,
and showed as bravely here, I thought, as in
the barest of Massachusetts swamp-lands.

A few rods more, up a moderate slope,
and I was at the top of the mountain, —
a wall of outcropping rocks, falling off

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 149

abruptly on the further side, and looking
almost like an artificial rampart. Beyond
me, to my surprise, I heard the hum of
cicadas, — seventeen-year locusts, — a sound
of which the lower country had for some
time been full, but of which, till this mo-
ment, I had heard nothing on the Bidge.

As for the prospect, it was far reaching,
but only in one direction, and through open-
ings among the trees. Directly before me,
some hundreds of feet below, was a piece of
road, with a single cabin and a barn ; and
much farther away were other cabins, each
with its private clearing. Elsewhere the
foreground was an unbroken forest. For
some time I could not distinguish the Eidge
itself from the outlying world. Mountains
and hills crowded the hazy horizon, range
beyond range. Moving along the rocks, I
found a vista through which Chattanooga
and Lookout Mountain were visible. An-
other change, and a stretch of the Tennessee
River came into sight, and, beyond it, Mis-
sionary Ridge with its settlements and its
two observatories. Evidently I was consid-
erably above the level of the Brow ; but
whether this was really the top of the moun-

150 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S KIDGE.

tain — reached, in some mysterious way,
without going uphill — was more than I
could say.1

Nor did it matter. I was glad to be
there. It was a pleasant place and a pleas-
ant hour, with an oak root for a seat, and
never an insect to trouble me. That, by the
way, was true of all those Tennessee forests,
— when I was there, I mean ; from what I
heard, the ticks and jiggers must be bad
enough later in the season. As men do at
such times, — for human nature is of noble
origin, and feels no surprise at being well
treated, — I took my immunity as a matter
of course, and only realized how I had been
favored when I got back to Massachusetts,
where, on my first visit to the woods, I was
fairly driven out by swarms of mosquitoes.

The shoemaker was at home when I
reached his house on my return, and at the
urgent invitation of himself and his wife I
joined them on the piazza for a bit of neigh-
borly chat. I found him a smallish man,

1 It was not the top of the mountain ; so I am now in-
formed, on the best of authority. I followed the map,
but misunderstood the man who drew it. It was a map
of some other route, and I did not see the top of the
mountain, after all.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 151

not German in appearance, but looking, I
thought, like Thoreau, only grown a little
older. He had been on Walden's Eidge for
fifteen years. Before that he was in South
Carolina, but the yellow fever came along
and made him feel like getting out. Yes,
this was a healthy country. He had nothing
to complain of ; he was sixty-two years old
and his doctors' bills had never amounted to
" five dollar."

" Do you like living here ? " I asked his
wife.

" No," she answered promptly ; " I never
did. But then," she added, " we can't help
it. If you own something, you know, you
have to stay."

The author of Walden would have appre-
ciated that remark. There was no shoe-
making to be done here, the man said, his
nearest neighbor being half a mile distant
through the woods ; and there was no clover,
so that his bees did not do very well ; and
the frost had just killed all his peach-trees ;
but when I asked if he never felt homesick
for Germany, the answer came like a pistol
shot,— "No."

I inquired about a cave, of which I had

152 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

heard reports. Yes, it was a good cave,
they said ; I could easily find it. But their
directions conveyed no very clear idea to
my mind, and by and by the woman began
talking to her husband in German. " She
is telling him he ought to go with me
and show me the way," I said to myself;
and the next moment she came back to
English. " He will go with you," she said.
I demurred, but he protested that he could
do it as well as not. " Take up a stick ;
you might see a snake," his wife called after
him, as we left the house. He smiled, but
did not follow her advice, though I fancied
he would have done so had she gone along
with us. A half-mile or so through the
pathless woods brought us to the cave,
which might hold a hundred persons, I
thought. The dribbling " creek " fell over
it in front. Then the man took me to my
path, pointed my way homeward, and, with
a handshake (the silver lining of which was
not refused, though I had been troubled
with a scruple), bade me good-by. First,
however, he told me that if I found any one
in Boston who wanted to buy a place on
Walden's Ridge, he would sell a part of his

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 153

or the whole of it. I remember him most
kindly, and would gladly do him a service.
If any reader, having a landed investment
in view, should desire my intervention in
the premises, I am freely at his command ;
only let him bear in mind the terms of the
deed : " If you own something, you know,
you have to stay."

II.

Fairmount, as has already been said, is
but a clearing in the forest. Instead of a
solitary cabin, as elsewhere, there are per-
haps a dozen or two of cabins and houses
scattered along the road, which emerges
from the woods at one end of the settlement,
and, after a mile or so in the sun, drops
into them again at the other end. The
glory of the place, and the reason of its
being, as I suppose, is a chalybeate spring
in a woody hollow before the post-office.
There may be a shop of some kind, also,
but memory retains no such impression.
One building, rather larger than most of
its neighbors, and apparently unoccupied, I
looked at more than once with a measure
of that curiosity which is everywhere the

154 A WEEK ON WALDEWS RIDGE.

stranger's privilege. It sat squarely on the
road, and boasted a sort of portico or piazza,
— it puzzled me what to call it, — but there
was no vestige of a chimney. One day a
ragged, bright-faced boy met me at the right
moment, and I asked, " Did some one use
to live in that house ? " " That ? " said he,
in a tone I shall never forget. " That 's a
barn. That over there is the dwelling."
My ignorance was fittingly rebuked, and I
had no spirit to inquire about the piazza.
Probably it was nothing but a lean-to.
Even in my humiliation, however, it pleased
me to hear what I should have called that
good literary word " dwelling " on such lips.
A Yankee boy might have said " dwelling-
house," but no Yankee of any age, or none
that I have ever known, would have said
" dwelling," though he might have read the
word in books a thousand times. I thought
of a spruce colored waiter in Florida, who,
when I asked him at breakfast how the day
was likely to turn out, answered promptly,
"I think it will be inclement." It may
reasonably be counted among the minor
advantages of travel that it enriches one's
every-day vocabulary.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 155

Another Fairmount building (an unmis-
takable house, this time) is memorable to
me because on the doorstep, day after day,
an old gentleman and a younger antagonist
— they might have been grandfather and
grandson — were playing checkers. " I
hope you are beating the young fellow," I
could not help saying once to the old gen-
tleman. He smiled dubiously, and made
some halting reply suggestive of resignation
rather than triumph ; and it came to me
with a kind of pang, as I passed on, that if
growing old is a bad business, as most of us
think, it is perhaps an unfavorable symp-
tom when a man finds himself, not out of
politeness, but as a simple matter of course,
taking sides with the aged.

Fairmounters, living in the woods, have
no outlook upon the world. If they wish to
see off, they must go to the Brow, which, by
a stroller's guess, may be two miles distant.
My first visit to it was the pleasanter — the
more vacational, so to speak — for being an
accident. I sauntered aimlessly down the
road, past the scattered houses and orchards
(the raising of early apples seemed to be
a leading industry on the Ridge, though a

156 A WEEK ON WALDEWS RIDGE.

Chattanooga gentleman had assured me that
the principal crops were blackberries and
rabbits), and almost before I knew it, was
in the same delightful woods that had wel-
comed me wherever I had gone. And in
the same woods the same birds were singing.
My notes make particular record of hooded
and Kentucky warblers, these being two of
my newer acquaintances, as well as two of
the commoner Ridge songsters ; but I halted
for some time, and with even a livelier inter-
est, to listen to an old friend (no acquaint-
ance, if you please), — a black - throated
green warbler. It was one of the queerest
of songs : a bar of five or six notes, uniform
in pitch, and then at once, in perfect form
and voice, — the voice being a main part of
the music in the case of this warbler, —
the familiar trees, trees, murmuring trees.
Where could the fellow have picked up such
a ditty? No doubt there was some story
connected with it. Nothing is born of itself.
A dozen years ago, in the Green Mountains,
— at Bread-Loaf Inn, — I heard from the
forest by the roadside a song utterly strange,
and hastened in search of its author. After
much furtive approach and diligent scanning

A WEEK ON WALDEWS EIDGE. 157

of the foliage, I had the bird under my
opera-glass, — a black-throated blue war-
bler ! With my eye still upon him, he sang
again and again, and the song bore no faint-
est resemblance to the kree, Jcree, Jcree, which
all New England bird-lovers know as the
work of Dendroica ccerulescens. In what
private school he had been educated I have
no idea; but I believe that every such
extreme eccentricity goes back to some-
thing out of the common in the bird's early
training.

I felt in no haste. Life is easy in the
Tennessee mountains. A pile of lumber,
newly unloaded near the road, — in the
woods, of course, — offered a timely seat,
and I took it. Some Chattanooga gentle-
man was planning a summer cottage for
himself, I gathered. May he enjoy it for
twenty years as much as I did for twenty
minutes. Not far beyond, near a fork in the
road, a man of twenty-five or thirty, a youth
of sixteen or seventeen, and a small boy were
playing marbles in a cabin yard. I inter-
rupted the sport long enough to inquire
which road I had better take. I was going
nowhere in particular, I explained, and

158 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

wanted simply a pleasant stroll. " Then I
would go to the Brow, if I were you," said
the man. " Keep a straight road. It is n't
far." I thanked him, and with a cheery
" Come on! " to his playmates he ran back,
literally, to the ring. Yes, life is easy in
the Tennessee mountains. It is not to be
assumed, nevertheless, that the man was a
do-nothing: probably he had struck work
for a few minutes only ; but, like a sensible
player, he was enjoying the game while it
lasted. Perhaps it is a certain inborn Puri-
tanical industriousness, against which I have
never found the courage effectually to rebel,
that makes me look back upon this door-
yard comedy as one of the brightest inci-
dents of my Tennessee vacation. Fancy a
Massachusetts farmer playing marbles at
nine o'clock in the forenoon !

At that moment, it must be owned, a re-
buke of idleness would have fallen with a
poor grace from my Massachusetts lips. If
the player of marbles had followed his ques-
tioner round the first turn, he would have
seen him standing motionless beside a swamp,
holding his head on one side as if listening,
— though there was nothing to be heard, —

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 159

or evoking ridiculous squeaking noises by
sucking idiotically the back of his hand.
Well, I was trying to find another bird, just
as he was trying to knock another marble
out of the ring.

The spot invited such researches, — a
bushy swamp, quite unlike the dry woods
and rocky woodland brooks which I had
found everywhere else. I had seen my
first cerulean warbler on Lookout Mountain,
my first Cape May warbler on Cameron
Hill, my first Kentucky warbler on Mission-
ary Ridge, and my first blue-winged yellow
warbler at the Chickamauga battlefield. If
Walden was to treat me equally well, as in
all fairness it ought, now was the time.
Looking, listening, and squeaking were alike
unrewarded, however, till I approached the
same spot on my return. Then some bird
sang a new song. I hoped it was a protho-
notary warbler, a bird I had never seen, and
about whose notes I knew nothing. More
likely it was a Louisiana water-thrush, a
bird I had seen, but had never heard sing.
Whichever it was, alas, it speedily fell silent,
and no beating of the bush proved of the
least avail.

160 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

Meanwhile I had been to the Brow, where
I had sat for an hour or more on the edge
of the mountain, gazing down upon the
world. The sky was clouded, but here and
there were fugitive patches of sunshine, now
on Missionary Ridge, now on the river, now
glorifying the smoke of the city. Southward,
just across the valley and over Chattanooga,
was Lookout Mountain ; eastward stretched
Missionary Ridge, with many higher hills
behind it ; and more to the north, and far
in the distance, loomed the Great Smoky
Mountains, in all respects true to their
name. The valley at my feet was beautiful
beyond words : green forests interspersed
with green clearings, lonely cabins, and bare
fields of red earth. At the north, Wai-
den's Ridge made a turn eastward, narrowing
the valley, but without ending it. Chimney
swifts were cackling merrily, and the air was
full of the hum of seventeen-year locusts, —
miles and miles of continuous sound. From
somewhere far below rose the tinkle of cow-
bells. Even on that cloudy and smoky day
it was a glorious landscape ; but it pleased
me afterward to remember that the eye re-
turned of itself again and again to a stretch

A WEEK ON WALDEWS EIDGE. 161

of freshly green meadow along a slender
watercourse, — a valley within the valley.
Of all the fair picture, that was the most
like home.

Meanwhile there was no forgetting that
undiscovered stranger in the swamp. Who-
ever he was, he must be made to show
himself ; and the next day, when the usual
noonday deluge was past, I looked at the
clouds, and said : " We shall have another,
but in the interval I can probably reach the
Brow. There I will take shelter on the
piazza of an unoccupied cottage, and, when
the rain is over, go back to the swamp, see
my bird, and thence return home." So it
turned out — in part. The clouds hurried
me, but I reached the Brow just in season,
climbed the cottage fence, the gate being
padlocked, and, thoroughly heated as I was,
paced briskly to and fro on the piazza in
a chilling breeze for an hour or more, the
flood all the while threatening to fall, and
the thunder shaking the house. There was
plenty to look at, for the cottage faced the
Great Smokies, and though we were under
the blackest of clouds, the landscape below
was largely in the sun. The noise of the

162 A WEEK ON WALDEWS RIDGE.

locusts was incessant. Nothing but the peals
of thunder kept it out of my ears.

So far, then, my plans had prospered;
but to find the mysterious bird, — that was
not so easy. The swamp was silent, and I
was at once so cold and so hot, and so badly
under the weather already, that I dared not
linger.

In the woods, nevertheless, I stopped long
enough to enjoy the music of a master
cardinal, — a bewitching song, and, as I
thought, original : birdy, 'birdy, repeated
about ten times in the sweetest of whistles,
and then a sudden descent in the pitch, and
the same syllables over again. At that
instant, a Carolina wren, as if stirred to
rivalry, sprang into a bush and began
whistling cherry, cherry, cherry at his
loudest and prettiest. It was a royal duet.
The cardinal was in magnificent plumage,
and a scarlet tanager near by was equally
handsome. If the tanager could whistle
like the cardinal, our New England woods
would have a bird to brag of.

Not far beyond these wayside musicians I
came upon a boy sitting beside a wood-pile,
with his saw lying on the ground. "It is

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 163

easier to sit down than to saw wood,
isn't it? " said I. Possibly he was unused (
to such aphoristic modes of speech. He
took time to consider. Then he smiled, and
said, " Yes, sir." The answer was all-suffi-
cient. We spoke from experience, both of
us ; and between men who know, what-
ever the matter in hand, disagreement is
impossible and amplification needless.

Three days later — my last day on the
Eidge — I had better luck at the swamp.
The stranger was singing on the nearer
edge as I approached, and I had simply to
draw near and look at him, — a Louisiana
water - thrush. He sang, and I listened ;
and farther along, at the little bridge where
I had first heard the song, another like him
was in tune. The strain, as warbler songs
go (" water-thrushes " being not thrushes,
but warblers), is rather striking, — clear,
pretty loud, of about ten notes, the first pair
of which are longest and best. I speak of
what I heard, and give, of course, my own
impression. Audubon pronounces the notes
" as powerful and mellow, and at times as
varied," as those of the nightingale, and
Wilson waxes almost equally enthusiastic in

164 A WEEK ON WALDEWS EIDGE.

his praise of the " exquisitely sweet and
expressive voice." Here, as in Florida, I
was interested to perceive how instantly the
bird's appearance and carriage distinguished
it from its Northern relative, although the
descriptions of the two species, as given in
books, sound confusingly alike. It is mat-
ter for thankfulness, perhaps, that language
is not yet so all-expressive as to render
individual eyesight superfluous.

I kept on to the Brow, and some time
afterward was at Mabbitt's Spring, quench-
ing my thirst with a draught of liquid iron
rust, when a third songster of the same kind
struck up his tune. The spring, spurting
out of the rock in a slender jet, is beside the
same stream — Little Falling Water — that
makes through the swamp; and along its
banks, it appeared, the water-thrushes were
at home. I was glad to have heard the
famous singer, but my satisfaction was not
without alloy. Walden, after all, had failed
to show me. a new bird, though it had given
me a new song.

The most fatiguing, and perhaps the most
interesting of my days on the Ridge was
the one day in which I did not travel on

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 165

foot. Passing through the village, on my
return from one of my earlier visits to
Falling Water, I stopped a nice-looking
man (if he will pardon the expression,
copied from my notes), driving a horse with
a pair of clothes-line reins. He had an air
of being at home, and naturally I took him
for a native. Would he tell me something
about the country, especially about the
roads, so that I might improve my scanty
time to the best advantage ? Very glably,
he answered. He had walked and driven
over the mountain a good deal, surveying,
and if I would call at his house, a short dis-
tance down the road, — the house with the
big barn, — he would make me a rough map,
such as would answer my purpose. At the
same time he mentioned two or three shorter
excursions which I ought not to miss ; and
when I had thanked him for his kindness,
he gathered up the reins and drove on.
Intending no disrespect to the inhabitants of
the Kidge, I may perhaps be allowed to say
that I was considerably impressed by a cer-
tain unexpected propriety, and even ele-
gance, of diction, on the part of my new
acquaintance. I remember in particular his

166 A WEEK ON WALVEWS EIDGE.

description of a pleasant cold spring as
being situated not far from the "con-
fluence " of two streams. Con-flueus^ I
thought, flowing together. Having always
something else to do, I omitted to call at
his house, and one day, when we met again
in the road, I apologized for my neglect,
and asked another favor. He was familiar
with the country, and kept a horse. Could
he not spare a day to take me about ? If
he thought this proposal a bit presumptuous,
courtesy restrained him from letting the fact
be seen, and, after a few minutes of delib-
eration, — his hands being pretty full just
then, he explained, — he promised to call
for me two mornings later, at seven o'clock.
We would take a luncheon along, and make
a day of it.

He appeared at the gate in due season,
and in a few minutes we were driving over
a road new to me, but through the same
spacious oak woods to which I had grown
accustomed. We went first to Burnt Cabin
Spring, one of the famous chalybeate springs
of the mountain, — a place formerly fre-
quented by picnic parties, but now, to all ap-
pearance, fallen into neglect. We stretched

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 167

our legs, drank of the water, admired the
flowers and ferns, talking all the while (it
was here that my companion told a story of
a young theologian from Grant University,
who, in a solemn discourse, spoke repeatedly
of Jacob as having "euchred his brother
out of his birthright "), and then, while a
"pheasant" drummed near by, took our
places again in the buggy.

Another stage, still through the oak
woods, and we were at Signal Point, famous
— in local tradition, at least — as the station
from which General Sherman signaled en-
couragement to the Union army beleaguered
in Chattanooga, in danger of starvation or
surrender. I had looked at the bold, jut-
ting crags from Lookout Mountain and else-
where, and rejoiced at last to stand upon them.

It would have been delightful to spend
a long day there, lying upon the cliffs and
enjoying the prospect, which, without being
so far-reaching as from Point Lookout, or
even from the eastern brim of Walden, is
yet extensive and surpassingly beautiful.
The visitor is squarely above the river,
which here, in the straitened valley between
the Bidge and Raccoon Mountain, grows

168 A WEEK ON WALDEWS RIDGE.

narrower and narrower till it rushes through
the " Suck." Even at that elevation we
could hear the roar of the rapids. A short
distance above the Suck, and almost at
our feet, lay Williams Island. A farmer's
Eden it looked, with its broad, newly
planted fields, and its house surrounded by
outbuildings and orchard-trees. The view
included Chattanooga, Missionary Kidge,
and much else ; but its special charm was
its foreground, the part peculiar to itself, —
the valley, the river, and Raccoon Mountain.
Along the river-banks were small clearings,
each with its one cabin, and generally a
figure or two ploughing or planting. A
man in a strangely long boat — a dugout,
probably — was making his difficult way
upstream with a paddle. The Tennessee,
in the neighborhood of Chattanooga, at all
events, is too swift for pleasure-boating.
Seen from above, as I commonly saw it, it
looked tranquil enough ; but when I came
down to its edge, now and then, the speed
and energetic sweep of the smooth current
laid fast hold upon me. From the mountains
to the sea is a long, long journey, and no
wonder the river felt in haste.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 169

I had gone to Signal Point not as an
ornithologist, but as a patriot and a lover
of beauty ; but, being there, I added one to
my list of Tennessee birds, — a red-tailed
hawk, one of the very few hawks seen in all
my trip. Sailing below us, it displayed its
rusty, diagnostic tail, and put its identity at
once beyond question.

Our next start — far too speedy, for the
day was short — was for Williams Point;
but on our way thither we descended into
the valley of Shoal Creek, down which, with
the creek to keep it company, runs the old
mountain road, now disused and practically
impassable. Here we hitched the horse,
and strolled downwards for perhaps half a
mile. I was never in a lovelier spot. The
mountain brook, laughing over the stones,
is overhung with laurel and rhododendron,
which in turn are overhung by precipitous
rocks broken into all wild and romantic
shapes, with here and there a cavern —
" rock-house " — to shelter a score of travel-
ers. The place was rich in ferns and other
plants, which, unhappily, I had no time to
examine, and all the particulars of which
have faded out of my memory. We walked

170 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

far enough to look over the edge of the
mountain, and up to the Signal Point cliffs.
If I could have stayed there two or three
hours, it would have been a memorable
season. As it was, the stroll was enlivened
by one little adventure, at which I have
laughed too many times ever to forget it.

I had been growing rapturous over the
beauty of things, when my companion said,
" There are some people whom it is no
pleasure to take into places like this. They
can't keep their eyes off the ground, they
are so bitten with the fear of snakes." He
was a few paces ahead of me, as he spoke,
and the sentence was barely finished before
he shouted, " Look at that huge snake ! "
and sprang forward to snatch up a stone.
" Get a stick ! " he cried. " Get a stick ! "
From his manner I took it for granted that
the creature was a rattlesnake, and a glance
at it, lying motionless among the stones
beside the road, did not undeceive me. I
turned hurriedly, looking for a stick, but
somehow could not find one, and in a mo-
ment more was recalled by shouts of " Come
and help me ! It will get away from us ! '
It was a question of life and death, I

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 171

thought, and I ran forward and began
throwing stones. " Look out ! Look out !
You 11 bury it ! " cried my companion ; but
just then one of my shots struck the snake
squarely in the head. " That 's a good
one ! " exclaimed the other man, and, pick-
ing up a dead stick, he thrust it under the
disabled creature and tossed it into the road.
Then he bent over it, and, with a stone,
pounded its head to a jelly. Such a fury as
possessed him ! He might have been bruis-
ing the head of Satan himself, as no doubt
he was — in his mind ; for my surveyor was
also a preacher, as had already transpired.

" It is n't a venomous snake, is it ? " I
ventured to ask, when the work was done.

" Oh, I think not," and he pried open its
jaws to look for its fangs.

" I don't generally kill innocent snakes,"
I ventured again, a little inopportunely, it
must be confessed.

" Well, /do," said the preacher. " The
very sight of a snake stirs my hatred to its
depths."

After that it was natural to inquire
whether he often saw rattlesnakes here-
abouts. (The driver who brought me up

172 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

the mountain had said that they were not
common, but that I " wanted to look out
sharp for them in the woods.") My com-
panion had never seen one, he answered, but
his wife had once killed one in their door-
yard. Then, by way of cooling off, after
the fervor of the conflict, he told me about
a gentleman and his little boy, who, having
come to spend a vacation on the Ridge,
started out in the morning for a stroll.
They were quickly back again, and the boy,
quite out of breath, came running into the
garden.

" Oh, Mr. M.," he cried, " we Saw a rat-
tlesnake, and papa fired off his pistol! "

" A rattlesnake ! Where is it ? What
did it look like?"

" Why, we did n't see it, but we heard it."
" What was the noise like ? " asked Mr.
M., and he took a pencil from his pocket
and began tapping on a log.

" That 's it ! " said the boy, " that 's it ! "
They had heard a woodpecker drilling for
grubs, — or drumming for love, — where-
upon the man had fired his pistol, and for
them there was no more walking in the
woods.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 173

After our ramble along Shoal Creek we
rested at the ford, near a brilliant show of
laurel and rhododendron, and ate our lun-
cheon to the music of the stream. I finished
first, as my evil habit is, and was crossing
the brook on natural stepping-stones when
a bird — a warbler of some unknown kind
- — saluted me from the thicket. Making
my companion a signal not to disturb us by
driving into the stream, I gave myself up
to discovering the singer ; edging this way
and that, while the fellow moved about also,
always unseen, and sang again and again,
now a louder song, now, with charming effect,
a quieter and briefer one, till I was almost as
badly beside myself as the preacher had been
half an hour before. But my warfare was
less successful than his, for, with all my
pains, I saw not so much as a feather.
There is nothing prettier than a jungle of
laurel and rhododendron in full bloom, but
there are many easier places in which to
make out a bird.

Williams Point, which we reached on foot,
after driving as near it as the roughness of
the unfrequented road would comfortably
allow, is not in itself equal to Signal Point,

174 A WEEK ON WALVEN'S RIDGE.

but affords substantially the same magnifi-
cent prospect. Near it, in the woods, stood
a newly built cabin, looking badly out of
place with its glaring un weathered boards ;
and beside the cabin stood a man and
woman in a condition of extreme disgust.
The man had come up the mountain to work
in some coal-mine, if I understood him cor-
rectly ; but the tools were not ready, there
was no water, his household goods were
stranded down in the valley somewhere (the
hens were starving to death, the woman
added), and, all in all, the pair were in a
sorry plight.

Here, as at Signal Point, I made an addi-
tion to my local ornithology, and this time
too the bird was a hawk. We were stand-
ing on the edge of the cliff, when a sparrow
hawk, after alighting near us, took wing and
hung for some time suspended over the
abyss, beating against the breeze, and so
holding itself steady, — a graceful piece of
Work, the better appreciated for being seen
from above. Here, also, for the first time
in my life, I was addressed as a " you-un."
" Where be you-uns from ? " asked the
woman at the cabin, after the ordinary greet-

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 175

ings had been exchanged. I believe, in my
innocence, I had always looked upon that
word as an invention of story-writers.

Somewhere in this neighborhood we
traversed a pine wood, in which my first
Walden pine warbler was trilling. Then,
for some miles, we drove along the Brow,
with the glory of the world — valley, river,
and mountain — outspread before us, and
the Great Smokies looming in the back-
ground, barely visible through the haze.
For seven miles, I was told, one could drive
along that mountain rim. Surely the city
of Chattanooga is happy in its suburbs.
Here were many cottages, the greater num-
ber as yet unopened ; and not far beyond
the one under the piazza of which I had
weathered the thunderstorm of the day be-
fore, the road entered the forest again.
Then, as the way grew more and more diffi-
cult, we left the horse behind us, and by
and by came to a footpath. This brought us
at last to Falling Water Fall, where Little
Falling Water — after threading the swamp
and passing Mabbitt's Spring, as before
described — tumbles over a precipice which
my companion, with his surveyor's eye, esti-

176 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

mated to be one hundred and fifty feet in
height. The slender stream, broken into
jewels as it falls, strikes the bottom at some
distance from the foot of the cliffs, which
here form the arc of a circle, and are not
perpendicular, but deeply hollowed. After
enjoying the prospect from this point, —
holding to a tree and leaning over the edge
of the rocks, — we retraced our steps till we
came to a steep, zigzag path, which took us
to the foot of the precipice. Here, as well
as above, were laurel and rhododendron in
profusion. One big rhododendron-tree grew
on the face of the cliff, thirty feet over our
heads, leaning outward, and bearing at least
fifty clusters of gorgeous rose-purple flowers ;
and a smaller one, in a similiar position,
was equally full. The hanging gardens of
Babylon may have been more wonderful,
but I was well content.

From the point where we stood the ledge
makes eastward for a long distance, almost
at right angles, and the cliffs for a mile —
or, more likely, for two or three miles —
were straight before us, broken everywhere
into angles, light gray and reddish-brown
intermixed, with the late afternoon sun shin'

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 177

ing full upon them, and the green forest
fringing them above and 'sweeping away
from them below.

It was a breathless clamber up the rocks
again, tired and poorly off as I was, but I
reached the top with one hand full of rho-
dodendrons (it seemed a shame to pick them,
and a shame to leave them), and in half an
hour we were driving homeward, our day's
work done ; while my seatmate, who, besides
being preacher, lawyer, surveyor, and farmer,
was also a mystic and a saint, — though he
would have refused the word, — fell into a
strain of reminiscence, appropriate to the
hour, about the inner life of the soul, its
hopes, its struggles, and its joys. I listened
in reverent silence. The passion for per-
fection is not yet so common as to have
become commonplace, and one need not be
certain of a theory in order to admire a
practice. He had already told me who his
father was, and I had ceased to wonder at
his using now and then a choice phrase.

My friend (he will allow me that word, I
am sure) had given me a day of days, and
with it a new idea of this mountain world ;
where the visitor finds hills and valleys,

178 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE.

creeks and waterfalls, the most beautiful of
forests, with clearings, isolated cabins, strag-
gling settlements, orchards, and gardens,
and where he forgets again and again that
he is on a mountain at all. Even now I had
seen but a corner of it, as I have seen but a
corner of the larger world on which, for
these few years back, I have had what I call
my existence. And even of what I saw,
much has gone undescribed : stately tulip-
trees deep in the forest, with humming-birds
darting from flower to flower among them ;
the flame-colored azalea ; the ground flowers
of the woods, including some tiny yellow
lady's - slippers, too dainty for the foot of
Cinderella herself; the road to Sawyer's
Springs ; and numbers of birds, whose names,
even, I have omitted. It was a wonderful
world ; but if the hobbyist may take the pen
for a single sentence, it may stand confessed
that the greatest wonder of all was this, —
that in all those miles of oak forest I found
not one blue jay.

Another surprising circumstance, which I
do not remember to have noticed, however,
till my attention was somewhat rudely called
to it, was the absence of colored people.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S EIDGE. 179

With the exception of three servants at the
hotel, I saw none but whites. Walden's
Eidge, although stanchly Union in war-time,
and largely Republican now, as I was told,
is a white man's country. I had gone to
bed one night, and was fast asleep, when I
was wakened suddenly by the noise of some
one hurrying up the stairs and shouting,
" Where's the gun ? Where's the gun ?
Shorty's been shot!" "Shorty" was the
colored waiter, and the speaker was a gen-
eral factotum, an English boy. The colored
people — Shorty, his wife, and the cook —
had been out on the edge of the woods be-
hind the house, when three men had fired
at them, or pretended to do so. It was ex-
plained the next morning that this was only
an attempt (on the part of some irresponsible
young men, as the older residents said) to
" run the niggers off the mountain," — after
what I understood to be a somewhat regular
custom. " Niggers " did not belong there ;
their place was down below. If a Chat-
tanooga cottager brought up a colored ser-
vant, he was " respectfully requested " to send
him back, and save the natives the trouble
of attending to the matter. In short, the

180 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

Eidgites appeared to look upon " niggers "
as Northern laborers look upon non-union
men — " scabs."

The hotel-keeper, an Englishman, with an
Englishman's notions about personal rights,
was naturally indignant. He would hire his
own servants, or he would shut the house.
In any event, the presence of " Whitecaps,"
real or imaginary, must affect his summer
patronage. I fully expected to see the col-
ored trio pack up and go back to Chatta-
nooga, without waiting for further hints;
but they showed no disposition to do any-
thing of the sort, and, I must add, rose in
my estimation accordingly.

Of the feeling of the community I had a
slight but ludicrous intimation a day or two
after the shooting. I passed a boy whom I
had noticed in the road, some days before,
playing with a pig, lifting him by the hind
legs and pitching him over forwards. " He
can turn a somerset good," he had said to me,
as I passed. Now, for the sake of being
neighborly, I asked, " How 's the pig to-
day ? " He smiled, and made some reply,
as if he appreciated the pleasantry ; but a
more serious-looking playmate took up his

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S KIDGE. 181

parable, and said, " The pig '11 be all right,
if the folks up at the hotel don't shoot him."
His tone and look were intended to be
deeply significant. " Oh, I know you," they
implied: "you are up at the hotel, where
they threaten to shoot white folks."

For my last afternoon — wars and rumors
of wars long since forgotten — I went to the
place that had pleased me first, the valley
of Falling Water Creek. The cross-vine on
the dead hemlock had by this time dropped
the greater part of its l3ells, but even yet
many were hanging from the uppermost
branches. The rhododendron was still at
the height of its splendor. All the gardens
were nothing to it, I said to myself. Cross-
ing the creek on the log, and the branch on
stepping-stones, I went to quench my thirst
at the Marshall Spring, which once had a
cabin beside it, and frequent visitors, but
now was clogged with fallen leaves and
seemingly abandoned. It was perhaps more
beautiful so. Directly behind it rose a steep
bank, and in front stood an oak and a
maple, the latter leaning toward it and form-
ing a pointed arch, — a worthy entrance.
Mossy stones walled it in, and ferns grew

182 A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

luxuriantly about it. Just over them, an
azalea still held two fresh pink flowers, the
last till another May. In such a spot it
would have been easy to grow sentimental ;
but there came a rumbling of thunder, the
sky darkened, and, with a final hasty look
about me, I picked up my umbrella and
started homeward.

My last walk had ended like many others
in that showery, fragmentary week. But
what is bad weather when the time is past ?
All those black clouds have left no shadow
on Walden's Bidge, and the best of all my
strolls beside Falling Water, a stroll not yet
finished,

" The calm sense of seen beauty without sight,"

suffers no harm. As Thoreau says, " It is
after we get home that we really go over the
mountain."

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

WHOEVER loves the music of English
sparrows should live in Chattanooga ; there
is no place on the planet, it is to be hoped,
where they are more numerous and perva-
sive. Mocking-birds are scarce. To the
best of my recollection, I saw none in the
city itself, and less than half a dozen in the
surrounding country. A young gentleman
whom I questioned upon the subject told me
that they used to be common, and attributed
their present increasing rarity to the perse-
cution of boys, who find a profit in selling
the young into captivity. Their place, in
the city especially, is taken by catbirds;
interesting, imitative, and in their own
measure tuneful, but poor substitutes for
mocking-birds. In fact, that is a role which
it is impossible to think of any bird as really
filling. The brown thrush, it is true, sings
quite in the mocking-bird's manner, and, to
my ear, almost or quite as well; but he
possesses no gift as a mimic, and further-

184 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

more, without being exactly a bird of the
forest or the wilderness, is instinctively and
irreclaimably a recluse. It would be hard,
even among human beings, to find a nature
less touched with urbanity. In the mock-
ing-bird the elements are more happily
mingled. Not gregarious, intolerant of
rivalry, and, as far as creatures of his own
kind are concerned, a stickler for elbow-
room, — sharing with his brown relative in
that respect, — he is at the same time a
born citizen and neighbor ; as fond of gar-
dens and dooryard trees as the thrasher is
of scrublands and barberry bushes. " Man
delights me," he might say, " and woman
also." He likes to be listened to, it is
pretty certain ; and possibly he is dimly
aware of the artistic value of appreciation,
without which no artist ever did his best.
Add to this endearing social quality the
splendor and freedom of the mocker's vocal
performances, multifarious, sensational, in-
comparable, by turns entrancing and amus-
ing, and it is easy to understand how he has
come to hold a place by himself in Southern
sentiment and literature. A city without
mocking-birds is only half Southern, though

SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES. 185

black faces be never so thick upon the side-
walks and mules never so common in the
streets. If the boys have driven the great
mimic away from Chattanooga, it is time
the fathers took the boys in hand. Civic
pride alone ought to bring this about, to
say nothing of the possible effect upon real
estate values of the abundant and familiar
presence of this world-renowned, town-lov-
ing, town-charming songster.

From my window, on the side of Cameron
Hill, I heard daily the singing of an orchard
oriole — another fine and neighborly bird —
and a golden warbler, with sometimes the
fidgety, fidgety of a Maryland yellow-throat.
What could he be fussing about in so
unlikely a quarter? An adjoining yard
presented the unnatural spectacle — unnat-
ural, but, I am sorry to say, not unprece-
dented — of a bird-house occupied in part-
nership by purple martins and English
sparrows. They had finished their quarrels,
if they had ever had any, — which can
hardly be open to doubt, both native and
foreigner being constitutionally belligerent,
— and frequently sat side by side upon the
ridge-pole, like the best of friends. The

186 SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

oftener I saw them there, the more indig-
nant I became at the martins' un-American
behavior. Such a disgraceful surrender of
the Monroe Doctrine was too much even for
a man of peace. I have never called myself
a Jingo, but for once it would have done me
good to see the lion's tail twisted.

With the exception of a few pairs of
rough-wings on Missionary Eidge, the mar-
tins seemed to be the only swallows in the
country at that time of the year; and
though Prague subis, in spite of an occa-
sional excess of good nature, is a most noble
bird, it was impossible not to feel that by
itself it constituted but a meagre represen-
tation of an entire family. Swallows are
none too numerous in Massachusetts, in
these days, and are pretty certainly growing
fewer and fewer, what with the prevalence
of the box - monopolizing European spar-
row, and the passing of the big, old-fash-
ioned, widely ventilated barn ; for there is
no member of the family, not even the sand
martin, whose distribution does not depend
in great degree upon human agency. Even
yet, however, if a Massachusetts man will
make a circuit of a few miles, he will usually

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 187

meet with tree swallows, barn swallows, cliff
swallows, sand martins, and purple martins.
In other words, he need not go far to find
all the species of eastern North America,
with the single exception of the least attrac-
tive of the six ; that is to say, the rough-
wing. As compared with the people of
eastern Tennessee, then, we are still pretty
well favored. It is worth while to travel
now and then, if only to find ourselves better
off at home.

It might be easy to suggest plausible
reasons for the general absence of swallows
from a country like that about Chattanooga ;
but the extraordinary scarcity of hawks,
while many persons — not ornithologists —
would account it less of a calamity, is more
of a puzzle. From Walden's Ridge I saw
a single sparrow hawk and a single red-tail ;
in addition to which I remember three birds
whose identity I could not determine. Five
hawks in the course of three weeks spent
entirely out of doors, in the neighborhood of
mountains covered with old forest ! Taken
by itself, this unexpected showing might
have been ascribed to some queer combina-
tion of accidents, or to a failure of observa-

188 SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

tion. In fact, I was inclined so to explain
it till I noticed that Mr. Brewster had
chronicled a similar state of things in what
is substantially the same piece of country.
Writing of western North Carolina, he
says : l " The general scarcity — one may
almost say absence — of hawks in this re-
gion during the breeding season is simply
unaccountable. Small birds and mammals,
lizards, snakes, and other animals upon
which the various species subsist are every-
where numerous, the country is wild and
heavily forested, and, in short, all the neces-
sary conditions of environment seem to be
fulfilled." Certainly, so far as my ingenuity
goes, the mystery is " unaccountable ; " but
of course, like every other mystery, it would
open quickly enough if we could find the
key.

Turkey vultures were moderately nu-
merous, — much less abundant than in
Florida, — and twice I saw a single black
vulture, recognizable, almost as far as it
could be seen (but I do not mean at a first
glance, nor without due precaution against
foreshortened effects), by its docked tail.

The Auk, vol. iii. p. 103.

SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES. 189

Both are invaluable in their place, — useful,
graceful, admirable, and disgusting. The
vultures, the martins, and the swifts were
the only common aerial birds. The swifts,
happily, were everywhere, — jovial souls in
a sooty dress, — and had already begun
nest-building. I saw them continually pull-
ing up against the twigs of a partially dead
tree near my window. In them nature has
developed the bird idea to its extreme, —
a pair of wings, with just body enough for
ballast ; like a racing-yacht, built for no-
thing but to carry sail and avoid resistance.
Their flight is a good visual music, as
Emerson might have said ; but I love also
their quick, eager notes, like the sounds of
children at play. And while it has nothing
to do with Tennessee, I am prompted to
mention here a bird of this species that I
once saw in northern New Hampshire on
the 1st of October, — an extraordinarily
late date, if my experience counts for any-
thing. With a friend I had made an ascent
of Mount Lafayette (one of the days of a
man's life), and as we came near the Profile
House, on our return to the valley, there
passed overhead a single chimney swift.

190 SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

What he could be doing there at that season
was more than either of us could divine. It
was impossible to feel any great concern
about him, however. The afternoon was
nearly done, but at the rate he was traveling
it seemed as if he might be in Mexico before
sunrise. And easily enough he may have
been, if Mr. Gatke is right in his contention
that birds of very moderate powers of wing
are capable of flying all night at the rate of
four miles a minute !

The comparative scarcity of crows about
Chattanooga, and the amazing dearth of
jays in the oak forest of Walden's Ridge,
have been touched upon elsewhere. As for
the jays, their absence must have been more
apparent than real, I am bound to believe.
It was their silent time, probably. Still
another thing that I found surprising was
^the small number of woodpeckers. For the
first four days I saw not a single repre-
sentative of the family. It would be next
to impossible to be so much out of doors in
Massachusetts at any season of the year
with a like result. During my three weeks
in Tennessee I saw eight flickers, seven
hairy woodpeckers, two red-heads, and two

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 191

or three red-cockaded woodpeckers, besides
which I heard one downy and one "log-
cock." The last-named bird, which is big
enough for even the careless to notice,
seemed to be well known to the inhabitants
of Walden's Eidge, where I heard it. By
what they told me, it should be fairly com-
mon, but I saw nothing of its " peck-holes."
The first of my two red-headed woodpeckers
was near the base of Missionary Eidge,
wasting his time in exploring pole after pole
along the railway. Did he mistake them
for so many dead trees still standing on
their own roots ? Dry and seemingly unde-
cayed, they appeared to me to offer small
encouragement to a grub-seeker ; but prob-
ably the fellow knew his own business best.
On questions of economic entomology, I
fear I should prove but a lame adviser for
the most benighted woodpecker that ever
drummed. And yet, being a man, I could
not help feeling that this particular red-
head was behaving uncommonly like a fool.
Was there ever a man who did not take it
as a matter of course that he should be wiser
than the " lower animals " ?

Humming-birds cut but a small figure in

192 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

my daily notes till I went to Walden's
Ridge. There, in the forest, they were
noticeably abundant, — for humming-birds,
that is to say. It seemed to be the time of
pairing with them ; more than once the two
sexes were seen together, — an unusual
occurrence, unless my observation has been
unfortunate, after the nest is built, or even
while it is building. One female piqued my
curiosity by returning again and again to
the bole of an oak, hovering before it as
before a flower, and more than once clinging
to its rough upright surface. At first I
took it for granted that she was picking
off bits of lichen with which to embellish
the outer wall of her nest ; but after each
browsing she alighted here or there on a
leafless twig. If she had been gathering
nest material, she would have flown away
with it, I thought.

At another time, in a tangle of shrubbery,
I witnessed a most lively encounter between
two humming-birds ; a case of fighting or
love-making, — two things conf usingly alike
to an outsider, — in the midst of which one
of the contestants suddenly displayed so
dazzling a gorget that for an instant I

SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES. 193

mistook it for a scarlet flower. I did not
" wipe my eye," not being a poet, nor even
a " rash gazer," but I admired anew the
wonderful flashing jewel, now coal-black,
now flaming red, with which, perhaps, the
male ruby-throat blinds his long-suffering
mate to all his shameful treatment of her
in her season of watchfulness and motherly
anxiety. Does she never remind him, I
wonder, that there are some things whose
price is far above rubies? I had never
seen the humming-bird so much a forest-
dweller as here, and gladly confessed that
I had never seen him when he looked so
romantically at home and in place. The
tulip-trees, in particular, might have been
made on purpose for him.

As the Chattanooga neighborhood was
poorly supplied with hawks, woodpeckers,
and swallows, so was it likewise with spar-
rows, though in a less marked degree. The
common species — the only resident species
that I met with, but my explorations were
nothing like complete — were chippers, field
sparrows, and Bachman sparrows ; the first
interesting for their familiarity, the other
two for their musical gifts. In a compari-

194 SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

son between eastern Tennessee — as I saw
it — and eastern Massachusetts, the Bach-
man sparrow must be set against the song
sparrow, the vesper sparrow, and the swamp
sparrow. It is a brilliant and charming
songster, one of the very finest; but it
would be too costly a bargain to buy its
presence with loss of the song sparrow's
abounding versatility and high spirits, and
the vesper sparrow's unfailing sweetness,
serenity, and charm.

So much for the sparrows, commonly so
called. If we come to the family as a whole,
the goodly family of sparrows and finches,
we miss in Tennessee the rose-breasted gros-
beak and the purple finch, two of our best
esteemed Massachusetts birds, both for
music and for beauty; to offset which we
have the cardinal grosbeak, whose whistle is
exquisite, but who can hardly be ranked as
a singer above either the rose-breast or the
linnet, to say nothing of the two combined.

At the season of my visit, — in the latter
half of the vernal migration, — the prepon-
derance of woodland birds, especially of the
birds known as wood warblers, was very
striking. Of ninety-three species observed,

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 195

twenty-eight belonged to the warbler family.
In this list it was curious to remark the
absence of the Nashville and the Tennessee.
The circumstance is significant of the com-
parative worthlessness — except from a his-
torical point of view — of locality names as
they are applied to American birds in gen-
eral. Here were Maryland yellow-throats,
Cape May warblers, Canada warblers, Ken-
tucky warblers, prairie warblers, palm war-
blers, Acadian flycatchers, but not the two
birds (the only two, as well as I remem-
ber) that bear Tennessee names.1 The
absence of the Nashville was a matter of
wonderment to me. Dr. Rives, I have since
noticed, records it as only a rare migrant
in Virginia. Yet by some route it reaches
eastern New England in decidedly handsome
numbers. Its congener, the blue golden-
wing, surprised me in an opposite direction,
— by its commonness, both in the lower

1 Both these warblers — the Nashville and the Tennes-
see — were named by Wilson from the places where the
original specimens were shot. Concerning the Tennessee
warbler he sets down the opinion that " it is most prob-
ably a native of a more southerly climate." It would be
a pity for men to cease guessing, though the shrewdest
are certain to be sometimes wrong.

196 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

country near the river and on Walden's
Ridge. This, too, is a rare bird in Virginia ;
so much so that Dr. Rives has never met
with it there. In certain places about Chat-
tanooga it was as common as it is locally in
the towns about Boston, where, to satisfy a
skeptical friend, I once counted eleven males
in song in the course of a morning's walk.
That the Chattanooga birds were on their
breeding grounds I had at the time no ques-
tion, although I happened upon no proof of
the fact.

In the same way, from the manner in
which the oven-birds were scattered over
Walden's Ridge in the middle of May, I
assumed, rather hastily, that they were at
home for the summer. Months afterward,
however, happening to notice their southern
breeding limits as given by the best of
authorities, — " breeding from . . . Virginia
northward," — I saw that I might easily
have been in error. I wrote, therefore, to
a Chattanooga gentleman, who pays atten-
tion to birds while disclaiming acquaintance
with ornithology, and he replied that if the
oven-bird summered in that country he did
not know it. The case seemed to be going

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 197

against me, but I bethought myself of Mr.
Brewster's "Ornithological Keconnaissance
in Western North Carolina," and there I
read,1 " The open oak woodlands, so preva-
lent in this region, are in every way adapted
to the requirements of the oven-bird, and
throughout them it is one of the common-
est and most characteristic summer birds."
" Open oak woodlands " is exactly descrip-
tive of the Walden's Ridge forest ; and east-
ern Tennessee and western North Carolina
being practically one, I resume my assured
belief (personal and of no authority) that
the birds I saw and heard were, as I first
thought, natives of the mountain. Birds
which are at home have, as a rule, an air
of being at home ; a certain manner hard
to define, but felt, nevertheless, as a pretty
strong kind of evidence — not proof — by a
practiced observer.

Several of the more northern species of
the warbler family manifested an almost ex-
clusive preference for patches of evergreens.
I have elsewhere detailed my experience in
a grove of stunted pines on Lookout Moun-
tain. A similar growth is found on Cam-
1 The Auk, vol. iii. p. 175.

198 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

eron Hill, — in the city of Chattanooga, —
one side of which is occupied by dwellings,
while the other drops to the river so precipi-
tously as to be almost inaccessible, and is
even yet, I was told, an abode of foxes. On
the day after my arrival I strolled to the
top of the hill toward evening, and in the
pines found a few black -polls and yellow-
rumps. I was in a listless mood, having
already taken a fair day's exercise under an
intolerable sun, but I waked up with a start
when my glass fell on a bird which at a
second glance showed the red cheeks of a
Cape May warbler. For a moment I was
almost in poor Susan's case, —

" I looked, and my heart was in heaven."

Then, all too soon, as happened to poor
Susan also, the vision faded. But I had
seen it. Yes, here it was in Tennessee, the
rarity for which, spring after spring, I had
been so many years on the watch. I had
come South to find it, after all, — a bird
that breeds from the northern border of New
England to Hudson's Bay !

It is of the nature of such excitements
that, at the time, the subject of them has no

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 199

thought of analyzing or justifying his emo-
tions. He is better employed. Afterward,
in some vacant mood, with no longer any-
thing actively to enjoy, he may play with
the past, and from an evil habit, or flatter-
ing himself with a show of intellectuality,
may turn his former delight into a study ;
tickling his present conceit of himself by
smiling at the man he used to be. How
very wise he has grown, to be sure ! All
such refinements, nevertheless, if he did but
know it, are only a poorer kind of child's
play; less spontaneous, infinitely less satis-
fying, and equally irrational. Ecstasy is
not to be assayed by any test that the rea-
son is competent to apply ; nor does it need
either defense or apology. It is its own
end, and so, like beauty, its own excuse for
being. That is one of the crowning felici-
ties of this present order of things, — the
world, as we call it. What dog would hunt
if there were no excitement in overhauling
the game ? And how would elderly people
live through long evenings if there were no
exhilaration in the odd trick ?

" What good does it do ? " a prudent
friend and adviser used to say to me, smiling

200 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

at the fervor of my first ornithological en-
thusiasm. He thought he was asking me
a poser ; but I answered gayly, " It makes
me happy ; " and taking things as they run,
happiness is a pretty substantial "good."
So was it now with the sight of this long-
desired warbler. It taught me nothing ; it
put nothing into my pocket; but it made
me happy, — happy enough to sing and
shout, though I am ashamed to say I did
neither. And even a sober son of the Puri-
tans may be glad to find himself, in some
unexpected hour, almost as ineffably de-
lighted as he used to be with a new plaything
in the time when he had not yet tasted of
the tree of knowledge, and knew not that
the relish for playthings could ever be out-
grown. I cannot affirm that I went quite
as wild over my first Cape May warbler as
I did over my first sled (how well the rapture
of that frosty midwinter morning is remem-
bered, — a hard crust on the snow, and the
sun not yet risen!), but I came as near to
that state of heavenly felicity — to reenter
which we must become as little children —
as a person of my years is ever likely to do,
perhaps.

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 201

It is one precious advantage of natural
history studies that they afford endless op-
portunities for a man to enjoy himself in
this sweetly childish spirit, while at the same
time his occupation is dignified by a certain
scientific atmosphere and relationship. He
is a collector of insects, let us say. Whether
he goes to the Adirondacks for the summer,
or to Florida for the winter, he is surrounded
with nets and cyanide bottles. He travels
with them as another travels with packs of
cards. Every day's catch is part of the
game ; and once in a while, as happened to
me on Cameron Hill, he gets a " great hand,"
and in imagination, at least, sweeps the
board. Commonplace people smile at him,
no doubt; but that is only amusing, and
he smiles in turn. He can tell many good
stories under that head. He delights to be
called a " crank." It is all because of peo-
ple's ignorance. They have no idea that he
is Mr. So-and-So, the entomologist ; that he
is in correspondence with learned men the
country over ; that he once discovered a new
cockroach, and has had a grasshopper named
after him ; that he has written a book, or is
going to write one. Happy man ! a contrib-

202 SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

utor to the world's knowledge, but a pleasure-
seeker ; a little of a savant, and very much
of a child ; a favorite of Heaven, whose work
is play. No wonder it is commonly said
that natural historians are a cheerful set.

For the supplying of rarities and surprises
there are no birds like the warblers. Their
pursuit is the very spice of American orni-
thology. The multitude of species (Mr.
Chapman's "Handbook of the Birds of East-
ern North America" enumerates forty-five
species and sub-species) is of itself an incal-
culable blessing in this respect. No single
observer is likely ever to come to the end of
them. They do not warble, it must be owned,
and few of them have much distinction as
singers, the best that I know being the
black-throated green and the Kentucky ; but
they are elegant and varied in their plumage,
with no lack of bright tints, while their
extreme activity and their largely arboreal
habits render their specific determination and
their individual study a work most agreeably
difficult and tantalizing. The ornithologist
who has seen all the warblers of his own
territory, say of New England, and knows
them all by their notes, and has found all

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 203

their nests, — well, he is himself a pretty
rare specimen.

As for my experience with the family in
Tennessee, I was glad, of course, to scrape
acquaintance — or to renew it, as the case
might be — with the more southern species,
the Kentucky, the hooded, the cerulean, the
blue-wing, and the yellow-throat: that was
partly why I was here ; but perhaps I en-
joyed quite as keenly the sight of our own
New England birds moving homeward ; tar-
rying here and there for a day, but not to
be tempted by all the allurements of this
fine country; still pushing on, northward,
and still northward, as if for them there
were no place in the world but the woods
where they were born. Of the southern
species just named, the Kentucky was the
most abundant, with the hooded not far be-
hind. The prairie warbler seemed about as
common here as in its favored Massachu-
setts haunts ; but unless my ear was at fault
its song went somewhat less trippingly : it
sounded labored, — too much like the scarlet
tanager's in the way of effort and jerkiness.
Unlike the golden warbler, the prairie was
found not only in the lower country, but —

204 SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

in less numbers — on Walden's Ridge. The
two warblers that I listed every day, no
matter where I went, were the chat and the
black-and-white creeper.

When all is said, the Kentucky, with its
beauty and its song, is the star of the family,
as far as eastern Tennessee is concerned. I
can hear it now, while Falling Water goes
babbling past in the shade of laurel and
rhododendron. As for the chat, it was om-
nipresent: in the valley, along the river, on
Missionary Ridge, on Lookout Mountain,
on Walden's Ridge, in the national cemetery,
at Chickamauga, — everywhere, in short,
except within the city itself. In this regard
it exceeded the white-eyed vireo, and even
the indigo-bird, I think. Black-polls were
seen daily up to May 13, after which they
were missing altogether. The last Cape
May and the last yellow-rump were noted on
the 8th, the last redstart and the last palm
warbler on the llth, the last chestnut-side,
magnolia, and Canadian warbler on the 12th.
On the 12th, also, I saw my only Wilson's
black-cap. In my last outing, on the 18th,
on Walden's Ridge, I came upon two Black-
burnians in widely separate places. At the

SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES. 205

time, I assumed them to be migrants, in spite
of the date. One of them was near the
hotel, on ground over which I had passed
almost daily. Why they should be so be-
hindhand was more than I could tell ; but
only the day before I had seen a thrush
which was either a gray-cheek or an olive-
back, and of course a bird of passage. " The
flight of warblers did not pass entirely until
May 19," says Mr. Jeffries, writing of what
he saw in western North Carolina.1

The length of time occupied by some
species in accomplishing their semi-annual
migration is well known to be very consid-
erable, and is best observed — in spring, at
least — at some southern point. It is admir-
ably illustrated in Mr. Chapman's " List of
Birds seen at Gainesville, Florida." 2 Tree
swallows, he tells us, were abundant up to
May 6, a date at which Massachusetts tree
swallows have been at home for nearly or
quite a month. Song sparrows were noted
March 31, two or three weeks after the
grand irruption of song sparrows into
Massachusetts usually occurs. Bobolinks,

1 The Auk, vol. vi. p. 120.

2 Ibid., vol. v. p. 267.

206 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

which reach Massachusetts by the 10th of
May, or earlier, were still very abundant —
both sexes — May 25 ! Such dates are not
what we should have expected, I suppose,
especially in the case of a bird like the
bobolink, which has no very high northern
range ; but they seem not to be exceptional,
and are surprising only because we have not
yet mastered the general subject. Nothing
exists by itself, and therefore nothing can
be understood by itself. One thing the
most ignorant of us may see, — that the
long period covered by the migratory jour-
neys is a matter for ornithological thankful-
ness. In Massachusetts, for example, spring
migrants begin to appear in late February
or early March, and some of the most inter-
esting members of the procession — notably
the mourning warbler and the yellow-bellied
flycatcher — are to be looked for after the
first of June. The autumnal movement is
equally protracted ; so that for at least half
the year — leaving winter with its arctic
possibilities out of consideration — we may
be on the lookout for strangers.

One of the dearest pleasures of a southern
trip in winter or early spring is the very

SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES. 207

thing at which I have just now hinted, the
sight of one's home birds in strange sur-
roundings. You leave New England in
early February, for instance, and in two or
three days are loitering in the sunny pine-
lands about St. Augustine, with the trees
full of robins, bluebirds, and pine warblers,
and the savanna patches full of meadow
larks. Myrtle warblers are everywhere.
Phoebes salute you as you walk the city
streets, and flocks of chippers and vesper
sparrows enliven the fields along the country
roads. In a piece of hammock just outside
the town you find yourself all at once sur-
rounded by a winter colony of summer birds.
Here are solitary vireos, Maryland yellow-
throats, black-and-white creepers, prairie
warblers, red-poll warblers, hermit thrushes,
red-eyed chewinks, thrashers, catbirds, cedar-
birds, and many more. White-eyed vireos
are practicing in the smilax thickets, —
though they have small need of practice, —
and white-bellied swallows go flashing and
twittering overhead. The world is good,
you say, and life is a festival.

My vacation in Tennessee afforded less of
contrast and surprise, for a twofold reason :

208 SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

it was near the end of April, instead of early
in February, so that migrants had been arriv-
ing in Massachusetts for six or seven weeks
before my departure ; and Tennessee has no-
thing of the foreign, half -tropical look which
Florida presents to Yankee eyes ; but even
so, it was no small pleasure to step sud-
denly into a world full of summer music.
Such multitudes of birds as were singing
on Missionary Ridge on that first bright
forenoon ! The number of species was not
great, when it came to counting them, —
morning and afternoon together yielded but
forty-two; but the whole country seemed
alive with wings. And of the forty-two
species, thirty-two were such as summer in
Massachusetts or pass through it to their
homes beyond. Here were already (April
27) the olive-backed thrush, and northern
warblers like the black-poll, the bay-breast,
and the Cape May, none of which would be
due in Massachusetts for at least a fortnight.
Here, too, were yellow-rumps and white-
throated sparrows, though the advance
guard of both species had reached New Eng-
land before I left home. The white-throats
lingered on Walden's Ridge on the 13th of

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 209

May, a fact which surprised me more at the
time than it does in the review.

One bird was seen on this first day, and
not afterward. I had been into the woods
north of the city, and was returning, when
from the bridge over the Tennessee I caught
sight of a small flock of black birds, which
at first, even with the aid of my glass, I
could not make out, the bridge being so
high above the river and its banks. While
I was watching them, however, they began
to sing. They were bobolinks. Probably
the species is not common in eastern Ten-
nessee, as the name is wanting in Dr. Fox's
" List of Birds found in Roane County, Ten-
nessee, during April, 1884, and March and
April, 1885." !

I have ventured upon some slight orni-
thological comparison between southeastern
Tennessee and eastern Massachusetts, and,
writing as a patriot (or a partisan), have

1 The Auk, vol. iii. p. 315. Of sixty-two species seen
by me during the last four days of April, eleven are not
given by Dr. Fox, namely, Wilson's thrush, black-poll
warbler, bay-breasted warbler, Cape May warbler, black-
throated blue warbler, palm warbler, chestnut-sided war-
bler, blue golden-winged warbler, bobolink, Acadian fly-
catcher, yellow-billed cuckoo.

210 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

seen to it that the scale inclined northward.
To this end I have made as much as possible
of the absence of robins, song sparrows, and
vesper sparrows, and of the comparative
dearth of swallows ; but of course the loyal
Tennessean is in no want of a ready answer.
Robins, song sparrows, vesper sparrows, and
swallows are not absent, except as breeding
birds. He has them all in their season,1
and probably hears them sing. On the
whole, then, he may fairly retort, he has
considerably the advantage of us Yankees :
he sees our birds on their passage, and
drinks his fill of their music before we have
caught the first spring notes ; while we, on
the other hand, see nothing of his distinc-
tively southern birds unless we come South
for the purpose. Well, they are worth the
journey. Bachman's finch alone — yes, the
one dingy, shabbily clad little genius by
the Chickamauga well — might almost have
repaid me for my thousand miles on the rail.

It was a strange mingling of sensations
that possessed me in Chattanooga. The
city itself was like other cities of its age

1 See Dr. Fox's list.

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 211

and size, with some appearance of a com-
munity that had been in haste to grow, — a
trifle impatient, shall we say (impatience
being one of the virtues of youth), to pull
down its barns and build greater ; just now
a little checked in its ambition, as things
looked; yet still enterprising, still fairly
well satisfied with itself, with no lack of
energy and bustle. As it happened, there
was a stir in local politics at the time of my
visit (possibly there always is), and at the
street corners all patriotic citizens were ex-
horted to do their duty. "Vote for Tom

for sheriff," said one placard. " Vote

for Bob ," said another, in capitals

equally importunate. In Tennessee, as
everywhere else, the politician knows his
trade. Familiarity, readiness with the hand,
freedom with one's own name (Tom, not
Thomas, if you please), and a happy knack
at remembering the names of other people,
— these are some of the preelection tests of
statesmanship.

All in all, then, between politics and
business, the city was " very much alive," as
the saying goes ; but somehow it was not so
often the people about me that occupied my

212 SOME TENNESSEE BIED NOTES.

thoughts as those who had been here thirty
years before. Precious is the power of a
first impression. Because I was newly in
the country I was constantly under the feel-
ing of its past. Hither and thither I went
in the region round about, listening at every
turn, spying into every bush at the stirring
of a leaf or the chirp of a bird ; yet I had
always with me the men of '63, and felt
always that I was on holy ground.

A LIST OF BIRDS

FOUND IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF CHATTANOOGA
FROM APRIL 27 TO MAY 18, 1894.

1. Green Heron. Ardea virescens. — A single individual
seen from a car window. No other water birds were
observed except three or four ducks and a single wader,
all upon the wing and unidentified.

2. Bob White. Quail. Partridge. Colinus virginianus.

— Common.

3. Ruffed Grouse. "Pheasant." Bonasa umbellus. —
Heard drumming on Walden's Ridge.

4. Carolina Dove. Mourning Dove. Zenaidura ma-
croura. — A small number seen.

5. Turkey Vulture. Turkey Buzzard. Cathartes aura.

— Common.

6. Black Vulture. Carrion Crow. Catharista atrata.

— Two birds seen.

7. Red-tailed Hawk. Buteo borealis — One bird seen
from Walden's Ridge.

8. Sparrow Hawk. Falco sparverius. — One bird, on
Walden's Ridge.

9. Yellow - billed Cuckoo. Coccyzus americanus. —
Common. First noticed April 29.

10. Black-billed Cuckoo. Coccyzus eryihrophthalmus.

— Seen twice on Lookout Mountain, May 7 and 8, and
once on Walden's Ridge, May 12.

11. Belted Kingfisher. Ceryle alcyon. — A single bird
heard on Walden's Ridge.

12. Hairy Woodpecker. Dry abates villosus. — My notes
record seven birds. No attempt was made to determine

214 A LIST OF BIEDS.

their specific or sub-specific identity, but they are pre-
sumed to have been D. villosus, not D. villosus audubonii.

13. Downy Woodpecker. Dryobates pubescens. — A
single bird was heard (not seen) on Walden's Kidge, — a
noticeable reversal of the usual relative commonness of
this species and the preceding.

14. Red-cockaded Woodpecker. Dryobates borealis. —
Found only at Chickamauga, on Snodgrass Hill, in long-
leaved pines — two or three birds.

15. Pileated Woodpecker. "Logcock." Ceophlceus
pileatus. — Said to be common on Walden's Ridge, where
I heard its flicker-like shout.

16. Red-headed Woodpecker. Melanerpes erythrocepha-
lus. — One seen near Missionary Ridge and one at Chick-
amauga. The scarcity of this bird, and the absence of
the red-bellied and the yellow-bellied, were among the
surprises of my visit.

17. Flicker. Golden-winged Woodpecker. Colaptes
auratus. — Not common. Three birds were seen at Chick-
amauga, and it was occasional on Walden's Ridge, where
I listed it five days of the seven.

18. Whippoorwill. Antrostomus vociferus. — Un-
doubtedly common. I heard it only on Walden's Ridge,
the only place where I went into the woods after dark.

19. Nighthawk. Chordeiles virginianus. — Common.

20. Chimney Swift. Chcetura pelagica. — Abundant.

21. Ruby-throated Humming-bird. Trochilus colubris.
— Common in the forests of Walden's Ridge. Seen but
twice elsewhere. First seen April 28»

22. Kingbird. Tyrannus tyrannus. — Seen but three
times — nine specimens in all. First seen April 29.

23. Crested Flycatcher. Myiarchus crinitus. — Noticed
daily, with two exceptions.

24. Phoabe. Sayornis phoebe. — Common on Lookout
Mountain and Walden's Ridge. Not seen elsewhere.

A LIST OF BIEDS. 215

25. Wood Pewee. Contopus virens. — Very common.
Much the most numerous member of the family. Pres-
ent in good force April 27, and gathering nest materials
April 29.

26. Acadian Flycatcher. Green-crested Flycatcher.
Empidonax virescens. — Common.

27. Blue Jay. Cyanocitta cristata. — Scarce (for the
blue jay), and not seen on Walden's Ridge!

28. Crow. Corvus americanus. — Apparently much less
common than in Eastern Massachusetts.

29. Bobolink. Dolichonyx oryzivorus. — A small flock
seen, and heard singing, April 27.

30. Orchard Oriole. Icterus spurius. — Common, but
not found on Walden's Ridge.

31. Baltimore Oriole. Icterus galbula. — A single bird,
at Chickamauga, May 3.

32. Crow Blackbird. Quiscalus quiscula ? — Seen on
sundry occasions in the valley country, but specific dis-
tinction not made out. Both forms — Q. quiscula and Q.
quiscula ceneus — are found in Tennessee. See Dr. Fox's
List of Birds found in Roane County, Tennessee. " The
Auk," vol. iii. p. 315. My own list of the Icteridae is
remarkable for its omissions, especially of the cowbird,
the red-winged blackbird (which, however, I am pretty
certain that I saw on the wing) and the meadow lark.

33. House Sparrow. English Sparrow. Passer domes-
ticus. — Distressingly superabundant in the city and its
suburbs.

34. Goldfinch. Spinus tristis. — Abundant. Still in
flocks.

35. White-crowned Sparrow. Zonotrichia leucophrys. —
Seen but once (May 1), two birds, in the national ceme-
tery.

36. White-throated Sparrow. Zonotrichia albicollis.
— Common. Still present on Walden's Ridge (in two
places) May 13. Sang very little.

216 A LIST OF BIRDS.

37. Chipping Sparrow. Doorstep Sparrow. Spizetta
socialis. — Common.

38. Field Sparrow. Spizella pusilla. — Common.

39. Bachman's Sparrow. Peuccea cestivalis bachmanii.
— Common. One of the best of singers.

40. Chewink. Towhee. Pipilo erythrophthalmus. —
Rather common. Much less numerous than I should
have expected from the nature of the country.

41. Cardinal Grosheak. Cardinalis cardinalis. — Seen
daily, but seemingly not very numerous.

42. Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Habia ludoviciana. — A
single female, May 11.

43. Indigo-bird. Passerina cyanea. — Very abundant.
For the first time I saw this tropical-looking beauty in
flocks.

44. Scarlet Tanager. Piranga eryihromelas. — Common
on the mountains, but seemingly rare in the valley.

45. Summer Tanager. Piranga rubra. — Common
throughout.

46. Purple Martin. Progne subis. — Common.

47. Rough-winged Swallow. Stelgidopteryx serripen-
nis. — A few birds seen.

48. Red-eyed Vireo. Vireo olivaceus. — Common.
One of the species listed every day.

49. Yellow-throated Vireo. Vireo flavifrons. — Com-
mon. Seen or heard every day except April 27.

50. White-eyed Vireo. Vireo noveboracensis. — Abun-
dant. Heard every day.

51. Black - and - white Creeper. Mniotilta varia. —
Very common.

52. Blue-winged Warbler. Helminthophila pinus. —
One bird seen at Chickamauga, and a pair on Missionary
Ridge.

53. Golden-winged Warbler. Helminthophila chryso-
ptera. — Common, especially in the broken woods north of
the city.

A LIST OF BIRDS. 217

54. Panda Warbler. Blue Yellow-backed Warbler.
Compsothlypis americana. — Only on Walden's Ridge.

55. Cape May Warbler. Dendroica tigrina. — One bird
seen on Cameron Hill, and a small company on Lookout
Mountain — April 27, and May 7 and 8.

56. Yellow Warbler. Golden Warbler. Dendroica
cestiva. — Common, but not observed on Walden's Ridge.

57. Black-throated Blue Warbler. Dendroica cceru-
lescens. — Common, April 27 to May 14.

58. Myrtle Warbler. Yellow-rumped Warbler. Den-
droica coronata. — Noted April 27 and 28, and May 7
and 8.

59. Magnolia Warbler. Dendroica maculosa. — Not
uncommon, May 1 to 12.

60. Cerulean Warbler. Dendroica ccerulea. — One bird,
a male in song, on Lookout Mountain.

61. Chestnut-sided Warbler. Dendroica pensylvanica,

— Listed on six dates — April 27 to May 12.

62. Bay - breasted Warbler. Dendroica castanea. —
Seven or eight individuals — April 27 to May 10.

63. Black-poll Warbler. Dendroica striata. — Common
to May 13.

64. Blackburnian Warbler. Dendroica blackburnice. —
Seven birds — May 1 to 18.

65. Yellow - throated Warbler. Dendroica domimca.
(Albilora ?) — Found only at Chickamauga (Snodgrass
Hill), where it seemed to be common.

66. Black-throated green Warbler. Dendroica virens.

— Common.

67. Pine Warbler. Dendroica vigorsii. — Not numer-
ous, but found in appropriate places.

68. Palm Warbler. Dendroica palmarum. — The spe-
cific — or sub-specific — identity of this bird was not cer-
tainly determined, but I judged the specimens — seen
on four dates, April 29 to May 11 — to be as above given,
rather than D. palmarum hypochrysea.

218 A LIST OF BIKDS.

69. Prairie Warbler. Dendroica discolor. — Very com-
mon.

70. Oven-bird. Seiurus aurocapillus. — Common on
Lookout Mountain and Walden's Eidge. Seen but once
in the lower country.

71. Louisiana Water-thrush. Seiurus motacilla. — A
few birds seen on Walden's Ridge.

72. Kentucky Warbler. Geothlypis formosa. — Very
common, and in places very unlike.

73. Maryland Yellow - throat. Geothlypis trichas. —
Common.

74. Yellow-breasted Chat. Icteria virens. — Very com-
mon.

75. Hooded Warbler. Sylvania mitrata. — Common,
especially along the woodland streams on Walden's Ridge.

76. Wilson's Blackcap. Sylvania pusilla, — A single
bird on Walden's Ridge, May 12, in free song.

77. Canadian Warbler. Sylvania canadensis. — Seen
on three dates — May 6, 11, and 12.

78. Redstart. Setophaga ruticilla. — Common. Not
seen after May 14.

79. Mocking-bird. Mimus polyglottos. — Rare. Not
found on the mountains.

80. Catbird. Galeoscoptes carolinensis. — Very com-
mon, both in the city and in the country round about.

81. Brown Thrasher. Harporhynchus rufus. — Com-
mon.

82. Carolina Wren. Mocking Wren. Thryothorus ludo-
vicianus. — Common.

83. Bewick's Wren. Thryothorus bewickii. — Not com-
mon. Seen only on Missionary Ridge.

84. White-breasted Nuthatch. Sitta carolinensis. —
Common at Chickamauga and on Walden's Ridge. A
single bird noticed on Lookout Mountain.

85. Tufted Titmouse. Parus bicolor. — Common.

A LIST OF BIEDS. 219

86. Carolina Chickadee. Parus carolinensis. — Com-
mon.

87. Blue - gray Gnatcatcher. Polioptila ccerulea. —
Common.

88. Wood Thrush. Turdus mustelinus. — Very com-
mon. A bird with its beak full of nest materials was
seen April 29, at the base of Missionary Ridge.

89. Wilson's Thrush. Veery. Turdus fuscescens. —
Rare.

90. Gray-cheeked Thrush. Turdus alicice, or T. ali-
cice bicknelli. — Two birds, May 2 and 13.

91. Swainson's Thrush. Olive-backed Thrush. Tur-
dus ustulatus swainsonii. — In good numbers and free
song. Seen on four dates, the latest being May 12.

92. Robin. Merula migratoria. — Five birds in the
national cemetery, April 29.

93. Bluebird. Sialia sialis. — Common. Young birds
out of the nest, April 28.

INDEX.

ARBUTUS, 137.
Azalea : —

flame-colored, 178.

pink, 182.

white, 132.

Baptisia, blue, 14, 93.
Blackbird : —

crow, 99.

red-winged, 215.
Bluebird, 9, 13, 78, 99, 111,

207.

Bobolink, 205, 209.
Buzzard, turkey, 6, 188.

Catbird, 6, 17, 25, 43, 47, 78,

99, 111, 183, 207.
Catchfly, scarlet, 15, 85, 109.
Cedar-bird, 207.
Chat, yellow-breasted, 3, 6,

9,13,17,19,27,47,55,99,

110, 121, 135, 204.
Chewink, 6, 13, 207.
Chickadee, blackcap, 98.
Chickadee, Carolina, 13, 25,

71, 88.
Cowslip, 85.
Cranesbill, 34, 85.
Creeper, black-and-white, 6,

12, 33, 42, 117, 204, 207.
Cross-vine, 23, 137, 181.
Crow, 42, 189.
Cuckoo : —

black-billed, 31, 42.
yellow-billed, 19, 24, 71,
99, 111, 117.

Dogwood, flowering, 136.
Dove, mourning, 24.

Fern: —

cinnamon, 148.
maiden-hair, 47.
Finch : —

Bachman's, 2, 6, 9, 13,
25, 66, 78, 81, 110, 118,
193, 194, 210.
purple, 194.
Flicker, 66, 78, 190.
Flycatcher : —

Acadian, 17, 24, 26, 62,

117.
crested, 9, 13, 67, 71,

87.

yellow-bellied, 206.
Fringe-tree, 135.

Ginger, wild, 137.
Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 6,

13, 18, 55, 99, 110.
Goldfinch, 13, 17, 24, 25, 47,

78, 111.

Gromwell, 85, 92.
Grosbeak : —

cardinal, 6, 13, 23, 26,

42, 135, 146, 162.
rose-breasted, 119, 194.
Grouse, ruffed (pheasant),
167.

Hawk : -

red-tailed, 169, 187.

sparrow, 174, 187.
Hieracium, 122.
Houstonia, 23, 61, 85, 93.
Humming-bird, ruby-
throated, 109, 178, 191.

Indigo-bird, 6, 9, 13, 17, 47,

222

INDEX.

55, 72, 78, 110, 111, 121,
204.

Jay, blue, 178, 189.

Kingbird, 13, 87.
Kinglet, golden - crowned,
97.

Lady's-slipper, yellow, 178.

Lizard, 43, 55.

Locust, seventeen-year, 55,

70, 83, 114, 149.

Magnolia, 136, 148.
Martin, purple, 6, 185.
Maryland yellow-throat, 6,

13, 47, 61, 70, 185.
Milkweed, 92, 142.
Mistletoe, 110.
Mocking-bird, 6, 78, 82, 94,

183.
Mountain Laurel, 132, 135,

147, 169, 173, 176.

Nuthatch, white - breasted
(Carolina), 58, 61, 82.

Oriole : —

Baltimore, 78.
orchard, 13, 78, 99, 111,

185.
Oven-bird, 31, 33, 42, 122,

196.
Oxalis: —

violet, 34, 61, 85.
yellow, 85.

Pentstemon, 61, 122.
Pewee, wood, 6, 17, 33, 62,

71, 78, 99, 117, 135.
Phlox, 23, 34, 61, 85, 122.
Phoebe, 28, 41, 207.
Pink, Indian, 15.

Quail, 6, 71, 122.

Ragwort (Senecio), 93, 122.

Raven, 130.

Redstart, 6, 13, 25, 108, 117.

Rhododendron, 135-137, 147,

169, 173, 176, 181.
Robin, 96, 207, 210.
Rue anemone, 62, 85.

Saxifrage, 34.
Sparrow : —

Bachman's (see FINCH).
chipping, 6, 13, 26, 99,

111, 193, 207.
field, 6, 13,17,25,47,55,
62, 67, 70, 87, 117, 135,
193.
house (English) 93, 183,

185.

song, 4, 194, 205, 210.
vesper, 194, 207, 210.
white-crowned, 96.
white-throated, 6, 26, 95,

135, 142, 208.
Specularia, 122.
Spring beauty, 61, 85.
Stonecrop, white, 34.
Swallow : —

rough-winged, 22, 87, 88,

187.
tree (white-bellied), 187,

205, 207.
Sweet bush, 137.
Swift, chimney, 189.

Tanager : —

scarlet, 20, 24, 33, 41,

118, 131, 135, 162.
summer, 3, 6, 13, 17, 20,

47, 70, 78, 120, 131.
Thrasher (brown thrush), 6,
7, 13, 17, 33, 82, 99, 111,
183, 207.
Thrush: —

gray-cheeked, 141.
hermit, 207.
Louisiana water, 163.
olive - backed (Swain-
son's), 7, 13, 14,19, 20,
22, 24, 133, 208.

INDEX.

223

Wilson's (veery), 13, 14,

25, 111.

wood, 6, 13, 14, 17, 33,
47, 87, 99, 117, 120,
135.
Titmouse, tufted, 13, 14, 61,

70.

Tulip-tree, 178, 193.
Tupelo, 23.
Turkey, wild, 81, 130, 140.

Viburnum, maple-leaved, 34.
Violet, bird-foot, 34, 85.
Vireo : —

red-eyed, 6, 13, 33, 42,

47, 55, 70.
solitary, 207.
white-eyed, 6, 9, 13, 17,
47, 110, 121, 204, 207.
yellow-throated, 9, 13,

33, 70, 99, 117.
Vulture: —

black (carrion crow),

111, 188.
turkey, 6, 188.

Warbler : —

bay-breasted, 6, 28, 32,

38, 49, 208.
Blackburnian, 30, 31, 38,

204.
black-poll, 6, 12, 19, 28,

32, 38, 42, 49, 61, 81,

96, 117, 198, 204, 208.
black-throated blue, 12,

31, 32, 37, 135, 157.
black - throated green,

28, 31, 135, 156, 202.
blue-winged, 20, 22, 71,

79, 80.
blue yellow-backed, 21,

134, 135.
Canadian, 21, 22, 23, 117,

135,204.
Cape May, 32, 37, 39,

198, 200, 204, 208.
cerulean, 53.

chestnut-sided, 12, 25.

117, 204.
Connecticut, 14.
golden-winged, 13, 110,

120, 195.

hooded, 7, 48, 135, 146,

156, 203.
Kentucky, 9, 13, 14, 19,

24, 35, 47, 49, 109, 110,

116, 122, 132, 135, 156,

202-204.
magnolia, 19, 30, 32, 37,

117, 204.
mourning, 206.
myrtle (yellow-rumped),

6, 12, 32, 39, 198, 204,

207, 208.
Nashville, 195.
palm (redpoll), 32, 38,

117, 204, 207.
pine, 25, 175, 207.
prairie, 6, 21, 25, 110,

121, 203, 207.
Tennessee, 195.
Wilson's blackcap, 136,

204.
yellow (golden), 12, 99,

108, 185, 203,
yellow-throated, 72, 73,

75,80.
Water - thrush, Louisiana,

163.

Whippoorwill, 143.
Wintergreen, striped, 34.
Woodpecker : —
downy, 191.
golden-winged, 66, 190.
hairy, 30, 190.
pileated, 191.
red-cockaded, 67, 73, 80,

191.

red-headed, 80, 190, 191.
Wren : —
' Bewick's, 4.

Carolina (mocking), 6,
13, 17, 25, 26, 28, 42,
47, 55, 71, 109, 162.

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