A world of green hills; observations of nature and human nature in the Blue Ridge

A WORLD
OP

REEN
HILLS

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UIMVCRSITY OF
CALIFORNIA

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BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

A WORLD OF GREEN
HILLS

OBSERVATIONS OF NATURE

AND HUMAN NATURE

IN THE BLUE

RIDGE

BY

BRADFORD TORREY

He joyes in groves, and makes bimselfe full blythe
With sundrie flowers, in wilde fieldes gathered.

SPEKSER.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

Press,
1898

COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

PAGB

NORTH CAROLINA.

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES ... 8

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 34

A MOUNTAIN POND 71

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE . . . 104

VIRGINIA.

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES .... 145

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 208

INDEX 283

NORTH CAROLINA

A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES

IN a day and a night I had come from
early May to middle June ; from a world of
bare boughs to a forest clad in all the ver-
dure of summer. Such a shine as the big,
lusty leaves of the black-jack oaks had put
on ! I could have raised a shout. In the
day when " all the trees of the field shall
clap their hands," may I be somewhere in
the black-jack's neighborhood. Hour after
hour we sped along, out of North Carolina
into South Carolina : now through miles and
miles of forest; now past a lonely cabin,
with roses before the door, white honey-
suckle covering the fence, and acres of sunny
ploughed land on either side. Here a river
ran between close green hills, and there the
hills parted and disclosed the revolving hori-
zon set with blue mountains. Then, at a

4 NORTH CAROLINA

little past noon, the porter appeared with
his brush. " Seneca is next," he said. I
alighted in lonely state, was escorted to
the hotel, did my best with a luncheon, —
gleaned bit by bit out of an outlying wilder-
ness of small dishes, — and at the earliest
moment took my seat in a " buggy " beside
a colored boy who was to drive me to Wal-
halla, nine miles away. At that point I was
to be met, the next morning, by the carriage
that should convey me into the mountains.

Seneca is a smallish place, but my colored
driver was no countryman. " Boston ? "
Yes, yes ; he had lived there once himself.
He had been a Pullman porter. " But you
don't get to learn anything in that way," he
added, a little disdainfully ; " just running
back and forth." He had "waited" in
Florida, and had been to Jamaica and I for-
get where else, though he was only twenty-
three years old. He liked to go round and
see the world. " Married ? " No ; a man
who didn't live anywhere had no business
with a wife and children. Still he was not
oblivious to feminine charms, as became evi-
dent when we passed a pair of dusky beau-
ties. "Oh, I will look at 'em," he said,

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 5

with the tone of a man who had broken his
full share of hearts. He was one of the
fortunates who are born with their eyes
open. I quizzed him about birds. Yes, he
had noticed them ; he had been hunting a
good deal. This and the other were named,
— partridges, pheasants, doves, meadow
larks, chewinks, chats, night-hawks. Yes,
he knew them ; if not by the names I called
them by, then from my descriptions, to
which in most cases he proceeded to add
some convincing touches of his own. The
chat he did not recognize under that title,
but when I tried to hit off some of the bird's
odd characteristics he began to laugh. " Oh
yes, sir, I know that fellow." As for whip-
poorwills, the whole country was full of
them. "You can't hear your ears for 'em
at night," he declared. " No, sir, you can't
hear your ears." With all the rest he was
a " silverite." At the end of the drive I
handed him a dollar bill, one of Uncle Sam's
handsomest, as it happened, fresh from the
bank. He looked at it dubiously, fumbled
it a moment, and passed it back. " Say,
boss," he said, " can't you give me a silver
dollar? It might rain." In a land of

6 NORTH CAROLINA

thunder-showers and thin clothing, he meant
to say, what we need is an insoluble cur-
rency. That, as such things go, was a pretty
substantial argument for " free silver," or
so it seemed to me ; and I spoke of it, ac-
cordingly, a week or two afterward, to an
advocate of the "white metal." He was
impressed by it just as I had been, and
begged me to make use of the argument
when I got back to Boston; as I now do,
with all cheerfulness, feeling that, whatever
a man's own opinions may be, he is bound
to keep an ear open for the best that can be
put forward against them. At the same
time, I am constrained to add that I have
never been quite sure whether my driver's
plea was anything better than a polite sub-
terfuge. It would have been nothing won-
derful, surely, if he had questioned the genu-
ineness of a kind of money to which he was
so little accustomed. Small bills — " ones
and twos," as we familiarly call them —
have but a limited circulation at the South,
as all travelers must have noticed. On my
present trip, for instance, I bought a railway
ticket at a rural station, and proffered the
agent a two-dollar bill. He gave it a glance

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 1

of surprise, looked at me, — " Ah, a North-
ern man," so I read his thoughts, — and in-
continently slipped the bill into his pocket.
A rarity like that was not for the cash drawer
and the daily course of business. I might
almost as well have given him a two-dollar
gold coin ; like the pious heroine of a Sun-
day-school story I was reading the other
day, who dropped into the contribution-box
a " fifty-dollar gold piece " !

The rain, concerning whose destructive
power my colored boy had been so appre-
hensive, very soon set in, and left me nothing
to do but to make the best of an afternoon
upon the hotel piazza, with its outlook up
and down the village street, and its gossip
and politics. As to the latter I played the
part of listener, in spite of sundry courteous
attempts to draw me out. Tillman and the
silver question were discussed with a wel-
come coolness of spirit, while I looked at an
occasional passing horseman (it is the one
advantage of poor roads that they keep an
entire community in the saddle), or admired
the evolutions of the chimney swifts and
the martins. Roses and honeysuckles would
have made the dooryards beautiful, had that

8 NORTH CAROLINA

result fallen within the bounds of possibil-
ity, and a chinaberry-tree, full of purple
blossoms, was not only a thing of beauty in
itself, but to me was also a sweet remem-
brancer of Florida.

My only other recollection of the after-
noon seems almost too trivial for record.
Yet who knows ? "What has interested one
man may perchance do as much for another.
In the midst of the talk, a man with an axe
came along, and said to the proprietor of the
hotel, " Have you got a grinding-rock here ? "
" Yes, round behind the house," was the an-
swer. " Grinding-rock" ! — that was a new
name for my old back-breaking acquaintance
of the haying season, and good as it was
new. I adopted it on the instant. With its
rasping, gritty sound, it seemed a plain case
of onomatopoetic justice. No more " grind-
stone " for me, if I live a thousand years.

I mentioned the subject some days after-
ward to a citizen of Highlands. " Oh yes,"
he answered, " they always say ' rock ; ' not
only ' grinding - rock,' but * whet - rock.' "
Then he added something that pleased me
still more. He had just been to the county
seat as a member of the grand jury, and

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 9

among the cases before him and his col-
leagues was one of alleged assault by " rock-
ing," that word being used in the legal
document, whatever its name, in which the
complaint was set forth. This point was of
special interest to me, I say. In my boy-
hood, which, so far as I know, was not ex-
ceptionally belligerent, it was an every-day
occurrence to "fire rocks" at an enemy, or
" rock him ; " whereas an editorial brother,
himself of New England birth, with whom
it is often my privilege to compare notes,
affirms that he never heard such expressions,
though he has sometimes met with them —
and presumably corrected them — in manu-
script stories. It was no small satisfaction
to find this bit of my own Massachusetts —
Old Colony — dialect still surviving, and in
common use, in the Carolinas.

Walhalla itself, with an elevation of a
thousand feet, and mountains visible not far
off, lays some not unnatural claims to a
"climate," and in a small way is a health
resort, I believe, in spite of its rather sinis-
ter name, both summer and winter. To me,
indeed, it seemed a place to stop at rather
than to stay in ; but, as the reader knows, I

10 NOETH CAROLINA

saw it only from the main street on a muddy
afternoon, and was likely to do it but foul-
weather justice. Even its merits as a neces-
sary lodging station were lightly appreciated,
till on my return I made my exit from the
mountains on the other side of them, and
put up for the night in another village, and
especially at another hotel. Compared with
that, Walhalla was, in deed as in name, a
kind of heavenly place. Is it well, or not,
that what is worse makes us half contented
with what is simply bad ? I was more than
ready, at any rate, when a Walhalla boy
brought me word the next morning, " Your
carriage has done come." l

The sky was fair, and shortly after seven

1 "Do come" and "did come" are proper enough;
•why not " done come " ? And in point of fact, this com-
mon Southern use of " done " with the past participle has
its warrant in at least two lines of . Chaucer : in The
Enightes Tale (1055) : —

" Hath Theseus doon wrought in noble wise,"
and in The Tale of the Man of Lawe (171) : —

" Tliise marchants han doon fraught her shippes newe."
If a ship is. " done loaded," why may not a carriage have
" done come " ? Idiom is long-lived. As Lowell said
of the Yankee vernacular, so doubtless may we say of
the Carolinian, that it " often has antiquity and very
respectable literary authority on its side."

A DATS DEIVE IN THREE STATES 11

o'clock we were on the road, the driver and
his one passenger, in a heavy three-seated
mountain wagon, locally known as a " hack,"
drawn by two horses. Our destination was
said to be thirty-two miles distant, — so
much I knew ; but the figures had given me
little idea of the length of the journey. It
was an agreeable surprise, also, when the
driver informed me that we were not only
going from South Carolina to North Caro-
lina, but on the way were to spend some
hours in Georgia, the mountainous north-
eastern corner of that State being wedged
in between the two Carolinas. In short, to
accomplish our ascent of twenty-eight hun-
dred feet we were out for a day's ride in
three States and over four mountains, — an
exhilarating prospect in that perfect May
weather.

My recollections of the day run together,
as it were, till the route, as memory tries to
picture it forth, turns all to one hopeless
blur : an interminable alternation of ups and
downs, largely over shaded forest roads, but
with occasional sunny stretches, especially,
as it seemed, whenever I essayed to take the
cramp out of my legs by a half-hour's climb

12 NORTH CAROLINA

on foot. A turn or two in the road, and we
had left the village behind us, and then,
almost before I knew it, we were among the
hills : now aloft on the shoulder of one of
them, with innumerable mountains crowding
the horizon ; now shut in some narrow, wind-
ing valley, our " distance and horizon gone,"
with a bird singing from the bushes, and
likely enough a stream playing hide-and-seek
behind a tangle of rhododendron and laurel.
Wild as the country was, we never traveled
many miles without coming in sight of a
building of some kind : a rude mill, it might
be, or more probably a cabin. Once at least,
in a very wilderness of a place, we passed a
schoolhouse; as to which it puzzled me to
guess, first where the pupils came from, and
then how they got light to read by, unless,
happy children, they took their books out of
doors and studied their lessons under the
trees, and so went to school with the birds.

Little by little — very little — we con-
tinued to ascend, gaining something more
than we lost as the road seesawed from valley
to hill, and from hill to valley. So it finally
appeared, I mean to say ; the changes in the
vegetation serving eventually to establish a

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 13

point which for hours together had been
mainly an article of faith. As to another
point, the four mountains over which our
course was supposed to run, that remains a
question of faith to this day. There might
have been two, or thrice two, for aught I
could tell. The road avoided summits, as a
matter of course, and, if I can make myself
understood, we were so lost in the hills that
we could not see them. When we had left
one and had come to another, I knew it only
as the driver told me. So far as any sense
of upward progress was concerned, we might
almost as well have been marking time.

" What mountain are we on now ? " This
was a stock question with me.

" Stumphouse."

" And why is it called Stumphouse ? "

" Because a good many years ago a man
lived here in a hollow stump."

" And in what State are we ? "

" South Car'lina."

" But are n't we near the North Carolina
line?"

" No, sir ; we have to go through Georgy
first."

Till now I had been quite unaware of

14 NORTH CAROLINA

what I may call the interstate character of
our day's ride.

"Indeed! And how soon shall we get
into Georgia?"

" When we cross the Chattoogy Kiver."

"The Chattooga? What is that? A
branch of the Savannah ? "

"Yes, sir."

"How do you spell it?"

" I do not know, sir."

My driver had certain verbal niceties of
his own ; he never said " don't." As for his
inability to spell " Chattooga," or " Chatuga,"
he was little to be blamed for that. The
atlas-makers are no better off.

By and by we forded a sizeable stream.

"Now, then, we are crossing into Geor-
gia ? " I began again.

" No, sir ; this is not the Chattoogy, but
one of its prongs."

Finally, at high noon, we dropped into a
hot and breezeless valley, with the Chattooga
running through it in the sun. Here was a

farm. Mr. lived here, and kept a kind

of half-way house for travelers. But we
would not stop at it, the driver said, if it
was all the same to me. There was another

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 15

house just across the river. He had given
the people notice of our coming, on his way
down the day before, and the woman would
have dinner ready for me. Both houses were
very nice places to eat at, he added for my
encouragement. So it happened that I break-
fasted in South Carolina, dined in Georgia,
and supped in North Carolina. The dinner,
to which I sat down alone, was bountiful
after its kind. If the table did not " groan,"
it must have been because it was ignorant
of a table's duty ; and if I did not make a
feast, let the failure be laid to the idiosyn-
crasy of a man who once cut short his stay
at one of the most inviting places in all Vir-
ginia because he was pampered monotonously
for five consecutive meals with nothing but
fried ham, fried eggs, and soda biscuits. " It
is never too late to give up our prejudices,"
says Thoreau, in one of his lofty moods.
Wisdom uttered in that tone is not to be
disputed ; but if it is never " too late," I for
one have sometimes found it too early. My
bill of fare here in Georgia was by no means
confined to the three Southern staples just
now enumerated (let so much be said in
simple justice), but they held the place of

16 NOBTH CAROLINA

honor, as a matter of course, and for the
rest — well, there is a kind of variety that is
only another kind of sameness. " An excel-
lent dinner," said a facetious fellow-traveler
of mine on a similar occasion, as, knife and
fork in hand, he hovered doubtfully over the
table, and, like Emerson's snowflake, " seemed
nowhere to alight," — "a most excellent din-
ner ; but then, you see, it is nothing but ham
and eggs with variations." If this sounds
like grumbling, it is only against a " system,"
as we say in these days, not against a person.
My generous hostess had spared no pains,
and from any point of view had given me
far more than my money's worth ; stinting
herself only when it came to setting a price
upon her bounty. That unavoidable business
she approached, in response to the usual
overtures on my part, with all manner of
delicate indirections, holding back the deci-
sive word till the very last moment, as if her
tongue could not bring itself to utter a figure
so extortionate. The truth was, she said,
she had made nothing by giving dinners the
year previous, and so felt obliged to charge
five cents more the present season ! 1

1 If I seem to have said too much about the vulgar

A DAY'S DEIVE IN THESE STATES 17

The noon hour brought a sudden change
in the day's programme. All the forenoon
I had been asking questions, presuming upon
my double right as a traveler and a Yankee ;
now I was to take my turn in the witness-
box. My landlady's brother sat on the
veranda mending a fishing-tackle, and we
had hardly passed the time of day before it
became apparent that he possessed one of
nature's best intellectual gifts, an appetite
for knowledge. With admirable civility,
yet with no waste of time or breath, he went
about his work, and long before dinner was
announced I had given him my name, my
residence (my age, perhaps, but here recol-
lection becomes hazy), my occupation, the

question of something to eat, let it be my apology that
for a Northern traveler in the rural South the food ques-
tion is nothing less than the health question. A few
years ago, two Boston ornithologists, who had undertaken
an extensive tour among the North Carolina mountains,
returned before the time. Sickness had driven them
home, it turned out ; and when they came to publish the
result of their investigations, they finished their narrative
by saying, " Few Northern digestions could accomplish
the feat of properly nourishing a man on native fare."
On my present trip, a resident physician assured me that
the native mountaineers, living mostly out of doors and
in one of the best of climates, are almost without excep-
tion dyspeptics.

18 NOETH CAROLINA

object of my present journey and its probable
duration, some account of my previous visits
South, my notion of New England weather,
my impressions of Washington, especially of
the height of the Washington monument as
compared with other similar structures (a
question of peculiar moment to him, for
some reason now past recall), and Heaven
knows what else ; while on a thousand or
two of other topics I had confessed ignorance.
I had never been to Chautauqua ; that was
perhaps my examiner's most serious disap-
pointment. He was at present engaged on
a Chautauquan course of reading, as it ap-
peared, — the best course of reading that he
had ever seen, he was inclined to think.
Here again he had me playing second fiddle,
or rather no fiddle at all.

His was a wholesome catholicity of mind,
but it pleased me to notice that he too had
felt the touch of the modern spirit, and was
something of a specialist. Geography, or
perhaps I should say climatology, seemed to
lie uppermost in his thoughts. Once, I re-
member, he brought out a ponderous atlas
of the world, a book of really astonishing
proportions when the size of the house was

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THEEE STATES 19

taken into account, though it may not have
been absolutely necessary for him to bring
it out of doors in order to open it. On the
subject of comparative climatology, be it said
without reserve, it did not take him long to
come to the end of my resources. It is pos-
sible, of course, that his own concern about
it was but temporary, — the result of his
before-mentioned course of reading. There
is no better — nor better understood — rule
for conversation than to choose the subject
of the book you happen to have had last in
hand. Two to one the other man will know
less about it than you do. Then you are in
clover. But should it turn out that he is at
home where you have but recently peeped in
at the window, and so is bound to have you
at a disadvantage, you have only to be be-
forehand with him by acknowledging with
becoming modesty that you really know no-
thing about the matter, but happen to have
just been looking over with some interest
Mr. So-and-So's recent book. In other
words, you may pass for a special student
or a discursive reader, honorable characters
both of them, according as the way opens.
I am not saying that my noonday acquain-

20 NOETH CAROLINA

tance had practiced any such stratagem.
His attitude throughout was that of a learner ;
nor did he set himself to shine even in that
humble capacity, as one may easily do (and
there are few safer methods) in this day of
multifarious discovery, when the ability to
ask intelligent questions has become of itself
a badge of scholarship. His inquiries fol-
lowed one another with perfect naturalness
and simplicity ; he simply wanted to know.
As for the more strictly personal among
them, they were only such as the most con-
ventional of us instinctively feel like asking.
" As soon as a stranger is introduced into any
company," says Emerson, " one of the first
questions which all wish to have answered
is, 'How does that man get his living?'"
There was no thought of taking offense. On
the contrary, it was a pleasure to be angled
for by so true an artist. If any newspaper
should be in want of an " interviewer," — a
remote contingency so far as any newspaper
that I know anything about is concerned, —
I could recommend a likely hand. A candi-
date for the presidency might balk him, but '
nobody else. My own conversation with him
is still an agreeable memory ; a man's mind

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 21

is like a well, all the better for being once in
a while pumped dry. And yet, while I speak
of him in this tone of sincere appreciation,
it must be acknowledged that in one respect
he did me an ill turn. He robbed me of an
illusion. The Yankee is second where I had
supposed him an undisputed first.

Though we were at the half-way house, and
in fact had made more than half of our day's
journey, the valley of the Chattooga at this
point lay so warmly in the sun that the as-
pect of things remained decidedly southern.
Roses and snowballs were in bloom in the
dooryard, and as I came out from dinner a
blue-gray gnatcatcher, the only one seen on
my entire trip, was complaining from a per-
simmon-tree beside the gate. My attention
to it, and to sundry other birds of the smaller
sorts, — a blue golden- winged warbler, for
example, — was matter of surprise to the
men of the house, both of whom were now
on the veranda. My seeker after knowledge,
indeed, asked me plainly, but not without a
word of apology, what object I had in view
in such studies ; in short, — when I stumbled
a bit in my explanation, — whether there
was "any money in them." In that form

22 NORTH CAROLINA

the question presented less difficulty, and in
my turn I asked him and his brother-in-law
how often they were accustomed to see ravens
thereabout. Their reply was little to the
comfort of an enthusiast who had come a
thousand miles, more or less, with ravens in
his eye. Neither of them had seen one in
the last five years. Something had happened
to the birds, they could not say what. For-
merly it was nothing uncommon to notice
one or two flying over. Alas, this was not
the first time it had been borne in upon me
that, ornithologically, my portion was among
the belated.

I have said nothing about it hitherto, but
I had not driven five or six hours through
strange woods and into the midst of strange
hills without an ear open for bird notes.
Even the rumbling of the heavy wagon and
the uneasy creaking of the harness could not
drown such music altogether, and once in a
while, as I have said, I spelled myself on
foot. At short intervals, too, when we came
to some promising spot, — a swampy thicket,
perhaps, or a patch of evergreens, — I called
a halt to listen; the driver making no ob-
jection, and the horses less than none. The

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 23

voices, to my regret rather than to my sur-
prise, were every one familiar, and the single
unexpected thing about it all was the dearth
of northern species. The date was May 6,
and the woods might properly enough have
been alive with homeward-bound migrants ;
but the only bird that I could positively rank
under that head was a Swainson thrush, —
a free-hearted singer, whose cheery White
Mountain tune I never hear at the South
without an inward refreshment. From the
evergreens, none too common, and mostly
too far from the road, came the voices of a
pine warbler and one or two black-throated
greens ; and once, as we skirted a bushy hill-
side, I caught the sliding ditty of a prairie
warbler. Here, too, I think it was that I
heard the distinctive, loquacious call of a
summer tanager, — four happy chances, as
but for them, and the single gnatcatcher by
the half way house gate, my vacation bird
list would have been shorter by five species.
After all, the principal ornithological
event of the forenoon was, not the singing
of the Swainson thrush, but the discovery of
a humming-bird's nest. This happened on
the side of Stumphouse Mountain. I had

24 NORTH CAROLINA

taken a short cut by myself, and had come
out of the woods into the road again some
distance ahead of the wagon, when suddenly
I heard the buzz and squeak of a hummer,
and, glancing upward, put my eye instantly
upon the nest, which might have been two
thirds done from its appearance, and then
upon its owner, whose reiterated squeakings,
I have no doubt, expressed her annoyance
at my intrusion. In truth, both owners
were present, and in that lay the exceptional
interest of the story.

Some years ago I had proved, as I
thought, that the male ruby-throat habitu-
ally takes no part in the hatching and rear-
ing of its young, and, for that matter, is
never to be seen about the nest in the five
or six weeks during which that most labo-
rious and nerve-trying work is going on.
As to why this should be I could only
confess ignorance ; and subsequent observa-
tions, both by myself and by others,1 while
confirming the fact of the male's absence,
had done nothing to bring to light the rea-
son for it. Is the female herself responsible

1 See especially an article by Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller
in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1896.

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 25

for such a state of things ? I should hate
to believe, as I have heard it maintained,
that female birds in general cherish little or
no real affection for their mates, regarding
them simply as necessities of the hour ; but
it is certain that widows among them waste
no time in mourning, and it appears to me
likely enough, if I am to say what I think,
that the lady hummer, a fussy and capable
body (we all know the human type), having
her nest done and the eggs laid, prefers her
mate's room to his company, and gives him
his walking ticket.

So much for a bit of half-serious specula-
tion. The interest of the nest found here
on Stumphouse Mountain lay, as I have
said, in the fact that it was unfinished, and
the male owner of it — if he is to be called
an owner — was still present. Whether he
was actually assisting in the construction of
the family house, I am unable to tell. For
the few minutes that I remained the female
alone entered it, doing something or other
to the wall or rim, and then flying away.
With so long a journey before us there was
no tarrying for further investigations, glad
as I should have been to see the ruby-throat

26 NORTH CAROLINA

for once conducting himself with something
like Christian propriety. For to-day, at all
events, he was neither a deserter nor an
exile.

We rested for an hour or more at the
half-way house, and then resumed our jour-
ney : the morning story over again, — up-
ward and downward and roundabout, with
woods and hills everywhere, and two moun-
tains still to put behind us. We should be
in Highlands before dark, the driver said ;
but one contingency had been left out of his
calculation. When we had been under way
an hour, or some such matter, he began to
worry about one of the horses. My own
eyes had been occupied elsewhere, but now
it was plain enough, my attention having
been called to it, that " Doc " was leaving
his mate to do the work. And Doc was
never known to play the shirk, the driver
said, with a jealousy for his favorite's repu-
tation pleasant to see and honorable to both
parties. The poor fellow must be sick.
" Did n't he eat his dinner ? " I asked.
" Yes ; there was no sign of anything wrong
at that time." Then it could be no very
killing matter, I said to myself ; a touch of

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THESE STATES 27

laziness, probably; who could blame him?
— and I continued to enjoy the sights and
sounds of the forest. But my seatmate,
better experienced and more charitable, was
not to be misled. Little by little his anxi-
ety increased, till he could do nothing but
talk about it (so it happened that we crossed
the North Carolina line, and I was none the
wiser) ; and before long it became evident,
even to me, that whatever ailed the horse,
sickness, laziness, discouragement, or ex-
haustion, he must be carefully humored, or
we should find ourselves stranded for the
night on a lonesome mountain road. Slower
and slower we went, — both men on foot, of
course, up all the ascents, — and worse and
worse grew Doc's behavior. I was sorry for
him, and sorrier still for the driver, who was
thinking not only of his horse and his pas-
senger, but of himself and his own standing
with the owner of the team. He was sure it
was none of his fault, he kept protesting ;
nothing of the kind had ever happened to
him before. Finally, seeing him so misera-
bly depressed (for the time being every mis-
fortune is as bad as it looks), so quite at the
end of his wit, and almost at the end of his

28 NORTH CAROLINA

courage, I said, " Why not take advice at
the next house we come to ? Two heads are
better than one." That was a word in sea-
son. To take advice would be a kind of
division of responsibility. It is what doc-
tors do when the patient is dying on their
hands. The man brightened at once.

A mile or two more of halting and painful
progress, then, and we approached a clear-
ing, on the farther side of which two men
were busy with a plough. The driver hailed
one of them by name, and made known our
difficulty. Would n't he please come to the
road and see if he could make out what was
the matter ? He responded in the most
neighborly spirit (he would have been a
queer farmer, neighborly or not, not to feel
interested in a question about a horse) ; but
after looking into the animal's mouth, and
disclaiming any special right to speak in
such a case, he could only say that he saw
no sign of anything worse than fatigue.
Hadn't the horse been worked hard lately?
Yes, the driver answered, he had been in the
harness pretty steadily for some time past.
At this I put in my oar. Could n't another
horse be borrowed somewhere, and the tired

A DAY'S DEIVE IN THREE STATES 29

one left to rest ? — a suggestion, I need
hardly say, that squinted hard toward the
horse in sight before us across the field.
The farmer approved of the idea; only
where was the horse to come from? Moun-
tain farmers, as I was to learn afterward, —
and a strange state of things it seemed to a
pilgrim from Yankee land, — are mostly too
poor to support a horse, or even a mule.
The man would let us have his, of course,
but it was a young thing that had never
been hitched up. "But I tell you," he
broke out, after a minute's reflection. " You
know So-and-So, don't you ? He has a pair
of mules. Perhaps you could get one of
them." " Good ! " said I, and we drove on
a mile or two farther, — and by this time it
was driving, — till we came to a cross-road,
the only one that I recall on the whole day's
route, though there must have been others,
I suppose. The owner of the mules — whose
exceptional opulence should have kept his
name remembered — lived down that road a
piece, the driver said. If I would stay by
the wagon, he would go down there, and be
back as quickly as possible.

He was gone half an hour or more, while

30 NORTH CAEOLWA

the horses browsed upon the bushes (if a
good appetite signified anything, Doc was
not yet on his way to the buzzards), and I,
after listening awhile to the masterly impro-
visations of a brown thrasher, went spying
about to see what birds might be hiding in
the underbrush. The hobbyist, say what you
please about him, is a lucky fellow. All
sorts of untoward accidents bring grist to
his mill ; and so it was this time. I heard
a sparrow's tseep, and soon called into sight
two or three white-throats, — ordinary birds
enough, but of value here as being the only
ones found on the whole journey. I should
have missed them infallibly but for Doc's
misadventure.

The driver returned at last, and with him
came a mountain farmer, — another good
neighbor, I was glad to see, — leading a
mule, which was quickly put into Doc's har-
ness. But what to do with Doc? "Leave
him," said I. " Lead him at the tail of the
wagon," said the farmer; and the latter
advice prevailed. And very good advice it
seemed till we came to the first steepish
piece of road. Then the horse began to
hold back. " Look at him ! " exclaimed the

A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 31

driver in despairing tones ; and all our trib-
ulations were begun over again.

From this point there was only one way
of getting on, and that at a snail's pace and
with continual interruptions. The passenger
took the reins, and the driver walked behind
with his whip, and so, using as much kind-
ness as might be, forced the unwilling horse
to follow. Even that cruel resource threat-
ened before long to fail us ; for it began to
look as if the unsteady creature would drop
in his tracks. There it was, as I now sus-
pect, that he played his best card. " You
must leave him at the next house, if there is
another," I said. " Yes, there is another,"
the driver answered, " and only one." We
came to it presently, — a cabin far below us
in a deep, wood-encircled valley, out of which
rose pleasant evening sounds of a banjo and
singing. The driver lifted his voice, and a
woman appeared upon the piazza. The man
of the house was not at home, she said ; but
the driver took down the Virginia fence, and
with much patient coaxing and pulling got
the horse down the long, steep slope and into
a shed. Then, leaving word for him to be
fed and cared for, he climbed back to the

32 NORTH CAROLINA

road, and, freed at last from our incum-
brance, we quickened our pace.

By this time it was growing dark. Bird
songs had ceased, and flowers had long been
invisible. But indeed, for the greater part
of the afternoon, we had been so taken up
with working our passage that I had found
small opportunity for natural history com-
ment. I recall a lovely rose-acacia shrub,
an endless display of pink azalea, — set off
here and there with the flat snowy clusters
of the dogwood, — thickets fringed with
drooping, white, sickly sweet Leucothoe ra-
cemes (which at the time I mistook for some
kind of Andromeda), the shouts of two
pileated woodpeckers, — always remember-
able, — a hooded warbler's song out of a
rhododendron thicket, and the sight of two
or three rough-winged swallows. These last
are worth mentioning, because in connection
with them there came out the astonishing
fact that the driver did not know what I
meant by swallows. Apparently he had
never heard the word, — which may help
readers to understand what a scarcity of
these airy birds there is in all that Allegha-
nian country. I should almost as soon have

A DAY'S DEIVE IN THREE STATES 33

expected to find a man who had never heard
of sparrows !

It was after eight o'clock when we turned
a sharp corner in the road and saw the lights
of the village shining through the forest
ahead of us. In fifteen minutes more I was
at supper. I had come a long way by faith,
— faith in a guidebook star ; and my faith
had not been vain.

IN QUEST OF RAVENS

" Every pursuit takes its reality and worth from the
ardor of the pursuer." — KEATS.

WHILE M. Sylvestre Bonnard, Member
of the Institute, was in Sicily prosecuting his
memorable search for the Alexandrian manu-
script of the Golden Legend, he fell in un-
expectedly with his old acquaintances, M.
and Mme. Trepof, collectors of match-boxes.
Their specialty, as may be supposed, was
not exactly to M. Bonnard' s liking. Being
a scholar and an antiquary, he would rather
have seen their affections bestowed upon
something more strictly in the line of the
fine arts, — upon antique marbles, perhaps,
or painted vases ; but after all, he said to
himself, it made no very great difference. A
collector is a collector ; and, besides, Mme.
Trepof always spoke of their pursuit (she
and her husband were traveling round the
world in furtherance of it) with a mixture of
enthusiasm and irony that made the whole
business truly delightful. *

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 35

There we have the shrewd collector's se-
cret. Whatever the objects of his choice, —
postage-stamps, first editions, butterflies, or
match-boxes, — they become for the time
being the only objects worthy of a man's de-
sire ; but in talking about them, as of course
he cannot altogether avoid doing, he keeps
in mind the old caution about the pearls and
the swine, and veils his seriousness under a
happy lightness of speech. This is the better
course for all concerned ; and something like
this is the course I mean to adopt in narrat-
ing my raven-hunt amid the North Carolina
mountains, in May, 1896. The work was
absorbing enough in the doing, but at this
distance, and out of consideration for the
scholarly reader, — who may feel about ra-
vens as M. Bonnard felt about match-boxes,
— I hope to be able to treat it with a be-
coming degree of disinterestedness.

My collecting, be it said in parenthesis,
was in one respect quite unlike M. Bonnard's
and Mme. Trepof's. It was concerned, not
with the objects themselves, but with the
sight of them. I wanted, not cured bird-
skins in a cabinet, but bits of first-hand
knowledge in the memory and the notebook.

36 NORTH CAROLINA

Here at Highlands, this little hamlet perched
far up in a mountain wilderness, ravens were
common, — so I had read ; and as I purposed
remaining in the place for two or three
weeks, I should no doubt see much of them,
and so be able not only to " check the name,"
thus adding the species to my set of the
Corvidce, but to acquire some real familiarity
with the bird's voice and ways. Such was
my dream ; but certainty began to fade into
uncertainty from the day I drove into the
mountains.

One of my first village calls, after a day's
ramble in the country round about, was upon
the apothecary, who sat sunning himself on
the stoop in front of his shop, — a cheerful
example of how idyllic a life " tending store "
may become under favorable conditions. To
begin with, as was natural, not to say obliga-
tory, between a newcomer and an old resi-
dent, the altitude and climate of the place
were discussed. Then, as soon as I could do
so with politeness, I asked about ravens.

"Ravens?" said the doctor. "Ravens?"
Surely the inflection was not encouraging.
There were no ravens, so far as he knew.

" But the books say they are common
here."

IN QUEST OF EAVENS 37

"Well, I am perfectly acquainted with
the bird, and I have never seen one in High-
lands in all my twelve years."

This might have seemed to end the matter,
once for all ; but as I walked away I remem-
bered how often birds had proved to be com-
mon where old residents had never seen
them, and I said to myself that the present
would be only another repetition of the
familiar story. There must be ravens here.

Mr. and Mr. could not have been

mistaken.

Let that be as it might, this was my third
day in the mountains, — the long ride from
Walhalla counting for one, — and when I
returned to the village, at noon, my first
glimpse of a raven was yet to be had. How-
ever, a wide-awake farmer assured me that,
as he expressed it, something must be the

matter with Dr. 's eyes. He had seen

ravens many a time ; in fact he had seen one
within two days. Of course he had. The
affair was turning out just as I had foreseen.
It is a poor naturalist who has not learned
to beware of negative testimony. The apoth-
ecary might sit on his stoop and shake his
head ; before many days I would shake a
black wing in his face.

38 NORTH CAROLINA

That afternoon I took another road, and
though I found no ravens I brought back a
lively expectation. I had stopped beside a
pond, and was pulling down a small halesia-
tree to break off a branch of its snowy bells,
when a horseman rode up. We spoke to
each other (it is one advantage of out-of-the-
way places that they encourage human inter-
course, as poverty helps people to be gener-
ous), and in answer to my inquiry he told
me that the tree I was holding down was a
" box elder." The road was the Hamburg
road, or the Shortoff road, — one name be-
ing for a town, the other for a mountain, —
and the body of water was Stewart's Pond.
Then I came to the point. Did he often
see ravens in this country? He answered
promptly in the affirmative ; and when I told

him of my want of success and of Dr. 's

twelve-year failure, he assured me that if I
would come out to Turtlepond, where he
lived, I could see them easily enough. He
saw them often, and just now they were
particularly noisy ; he thought they must be
teaching their young to fly.

How far was it to Turtlepond ? I asked.
"Seven or eight miles." And the road?

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 39

Could he tell me how to get there ? Oh, yes ;
and he began. But I was soon quite lost.
He knew the way too well, and I gave over
trying to follow him, saying to myself that I
would procure directions, when the time
came, from some one in the village. The
man was very neighborly and kind, invited
me to get up behind him and ride, gave me
his name, answered all my questions, and
rode away. Here, then, were ravens with
something like certainty and well within
reach (" ra-vens," my new acquaintance had
been careful to say, with no slurring of the

second vowel), and, Dr. to the contrary

notwithstanding, I would yet see them.

The next morning, with a luncheon in my
pocket and a minute itinerary in my note-
book, I set out for Turtlepond. Important
things must be attended to promptly. " You
will be lucky if you find it," said the man
who had laid out my route, by way of a god-
speed ; and I half believed him. He did not
add, what I knew was on his tongue, " You
will be luckier still if you find a raven ; " as
to that, also, he was welcome to his opinion.
Ravens or no ravens, I meant to enjoy my-
self. What could a man want better than

40 NOETH CAROLINA

a long, unhurried day in those romantic
mountain roads, with a bird singing from
every bush, and new and lovely flowers in-
viting his hand at every turn ? With fair
weather and in a fair country, walking is its
own reward.

To put the town behind me was the work
of a few minutes. After that my way ran
through the woods, although for the first
half of the distance, at least, there was never
more than a mile or two without a clearing
and a house. This part of the road grew
familiar to me afterward, I traveled it so
often ; and now, as I take it once more in
my mind, I can see it in all its windings.
Here, as the land begins to decline from the
plateau, or mountain shoulder, on which the
village nestles, stands a line of towering con-
ical hemlocks, — a hundred and fifty feet
tall, at a moderate guess. Out of them came
the nasal, high-pitched, highly characteristic
ank, ank, ank of my first Canadian nuthatch,
— my first one in North Carolina, I mean.
That, by the bye, was on this very trip to
Turtlepond. I had been on the watch for
him, and put him into my bird list with pe-
culiar satisfaction. He was like a fellow

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 41

Yankee, as was also the brown creeper that
dwelt near by. This same row of hemlocks

— beside a brook, as Southern hemlocks al-
ways are, with a thicket of laurel and rho-
dodendron underneath — was also one of the
haunts of the olive-sided flycatcher, another
Northerner, who chooses the loftiest perch
he can find from which to deliver his wild
quit-quequeeo. Should this Carolinian re-
presentative of a boreal species ever be pro-
moted to the dignity of sub-specific rank,
as has happened to some of his neighbors,
I should bid for the honor of naming him,

— the hemlock flycatcher.

By the time I reached this point, on a sul-
try morning, I was commonly ready for a
breathing-spell, and by good luck here was a
most convenient log, on which I used to sit,
listening to the bird chorus, and waylaying
any socially disposed mountaineer who might
chance to come along on his way to the
town ; for Highlands, whatever an outsider
may think of it, is in its own measure and
degree a veritable metropolis.1 The only
man who ever failed to halt in response to

1 All things go by comparison. " I always lived in the
country till I came here," said my driver to me one day.

42 NORTH CAROLINA

my greeting was a very canonical-looking
parson. He was traveling up to Zion in a
" buggy," and not unlikely was meditating
his next Sunday's sermon.

If the religious condition of a community
is to be estimated by the number of its meet-
ing-houses, let me say in passing, then High-
lands ought to be a very suburb of the New
Jerusalem. Its population cannot be more
than three or four hundred, but its churches
are legion. " Yes," said a sprightly young
lady, to whom the subject was mentioned,
" if there were only one or two more, we
might all have one apiece." Baptists, Meth-
odists (of different sorts, — species and sub-
species), Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Ad-
ventists, Unitarians, — all the sects seemed
to be provided for, though I am not sure
about the Catholics and the Swedenborgians.
It is queer how conscientiously particular,
and almost private, the worship of God is
made. The Almighty must be a great lover
of mint, anise, and cummin, one would say.
I was reminded again and again of that sweet
old Scripture : " Behold how good and how
pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together
in unity ! "

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 43

This digression, though suggested by the
recollection of my serious-faced clergyman,
is not to be taken as reflecting in any wise
upon him or upon his calling. He was try-
ing to do his duty, I have no question. If
he felt obliged to have a pulpit and a uni-
form of his own, it was not that he differed
from other people, but that other people dif-
fered from him. May his work prosper, and
his days be long! He was traveling in a
buggy, as I have said. Had he been on foot,
no doubt he might have been readier to stop
a minute to chat with an inquisitive stranger,
— as ready, perhaps, as a more venerable
pilgrim who happened along a few minutes
later, and who not only stopped, but sat
down, and, so to speak, paid me a visit : a
little man, bent with his seventy-three years
(he told me his age almost at once), who
had come ten miles on foot that morning.
In one hand he carried a live turkey, — with
its legs tied, of course, — and in the other a
chicken. Poor things, they were making
their last journey. It was a " very hot day,"
the old man thought. His cotton shirt was
flung wide open for coolness, and as he
mopped his face, having put down his bur-

44 NORTH CAROLINA

dens and taken off his hat, he talked in a
cheerful, honest voice, most agreeable to lis-
ten to. Life was still a pleasant experience
to him, as it seemed. I doubt whether he
had ever tired of it for a day. He would
sell the turkey and the chicken, buy a little
tobacco and perhaps one or two other neces-
saries, and then trudge the ten miles home
again. It is a great thing to have a market
for one's produce, and a greater thing to be
contented with one's lot.

Not far beyond this favorite resting-place
— tempting even in the retrospect, as the
reader perceives — is a house with a good-
sized clearing, through which meanders a
trout-stream, to the endless comfort of one
of the younger boys of the family. I saw
him angling there, one day, with shining
success. What a good time he was having !
He could hardly bait the hook fast enough.
I leaned over the fence and watched him
out of pure sympathy (he did not see me, I
think, though there was nothing in the world
between us — except the fish), and after-
ward I mentioned the circumstance to his
father. " Oh, he is a great fisherman," was
the proud response. For a boy that is a

IN QUEST OF BAVENS 45

boy a trout-brook is better than all the toy-
shops. The good man and his wife (New
York State people, who had moved here
twelve years before) treated me most hospi-
tably when I came to know them, but on
this first morning, having far to go, I went
by without calling, pausing only to note the
chebec of a least flycatcher, which seemed to
be at home in their orchard trees. Its name
is still Number 60 in my North Carolina
list.

Another bend in the road, and I came
within sight of the first of two mills. These
had figured at considerable length in my
chart of directions, and near them, as I now
remember, I fell into some uncertainty as
to how this chart was to be interpreted. I
turned aside, therefore, to inquire of the
second miller ; but before I could reach him
a blue yellow-backed warbler began singing
from a treetop ; and as he was my first spe-
cimen here, I must out with my opera-glass
and find him. The miller surveyed my pro-
ceedings with unashamed curiosity, but he
answered my questions, none the less, and
for still another stage I kept on with the
comfortable assurance that I was headed for
Turtlepond.

46 NOETH CAROLINA

If I failed to arrive there, it should not
be for want of using my tongue. From the
time I left Highlands I had inquired my
way of every man I met. For one thing, I
relish natural country talk ; and if there
is to be conversation, it must somehow be
opened. I kept in mind, too, the skepticism
of my Highlands informant, and by unhappy
experience I had learned how easy it is, in
cases of this kind, to go astray through some
misunderstanding of question or answer.

So I sauntered along, with frequent inter-
ruptions, of course (that was part of the
game), — here for a bird, there for a flower,
a tree, or a bit of landscape. I recall es-
pecially great numbers of the tiny yellow
lady's-slipper and beds of the white-flowered
clintonia — the latter a novelty to me — just
coming into bloom. Then, by and by, the
road began a long, sidelong ascent of a
mountain; but at the last moment, when I
seemed to have left human habitations be-
hind me for good, I saw across the narrow
valley through the forest — the branches at
this height being still in the bud — two men
at work in a ploughed field. Here was one
more opportunity to assure myself against

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 47

contingencies, and with a loud "hullo" I
gained their attention. Was this the road to
Turtlepond ? I shouted. Yes, they shouted
back (a man who could not lift up his voice
would be poorly off in that country) ; I was
to keep on and on as far as the schoolhouse,
just beyond which I must be sure to turn to
the right. Very good, said I to myself, here
is something definite ; and again I faced the
mountain road.

That was a master stroke of precaution.
But for it I might have walked till night,
and should never have found myself at
Turtlepond. I passed one more house, it is
true, but there was no one visible about it,
and when at last I reached the log school-
house, standing all by itself deep in the
woods, it was locked and empty, and the
"road to the right" was so obscure, so ut-
terly unlike a road, that only for my last
man's emphatic warning (how I blessed him
for his good sense !) I should have passed
it without a suspicion that it was or ever
had been a thoroughfare. As it was, I
looked at it and wondered. Could that be
my course ? There was no sign that horse
or wheel had turned that corner for an in-

48 NORTH CAROLINA

definite period. Still, my instructions were
explicit. This was certainly the school-
house, and at the schoolhouse I was to turn
to the right. Lest I should be interpreting
a preposition too strictly, nevertheless, I
kept on for a piece in the way I had been
traveling. No, there was no other cross-
road, and I came back to the schoolhouse,
rested awhile under a big tree, and then
took the blind trail. Happily, it very soon
became more distinct, more evidently a road
in use ; and being now on a downward
grade, I jogged along in good spirits.

It was drawing near noon, and unless my
jaunt was to measure more than eight miles
I must be somewhere near the end of it.
The mountain forest was especially inviting
here, with a brook now and then and a pro-
fusion of ground flowers, beside the laurel
and the azaleas; but I must not linger, I
said to myself, as I might be obliged to
spend an hour or two at Turtlepond. It
was hardly to be assumed that the ravens
would be waiting for me, to greet me on the
instant. Meanwhile, a pileated woodpecker
set up a lusty shout just in advance, and in
another moment went dashing off among the

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 49

trees, still shouting as he flew. He was no
rarity in these parts, but it did me good to
see his flaming crest and the flash of his
white wing-spots. Then, when I had gone
a little farther and could already discern the
open valley, a kingfisher rattled and showed
himself. He was the first of his kind, and
went down straightway as Number 62. Per-
haps Number 63 would be the raven !

Well, I emerged from the forest, the road
turning rather sharply at the last and mak-
ing down the valley with a brook on its left
hand ; and here I pretty soon approached a
house. The two opposite doors were open
(mosquitoes are unknown in this happy
country), and inside, looking out of the back
door in the direction of the brook, stood a
woman and a brood of children. They were
talking pretty loudly, as people may who
live so far from human neighbors, and a
hound stood silent behind them. I drew
near, but they did not hear me. Then,
rather than startle them rudely with a
strange voice, I touched the fence-rail with
my umbrella. Instantly the hound turned
and began baying, and the woman, bidding
him be quiet, came to the front door and

50 NORTH CAROLINA

answered my good-morning. Could she tell
me where Zeb McKinney lived ? I inquired.
Yes, it was the next house down the road,
" about a quarter." Hereabouts, as I knew,
a "quarter" means a quarter of a mile.
In Yankee land it means twenty-five cents.
The character of a people may be judged in
part by the ellipses of their daily speech, —
the things that are taken for granted by
every one as present in the minds of others.
I believe I did not raise the question of
ravens at this first house. For the instant
it was enough to know that I had arrived at
Turtlepond. But my eye was open and my
ear alert. And surely this was a place for
ravens and every wild thing : a narrow val-
ley, tightly shut in, with nothing in sight
but the crowding walls and a patch of sky.
Aloft in the distance, in the direction of
Hickory Gap (so I heard it called after-
ward, and wished that all place-names were
equally euphonious), some large bird, hawk
or eagle, was sailing out of sight. What a
groveling creature is man, in the compari-
son! Along the brookside grew splendid
halesia-trees, full of white bells, and a more
splendid crab-apple tree, — one of the glo-

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 51

ries of America, — just now a perfect cloud
of pink buds and blooms and tender green
leaves. Here sang catbirds, thrashers, wood
thrushes, robins, rose-breasted grosbeaks, a
blue golden-winged warbler, and I forget
what else. I had not traveled so far, half
disabled as I was, to listen to birds of their
quality. And the ravens? Well, at that
moment they must have an engagement else-
where. Perhaps they were still instructing
their young in the art of volitation.

And now, having walked "about a
quarter," I was at Zeb McKinney's. There
was no need to inquire if he were at home.
Through the open door I could see that
the only occupants of the house were two
women : one young, one very old and stiff.
The latter, as was meet, came to speak to
the stranger. No, Mr. McKinney was not
at home ; he had gone down to the sawmill.
Ravens? Yes, they saw them once in a
while, but she did not remember noticing
any for some time back. The spring was
just below the house ; I should find a gourd
to drink from.

I drank from the spring, pondered the
woman's "once in a while," took a look

52 NOETH CAROLINA

about me, and then retraced my steps,
having in mind a comfortable nooning-
place, out of sight of the houses, where I
would eat my luncheon, and observe the
ravens at my leisure as they crossed from
one mountain to another above my head.
For all the unexpectedness of the old
woman's dubious phrase, I was not dis-
couraged. Why should I be? Mr. Bur-
roughs did not find the English nightingale
all at once, nor did M. Tartarin kill a lion
on his first day in the Algerian desert ; and
if these men had exercised patience, so
could I.

At the right spot, therefore, where the
shade fell upon a handy stump, I took my
seat. First a line or two in my notebook,
and then I would dispose of my luncheon.
At that instant, however, two boys came
down the road ; and when I spoke to them,
they waited for no more explicit invitation,
but planted themselves on the ground, one
on each side of me. If I asked them a
question, they answered it ; if I kept
silence, they sat and looked at me. For
aught that appeared, they meant to spend
the afternoon thus engaged. Pleasant as

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 53

popularity is, its manifestations were just
now a trouble. The ravens might fly over
at any moment, and it was important that
I should be undisturbed, — to say nothing
of my dinner. I remembered the saying of
Poor Kichard, — " Love your neighbor, but
don't pull down your hedge ; " and at last,
seeing that something must be done, I rose,
moved a few rods, and then, dropping sud-
denly upon the grass, said, " Good-by."
The boys took the hint, and ten minutes
later I saw them beside the brook, trying
their luck with the fish. The quality of
selfishness had proved itself twice blest, as
happens oftener than we think, it may be,
in this " unintelligible world."

This part of the story need not be pro-
longed. The reader has already foreseen
that my luncheon was finished without
interruption. No raven's wing darkened
the air. I lingered till the case began to
seem hopeless. Then I loitered as slowly
as possible up the valley, and at last took
the ascending road through the mountain
woods toward the log schoolhouse. By
this time there were signs of rain, but with
a three-hour jaunt before me it was useless

54 NOETH CAROLINA

to hurry. So at the schoolhouse corner I
rested again, — partly to enjoy the sight of
Kabun Bald, a noble Georgia peak, which
showed grandly from this point, — and
then, all at once, thinking of nothing but
the landscape, I heard a far-away cry,
hoarse, loud, utterly strange, utterly unlike
a crow's, and yet unmistakably coracious !
That surely was a raven's voice. It could
be nothing else. If I were out of the
woods, where I could look about me ! The
bird, whatever it was, was evidently on the
wing ; the sound was now here, now there ;
but alas, it was receding. Fainter and
fainter it became at each repetition, and
then all was silent, till a heavy clap of
thunder and a sudden blackness recalled
me to myself, and I resumed the march
homeward. Soon it rained. Then came a
general pother of the elements, — wind,
hail, lightning and thunder. Not far
beyond me, as I now called to mind, there
was a house, the only one I had seen on the
mountain. I hastened forward, therefore,
and took shelter on the piazza. A dog was
cowering inside, too badly frightened to
resent my intrusion or to bid me welcome.

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 55

And there we stayed till the clouds broke.
Then, refreshing myself with big hailstones,
which lay white in the grass, I took the
road again for the long diagonal descent to
the valley.

I was well fagged by the time I reached
Highlands ; but I had been to Turtlepond,
and in my memory were some confused
recollections of a few distant notes, probably
a bird's, and possibly a raven's. To that
complexion had the matter already come.
It is marvelous how quickly certainty loses
its color when once the breath of doubt
touches it.

Two days afterward, finding myself not
yet acclimated, I joined a company who
were making a day's wagon-trip to White-
side, the highest peak in the immediate
vicinity of Highlands ; a real mountain,
said to be five thousand feet in height, but
looking considerably lower to my eye, its
surroundings being all so elevated, and the
southern latitude, as I suppose, giving to it
a more richly wooded, and consequently less
rugged and alpine appearance than belongs
to New England mountains of a correspond-
ing rank. On the southerly side it breaks

56 NORTH CAROLINA

off into a huge perpendicular light-colored
cliff, said to be eighteen hundred feet in
depth, from which it derives its name and
much of its local distinction. Above this
cliff rises its knob of a summit, with the
sight of which I had grown familiar as one
of the principal points in the landscape
from the hotel veranda.

The wagon carried us by a roundabout
course to the base of this rocky knob, and
there the majority of the party remained,
while two ladies and myself clambered up
a steep pitch to the summit, to take the
prospect and to feel that we had been
there, — and perhaps to see a raven ; for
Whiteside had from the beginning been
held up to me as one of that bird's par-
ticular resorts. " Wait till you go to
Whiteside," I had been told again and
again.

What had looked like a pyramidal rock
turned out to be the end of a long ridge,
over which we marched in Indian file for a
mile or more, picking flowers (the nodding
Trillium stylosum, especially, of which each
new specimen seemed pinker and prettier
than the last) and admiring the landscape,

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 57

— a boundless woodland panorama, with
clearings and houses in Whiteside valley,
and innumerable hazy mountains rising one
beyond another in every direction. The
world of new leafage below us, now
darkened by cloud shadows, now shining in
the sun, was beautiful far beyond any skill
of mine to picture it.

We were still walking and quietly enjoy-
ing — my fellow tourists being, fortunately,
of the non-exclamatory type — when the
silence was broken by loud screams.
" Ravens ! " I thought, — for when the
mind is full it is liable to spill over at any
sudden jar, — and, dropping my umbrella,
I sprang to the edge of the cliff. The bird
was only a hawk, soaring and screaming,
too far away to be made out ; a duck-hawk,
perhaps, but certainly not a raven. " How
you frightened me ! " said one of the ladies.
" I thought you were going to throw your-
self over the precipice." My hobby-horse
amused her, — as it did me also, — but she
was herself too sound an enthusiast to be
really unsympathetic. A New Jersey
grandmother, she made nothing of a
thirteen-mile tramp, a thorough drenching,

58 NORTH CAROLINA

and a pedestrian's blister, when rare flowers
were in question, and the next morning
would be off again before breakfast, scour-
ing the country for new trophies. Like
Mme. Trepof, she would have gone to
Sweden in search of a match-box, had the
notion taken her. As for ravens, she had
already seen one, only a few days before my
arrival. It flew directly over the hotel, and
she recognized it at once, not as a raven, to
be sure, but as " the blackest crow she had
ever seen." A man who happened to be
doing some carpenter's work about the
house heard her exclamation, and told her
what it was, and by good luck he was to-day
our driver. It was wonderful how much
encouragement I received in my amusing
pursuit. If only there were fewer stories
and more ravens ! I was ready to say.

Yet if I said so, it was only in a fit of
impatience. In point of fact, I received
with thankfulness every such bit of evidence

that Dr. 's gloomy prognostications were

ill founded. On the very morning after
this expedition to Whiteside, for example, I
was on my way to the summit of Satulah,
— an easy jaunt, and a capital observatory,

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 59

— when I met a young man carrying a gun,
and proposed to him the inevitable inquiry.
Oh yes, he saw ravens pretty often ; he had
seen some within a month, he thought. They
never flew over without calling out ; which,
as I interpreted it, might mean only that
when they kept silence he failed to notice
them. Here was more proof of the birds'
presence ; but the words " within a month "
kept down any tendency to undue exhilara-
tion.

That noon, at the hotel, I had an interest-
ing ornithological conference with two resi-
dents of the town, both of them already well
informed as to the nature of my crotchet.
For a beginning, one of them told me that
he had seen a raven that very forenoon, —
and as usual it was "flying over." Then
the talk somehow turned upon the whippoor-
will, of which I had thus far found no trace
hereabout, and they agreed that it was not
uncommon at certain seasons. It was often
called the bullbat, they added. They had
seen it, both of them, I think, flying far up
in the air in broad daylight, and crying
whippoorwill 1 " Good ! " said I. " I would
rather have seen that than all the ravens in

60 NORTH CAROLINA

North Carolina." Here was a really novel
addition to the familiar legend about the
identity of the whippoorwill and the night-
hawk, — a legend whose distribution is per-
haps almost as wide as that of the birds them-
selves.

But wonders were not to stop here. One
of the men, the one who had that forenoon
seen a raven, proceeded to inform, me that
catbirds passed the winter in the mud, in

a state of hibernation. William had

dug them up, and they had come to and
flown away. He himself had never seen
this, but he knew, as everybody else did,
that catbirds disappeared in the autumn,
there was no telling how or when, and reap-
peared in the spring in a manner equally
mysterious. I hinted some incredulity, to
his great surprise, intimating for one thing
that it was well known that catbirds migrated
farther south ; whereupon he appealed to his
companion. " Would n't you believe it, if

William told you he had seen it ? " he

asked; and there was a shout of laughter
from the bystanders when the second man,
after a minute's reflection, answered bluntly,
"No."

IN QUEST OF EAVENS 61

It would be too long a story to set down
all the answers I received from the many
persons whom I questioned here and there
in my daily peregrinations. One man was
sorry he had not heard of me sooner. A cow
had been killed by lightning somewhere on
the mountains, a week or two before. That
would have been my opportunity. Ravens
are sure to be on hand at such a time. But
it was too late now, as they never touch flesh
after it has begun to spoil. Another man, a
German, living some miles out of the village,
said, " Well, in my country we call them
ravens, but here they call them crows."
They were a nuisance ; he had to kill them.
He knew smaller black birds, in flocks, but
no larger ones. He and the apothecary —
who now and then laughed good-humoredly
at my continued failure, as I stopped to pass
the time of day with him, or to ask him
about the way to some waterfall — were, as
well as I remember, the only witnesses for
the negative; so that the question was no
longer as to the presence of the birds, but as
to the degree of their commonness and the
probability of my seeing them. It would
be too much to say that the whole town was

62 NORTH CAROLINA

excited over the matter, but at least my
few fellow boarders at the hotel either felt
or simulated a pretty constant interest.
" Well," one or another of them would say,
as I dragged my weary steps up the hill to
the door, at the end of a day's outing, " well,
have you seen any ravens yet ? "

One day there appeared at the dinner-
table a bright, rosy-faced, clear-eyed, whole-
some-looking boy of nine or ten years, and
the gentleman who had brought him in as
his guest presently introduced him to me,
with the remark that perhaps " Bob " could
give me information upon my favorite topic.
Bob smiled bashfully, and I began my ex-
amination. Yes, he said, he had seen ravens.
How often, should he say? Why, almost
every day. When did he see them last?
Yesterday. How many were there ? One.
It was flying over. Did it call ? Yes, they
always did. How much bigger than a crow
was it ? Not much, but the voice was very
different. This last was a model answer, —
not at all the answer of a dishonest witness,
or of an honest witness ambitious to make
out a story. It was impossible to doubt him
(his father and his older brother confirmed

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 63

his testimony afterward), and yet I had been
out of doors almost constantly for more than
two weeks, and so far had not obtained the
first glimpse of a large, wide-ranging, high-
flying bird which this boy — who lived a few
miles out of the village, it is true — saw
nearly every day. Verily, as the unsuccess-
ful man's text has it (and a comfortable text
it is), "the race is not to the swift, . . .
nor yet favour to men of skill ; but time and
chance happeneth to them all."

I speak unadvisedly. I had seen ravens ;
I had seen them here at Highlands. But it
was in a dream of the night. There were
two, and they were " flying over," — yes,
and calling as they flew. One of them was
partly white, an albinistic peculiarity at
which I do not remember to have felt the
least surprise. But indeed, if I may trust
my own experience, nothing surprises us in
dreamland. There, as in fairyland, every-
thing is natural. Perhaps the same will be
true in a world after this.

Meantime, if my eyes were holden from
some things, I saw many others as I traveled
hither and thither, now to a mountain top,
now down one of the roads into the warm

64 NORTH CAROLINA

lower country, now to some far-away wood-
land waterfall. The days were all too short
and all too few. Like a sensible man, to
whom years had brought the philosophic
mind, I had more than one string to my bow,
and toward the end of my three weeks the
very thought of ravens had mostly ceased
to trouble me. Then, on my last day in
the village, I met a barefooted boy near the
hotel. " Howdy ? " said I. " Howdy ? " he
answered ; and then he asked, " Did you
git to see your ravens?" Who is this, I
thought, and how does he know me ? For
I am not used to being famous. But I an-
swered No, I had seen no ravens. How
did he know I wanted to see any ? "I saw
you at Turtlepond," he said. He was out
there with his cousin, Cling Cabe. With
that it all came back to me. He was one
of the boys who had paid me such flattering-
noonday attentions, and of whom I had taken
so shabby a leave. I was glad to see him
again. But he was not yet done with his
story. Probably he had carried the burden
of it for the last fortnight. " Two ravens
flew over just after you left," he said. Was
he sure they were ravens ? Yes, his uncle

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 65

Zeb l saw them, and said they were. Well,
it was plainer and plainer that I had mis-
taken my game. I must leave it for younger
eyes to see ravens, — in the flesh, at least.
" Your old men shall dream dreams," said
the prophet.

It was May 27 when, after an early break-
fast, I left Highlands in a big mountain
wagon, bound for Boston by the way of
Dillsboro and Asheville. I had come into
the mountains from the south, and was go-
ing out in a northerly direction. The road
was not highly recommended ; it would be
a rough, all-day drive, but it would take me
through a new piece of country ; and as for
the jolting, I fancied that by this time I had
become hardened to all that the steepest and
stoniest of roads could inflict upon a passen-
ger. On that point, I may as well confess,
though it does not concern the present story,
I was insufficiently informed.

It had been agreed that I should take my

1 The great " war governor " and senator of North
Carolina was born among the mountains of the State ;
and from what I heard, he seems to have left his name

" to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear country,"
as truly as Wallace ever did in Scotland.

66 NORTH CAROLINA

own time, making the trip as natural-histor-
ical as I pleased. "It fares better with
sentiments not to be in a hurry with them,"
says Sterne, and the same is true of sciences
and other pleasures. Again and again I
ordered the horses stopped as we came to
some likely piece of cover, but little or no-
thing resulted. There were singers in plenty,
but no new voices. After all, I said to my-
self, one does not study ornithology to any
great advantage from a wagon-seat. Yet I
remember one lesson — an old one rehearsed
— that the morning brought me.

Soon after getting out of the village we
passed Stewart's Pond. This had been one
of my most frequent resorts. A considera-
ble part of several half-days had been idled
away beside it, and more than once I had
commented upon the singular fact that its
shores, birdy as they were, harbored no
water thrushes, while in several similar places
I had heard them singing for more than a
fortnight. There was something really mys-
terious about it, I was inclined to think.
The place seemed made for them, unless,
perhaps, the damming of the stream had
rendered the current too sluggish to suit

IN QUEST OF EAVENS 67

their taste. Now, however, as we drove
past, and just as I was bidding the place
good-by, a water thrush struck up his sim-
ple, lazily emphatic tune. " Here I am,
stranger," he might have been saying. Had
he been there all the time ? I did not know.
One's investigations are never complete, even
in the most limited area.

We had not gone many miles farther be-
fore we took what was for me a new road,
which turned out presently to be like all the
others : a road running mostly through the
forest, uphill and downhill by turns, with
here and there, at long distances, a solitary
cabin, unpainted, perhaps unwindowed, yet
pretty certainly with a patch of sweet-william
and other old-fashioned flowers in the " front
yard." The rudest one of all, in the very
lonesomest of clearings, had before the door
a magnificent eglantine bush that would
have made the fortune of any Northern gar-
dener. The mountain side might be all
aflame with azalea and laurel, but the wo-
man's heart must have a bit of garden, some-
thing planted and tended, to make the cabin
more like a home.

For some hours we had been traveling

68 NOETH CAROLINA

thus, and were now conie to an open place
in the town of Hamburg, so the driver told
me. Here, all at once, I nudged him with
a quick command to stop. " There it is ! "
I cried, as I whipped out my opera-glass.
" There 's a raven ! " " Yes," said the driver,
" that 's the bird." He was flying from us
in a diagonal course, making toward a hill
or mountain, — at a comfortable distance, in
the best of lights, and most admirably dis-
posed to show us his dimensions ; but he was
silent and in tremendous haste.

" Not the least obeisance made he ; not a minute stopped
or stayed he."

If you would only say something ! I thought.
But he did not " call out," perhaps because
he was not " flying over." I held the glass
on him till he passed out of sight, — a really
good look, as time counts under such circum-
stances. Yes, at the last moment I had seen
a raven ! Would the driver, when he got
back to Highlands to-morrow evening, have

the goodness so to inform Dr. for his

comfort ?

Another thing I had accomplished : I had
supplied three male Hamburgers with abun-
dant material for a week's gossip ; for even

IN QUEST OF RAVENS 69

in my excitement I had been aware that we
had halted almost directly in front of a
house, — the only one for some miles, I
think, — in the yard of which three men
were lounging. I looked at the bird, and
the men looked at me. It gave me pleasure
afterward to think what a story it must have
made. " Yes, sir, it 's gospel truth : he pulled
out a spy-glass and sat there looking at a
raven. I reckon he never see one before."

I speak of excitement, but it was a won-
der to me how temperate my emotions were,
and how quickly they subsided. Within a
half-mile our progress was blocked by a large
oak-tree, which the wind had twisted partly
off and thrown squarely across the road.
The driver had brought no axe along, and
was obliged to go back to the house for
help, leaving me to care for the team.
Straight before me loomed the Balsam
Mountains, a dozen peaks, gloriously high
and mountainous ; not too far away, yet far
enough to be blue, with white clouds veiling
their lower slopes and so lifting the tops
skyward. I looked at them and looked at
them, and between the looks I put the raven
into my notebook.

70 NORTH CAROLINA

For the day it kept its place unquestioned.
Then, long before I reached Massachusetts,
I punctuated the entry with a question mark.
The bird had been silent ; its apparent size
might have been an illusion ; and my assur-
ance of the moment, absolute though it was,
would not bear the test of time and cold
blood.

Here ended my raven-hunt. I had en-
joyed it, and would gladly have made it
longer, — in that respect it had been suc-
cessful ; but the " collection " I was to have
made, my little store of " first-hand know-
ledge," had fared but poorly. As far as
ravens were concerned, I was bringing home
a lean bag, — a brace of interrogation
points.

A MOUNTAIN POND

STEWART'S POND, on the Hamburg road
a mile or so from the village of Highlands,
served me, a visiting bird-gazer, more than
one good turn : selfishly considered, it was
something to be thankful for ; but I never
passed it, for all that, without feeling that it
was a defacement of the landscape. The
Cullasajah River is here only four or five
miles from its source, near the summit of
Whiteside Mountain; and already a land-
owner, taking advantage of a level space
and what passes among men as a legal title,
has dammed it (the reader may spell
the word as he chooses — " dammed " or
" damned," it is all one to a mountain
stream) for uses of his own. The water
backs up between a wooded hill on one side
and a rounded grassy knoll on the other,
narrows where the road crosses it by a rude
bridge, and immediately broadens again, as
best it can, against the base of a steeper,

72 NORTH CAROLINA

forest-covered hill just beyond. The shape-
lessness of the pond and its romantic sur-
roundings will in the course of years give
it beauty, but for the present everything'
is unpleasantly new. The tall old trees
and the ancient rhododendron bushes, which
have been drowned by the brook they meant
only to drink from, are too recently dead.
Nature must have time to trim the ragged
edges of man's work and fit it into her own
plan. And she will do it, though it may
take her longer than to absorb the man him-
self.

When I came in sight of the pond for the
first time, in the midst of my second day's
explorations, my first thought, it must be
confessed, was not of its beauty or want of
beauty, but of sandpipers, and in a minute
more I was leaning over the fence to sweep
the water-line with my opera-glass. Yes,
there they were, five or six in number, one
here, another there ; solitary sandpipers, so
called with only a moderate degree of appro-
priateness, breaking their long northward
journey beside this mountain lake, which
might have been made for their express con-
venience. I was glad to see them. Without

A MOUNTAIN POND 73

being rare, they make themselves uncommon
enough to be always interesting ; and they
have, besides, one really famous trait, — the
extraordinary secrecy of their breeding oper-
ations. Well known as they are, and wide
as is their distribution, their eggs, so far
as I am aware, are still unrepresented in
scientific collections except by a single
specimen found almost twenty years ago in
Vermont ; a " record," as we say in these
days, of which Totanus solitarius may right-
fully be proud.

About another part of the pond, on this
same afternoon (May 8), were two sand-
pipers of a more ordinary sort : spotted
sandpipers, familiar objects, we may fairly
say, the whole country over. Few American
schoolboys but have laughed at their absurd
teetering motions. In this respect the soli-
tary sandpiper is better behaved. It does
not teeter — it bobs; standing still, as if
in deep thought, and then dipping forward
quickly (a fanciful observer might take the
movement for an affirmative gesticulation,
an involuntary " Yes, yes, now I have it ! ")
and instantly recovering itself, exactly in the
manner of a plover. This is partly what

74 NORTH CAROLINA

Mr. Chapman means, I suppose^ when he
speaks of the solitary sandpiper's superior
quietness and dignity; two fine attributes,
which may have much to do with their pos-
sessor's almost unparalleled success in elud-
ing the researches of • oological collectors.
Nervousness and loquacity are poor hands
at preserving a secret.

Although my first brief visit to Stewart's
Pond made three additions to my local bird-
list (the third being a pair of brown creep-
ers), I did not go that way again for almost
a fortnight. Then (May 21) my feet were
barely on the bridge before a barn swallow
skimmed past me. Swallows of any kind
in the mountains of North Carolina are like
hen-hawks in Massachusetts, — rare enough
to be worth following out of sight. As for
barn swallows, I had not expected to see
them here at all. I kept my eye upon this
fellow, therefore, with the more jealousy,
and happily for me' he seemed to have found
the spot very much to his mind. If he was
a straggler, as I judged likely in spite of the
lateness of the season, he was perhaps all
the readier to stay for an hour or two on
so favorable a hunting-ground. With him

A MOUNTAIN POND 75

were half a dozen rough-wings, — probably
not stragglers, — hawking over the water ;
feeding, bathing, and now and then, by way
of variety, engaging in some pretty spirited
lovers' quarrels. In one such encounter, I
remember, one of the contestants received
so heavy a blow that she quite lost her bal-
ance (the sex was matter of guesswork) and
dropped plump into the water ; and more
than once the fun was interrupted by an
irate phcebe, who dashed out upon the mak-
ers of ft with an ugly snap of his beak, as
much as to say, " Come, now, this is my
bridge." Mr. Stewart himself could hardly
have held stricter notions about the rights
of property. The rough-wings frequently
perched in the dead trees, and once, at least,
the barn swallow did likewise ; something
which I never saw a bird of his kind do
before, to the best of my recollection. For
to-day he was in Rome, and had fallen in
with the Roman customs.

As I have said already, his presence was
unexpected. His name is not included in
Mr. Brewster's North Carolina list, and I
saw no other bird like him till I was ap-
proaching Asheville, a week later, in a rail-

76 NOETH CAEOLINA

way train. Then I was struck almost at the
same moment by two things — a brick chim-
ney and a barn swallow. My start at the
sight of red bricks made me freshly aware
with what quickness the mind puts away the
past and accustoms itself to new and strange
surroundings. Man is the slave of habit,
we say ; but how many of us, even in middle
age, have altered our modes of living, our
controlling opinions, or our daily occupa-
tions, and in the shortest while have for-
gotten the old order of things, till it has
become all like a dream, — a story heard
long ago and now dimly remembered. Was
it indeed we who lived there, and believed
thus, and spent our days so ? This capacity
for change augurs well for the future of the
race, and not less for the future of the indi-
vidual, whether in this world or in another.
In a previous chapter I have mentioned
as provocative of astonishment the igno-
rance of a North Carolina man, my driver
from Walhalla, who had no idea of what I
meant by " swallows." His case turned out
to be less singular than I thought, however,
for when I spoke of it to an exceptionally
bright, well-informed farmer in the vicinity

A MOUNTAIN POND 77

of Highlands, he answered that he saw
nothing surprising about it ; he did n't
know what swallows were, neither. Martins
he knew, — purple martins, — though there
were none hereabout, so far as I could
discover, but " swallow," as a bird's name,
was a novelty he had never heard of. Here
on Stewart's bridge I might have tested the
condition of another resident's mind upon
the same point, but unfortunately the ex-
periment did not occur to me. He came
along on horseback, and I called his atten-
tion to the swallows shooting to and fro
over the water, a pretty spectacle anywhere,
but doubly so in this swallow-poor country.
He manifested no very lively interest in the
subject ; but he made me a civil answer, —
which is perhaps more than a hobby-horsical
catechist, who travels up and down the
world cross-examining his busy fellow
mortals, has any good reason for counting
upon in such a case. With so many things
to be seen and done in this short life, it is
obvious that all men's tastes cannot run to
ornithology. "Yes," the stranger said,
glancing at the swallows, " I expect they
have their nests under the bridge." A

78 NORTH CAROLINA

civil answer I called it, but it was better
than that; indicating, as it did, some
acquaintance with the rough-wing's habits,
or a shrewd knack at guessing. But the
man knew nothing about a bird that nested
in barns.

A short distance beyond the bridge, in
a clearing over which lay scattered the
remains of a house that had formerly stood
in it (for even this new country is not
destitute of ruins), a pair of snowbirds
were chipping nervously, and near the
same spot my ear caught the lisping call
of my first North Carolina brown creeper.
No doubt it was breeding somewhere close
by, and my imagination at once fastened
upon a loose clump of water-killed trees,
from the trunks of which the dry bark was
peeling in big sun-warped flakes, as the site
of its probable habitation. This was on my
first jaunt over the road, and during the
busy days that followed I planned more
than once to spend an hour here in spying
upon the birds. A brown creeper's nest
would be something new for me. Now,
therefore, on this bright morning, when I
was done with the swallows, I walked on

A MOUNTAIN POND 79

to the right point and waited. A long
time passed, or what seemed a long time.
With so many invitations pressing upon
one from all sides in a vacation country, it
is hard sometimes to be leisurely enough
for the best naturalistic results. Then,
suddenly, I heard the expected tseep, and
soon the bird made its appearance. Sure
enough, it flew against one of the very
trees that my imagination had settled upon,
ducked under a strip of dead bark, between
it and the bole, remained within for half a
minute, and came out again. By this time
the second bird had appeared, and was
waiting its turn for admission. They were
feeding their young ; and so long as I
remained they continued their work, going
and coming at longer or shorter intervals.
I made no attempt to inspect their opera-
tions more nearly ; the tree stood in rather
deep water, and the nest was situated at an
altitude of perhaps twenty feet ; but I was
glad to see for myself, even at arm's length,
as it were, this curious and highly charac-
teristic abode of a bird which in general I
meet with only in its idle season. I was
surprised to notice that the pair had chosen

80 NOETH CAROLINA

a strip of bark which was fastened to the
trunk at the upper end and hung loose
below. The nest was the better protected
from the weather, of course, but it must
have been wedged pretty tightly into place,
it seemed to me, unless it had some means
of support not to be guessed at from the
ground. The owners entered invariably at
the same point, — in the upper corner.
The brown creeper has been flattening
itself against the bark of trees for so many
thousand years that a very narrow slit
suffices it for a doorway.

While I was occupied with this interest-
ing bit of household economy, I heard a
clatter of wheels mingled with youthful
shouts. Two boys were coming round a
bend in the road and bearing down upon
me, seated upon an axle-tree between a
pair of wheels drawn by a single steer,
which was headed for the town at a lively
trot, urged on by the cries of the boys, one
of whom held the single driving-rope and
the other a whip. " How fast can he go ? ''
I asked, as they drew near. I hoped to
detain them for a few minutes of talk, but
they had no notion of stopping. They had

A MOUNTAIN POND 81.

never timed him, the older one — not the
driver — answered, with the merriest of
grins. I expressed wonder that they could
manage him with a single rein. "Oh, I
can drive him without any line at all."
" But how do you steer him ? " said I. " I
yank him and I pull him," was the laconic
reply, which by this time had to be shouted
over the boy's shoulder ; and away the
crazy trap went, the wobbling wheels
describing all manner of eccentric and
nameless curves with every revolution; and
the next minute I heard it rattling over the
bridge. Undoubtedly the young fellows
thought ine a green one, not to know that
a yank and a steady pull are equivalent to a
gee and a haw. " Live and learn," said I
to myself. It was a jolly mode of traveling,
at all events, as good as a circus, both for
the boys and for me.

On my way through the village, at noon,
I passed the steer turned out to grass by
the roadside, and had a better look at the
harness, a simple, homemade affair, includ-
ing a pair of hames. The driving-rope,
which in its original estate might have
been part of a clothes-line or a bed-cord,

82 NORTH CAROLINA

was attached to a chain which went round
or over the creature's head at the base of
the horns. The lads themselves were
farther down the street, and the younger
one nudged the other's elbow with a nod
in my direction as I passed on the opposite
sidewalk. They seemed to have sobered
down at a wonderful rate since their arrival
in the " city." I should hardly have known
them for the same boys ; but no doubt they
would wake the echoes again on the road
homeward. I hoped so, surely, for I liked
them best as I saw them first.

As far as the pleasure of life goes, boys
brought up in this primitive mountain
country have little to complain of. They
may lack certain advantages ; in this
imperfect world, where two bodies cannot
occupy the same space at once, the presence
of some things necessitates the absence of
others ; but most certainly they have their
full quota of what in youthful phrase are
known as " good times." The very prettiest
sight that I saw in North Carolina, not
excepting any landscape or flower, — and I
saw floral displays of a splendor to bankrupt
all description, — was a boy whom I met

A MOUNTAIN POND 83

one Sunday morning in a steep, disused
road outside of the town. I was descend-
ing the hill, picking my steps, and he was
coming up. Eleven or twelve years old he
might have been, cleanly dressed, fit for any
company, but bare-legged to the knee. I
wished him good-morning, and he responded
with the easiest grace imaginable. "You
are going to church ? " said I. " Yes, sir,"
and on he went up the hill, " progressing
by his own brave steps ; " a boy, as Thoreau
says, who was "never drawn in a willow
wagon ; " straight as an arrow, and with
motions so elastic, so full of the very spirit
of youth and health, that I stood still and
gazed after him for pure delight. His face,
his speech, his manner, his carriage, all were
in keeping. If he does not make a good
and happy man, it will be an awful tragedy.
This boy was not a " cracker's " child, I
think. Probably he belonged to one of the
Northern families, that make up the village
for the most part, and have settled the
country sparsely for a few miles round about.
The lot of the native mountaineers is hard
and pinched, and although flocks of children
were playing happily enough about the

84 NORTH CAROLINA

cabin doors, it was impossible not to look
upon them as born to a narrow and cheerless
existence. Possibly the fault was partly in
myself, since I have no very easy gift with
strangers, but I found them, young and old
alike, rather uncommunicative.

I recall a family group that I overtook
toward the end of an afternoon ; a father
and mother, both surprisingly young-looking,
hardly out of their teens, it seemed to me,
with a boy of perhaps six years. They were
resting by the roadside as I came up, the
father poring over some written document.
" You must have been to the city," said I ;
but all the man could answer was " Howdy."
The woman smiled and murmured some-
thing, it was impossible to tell what. They
started on again at that moment, the grown
people each with a heavy bag, which looked
as if it might contain meal or flour, and the
little fellow with a big bundle. They had
four miles still to go, they said ; and the
road, as I could see for myself, was of the
very worst, steep and rugged to the last
degree. Partly to see if I could conquer
the man, and partly to please myself, I beck-
oned the youngster to my side and put a

A MOUNTAIN POND 85

coin into his hand. The shot took effect at
once. Father and mother found their voices,
and said in the same breath, " Say thank
you ! " How natural that sounded ! It is
part of the universal language. Every par-
ent will have his child polite. But the boy,
poor thing, was utterly tongue-tied, and
could only smile ; which, after all, was about
the best thing he could have done. The
father, too, was still inclined to silence, find-
ing nothing in particular to say, though I
did my best to encourage him ; but he took
pains to keep along with me, halting when-
ever I did so, and making it manifest that
he meant to be with me at the turn in the
road, about which I had inquired (needlessly,
there is no harm in my now confessing), so
that I should by no possibility go astray.
Nothing could have been more friendly, and
at the corner both he and his wife bade me
good-by with simple heartiness. " Good-by,
little boy," said I. "Tell him good-by,"
called both father and mother ; but the boy
could n't, and there was an end of it. " He 's
just as I was at his age ; bashful, that 's all."
This little speech set matters right. The
parents smiled, the boy did likewise, and we

86 NORTH CAROLINA

went our different ways, I still pitying the
woman, with that heavy bag under her arm,
having to make a packhorse of herself on
that tiresome mountain road.

However, it is the mountain woman's way
to do her full share of the hard work, as I
was soon to see farther exemplified ; for
within half a mile I heard in front of me
the grating of a saw, and presently came
upon another family group, in the woods on
the mountain side, — a woman, three chil-
dren, and a dog. The woman, no longer
young, as we say in the language of compli-
ment, was at one end of a cross-cut saw, and
the largest boy, ten or eleven years old, was
at the other. They were getting to pieces
a huge fallen trunk. " Wood ought to be
cheap in this country," said I ; and the
woman, as she and the boy changed hands to
rest themselves, answered that it was. In
my heart I thought she was paying dearly
for it ; but her voice was cheerful, and the
whole company was almost a merry one, the
younger children laughing at their play, and
the dog capering about them in high spirits.
The mountain family may be poor, but not
with the degrading, squalid poverty of dwell-

A MOUNTAIN POND 87

ers in a city slum ; and at the very worst the
children have a royal playground.

Mountain boys, certainly, I could never
much pity; for the girls it was impossible
not to wish easier and more generous condi-
tions. Here at Stewart's Pond I detained
two of them for a minute's talk : sisters, I
judged, the taller one ten years old, or there-
about. I asked them if there were many
fish in the pond. The older one thought
there were. " I know my daddy ketched
five hundred and put in there for Mr. Stew-
art," she said. Just then the younger girl
pulled her sister's sleeve and pointed toward
two snakes which lay sunning themselves on
the edge of the water, where a much larger
one had shortly before slipped off a log into
the pond at my approach. "They do no
harm ? " said I. " No, sir, I don't guess
they do," was the answer ; a strange-sound-
ing form of speech, though it is exactly like
the " I don't think so " of which we all con-
tinue to make hourly use, no matter how
often some crotchety amateur grammarian —
for whom logic is logic, and who hates idiom
as a mad dog hates water — may write to the
newspapers warning us of its impropriety.

88 NOETH CAROLINA

Then the girls, barefooted, both of them,
turned into a bushy trail so narrow that it
had escaped my notice, and disappeared in
the woods. I thought of the villainous-look-
ing rattlesnake that I had seen the day be-
fore, freshly killed and tossed upon the side
of the road, within a hundred rods of this
point, and of the surprise expressed by a
resident of the town at my wandering about
the country without leggins.

As to the question of snakes and the dan-
ger from them, the people here, as is true
everywhere in a rattlesnake country, held
widely different opinions. Everybody recog-
nized the presence of the pest, and most per-
sons, whatever their own practice might be,
advised a measure of caution on the part of
strangers. One thing was agreed to on all
hands : whoever saw a " rattler " was in duty
bound to make an end of it ; and one man
told me a little story by way of illustrating
the spirit of the community upon this point.
A woman (not a mountain woman) was rid-
ing into town, when her horse suddenly
stopped and shied. In the road, directly
before her, a snake was coiled, rattling de-
fiance. The woman dismounted, hitched the

A MOUNTAIN POND 89

frightened horse to a sapling, cut a switch,
killed the snake, threw it out of the road,
remounted, and went on about her business.
It is one advantage of life in wild surround-
ings that it encourages self-reliance.

In all places, nevertheless, and under all
conditions, human nature remains a para-
doxical compound. A mountain woman,
while ploughing, came into close quarters
with a rattlesnake. To save herself she
sprang backward, fell against a stone, and in
the fall broke her wrist. No doctor being
within call, she set the bone herself, made
and adjusted a rude splint, and now, as the
lady who told me the story expressed it,
" has a pretty good arm." That was plucky.
But the same woman suffered from an aching
tooth some time afterward, and was advised
to have it extracted. She would do no such
thing. She could n't. She had a tooth
pulled once, and it hurt her so that she
would never do it again.

Anthropology and ornithology were very
agreeably mingled for me on the Hamburg
road, — though it seems impossible for me
to stay there, the reader may say, — where
passers-by were frequent enough to keep me

90 NORTH CAROLINA

from feeling lonesome, and yet not so numer-
ous as to disturb the quiet of the place or
interfere unduly with my natural historical
researches. The human interview to which
I look back with most pleasure was with a
pair of elderly people who appeared one
morning in an open buggy. They were
driving from the town, seated side by side
in the shadow of a big umbrella, and as they
overtook me, on the bridge, the man said
" Good-morning," of course, and then, to my
surprise, pulled up his horse and inquired
particularly after my health. He hoped I
was recovering from my indisposition, though
I am not sure that he used that rather super-
fine word. I gave him a favorable account
of myself, — wondering all the while how
he knew I had been ill, — whereupon he
expressed the greatest satisfaction, and his
good wife smiled in sympathy. Then, after
a word or two about the beauty of the morn-
ing, and while I was still trying to guess
who the couple could be, the man gathered
up the reins with the remark, " I 'm going
after some Ilex monticola for Charley."
" Yes, I know where it is," he added, in
response to a question. Then I knew him.

A MOUNTAIN POND 91

I had been at his house a few evenings be-
fore to see his son, who had come home from
Biltmore to collect certain rare local plants
— the mountain holly being one of them —
for the Vanderbilt herbarium. The mystery
was cleared, but it may be imagined how
taken aback I was when this venerable rus-
tic stranger threw a Latin name at me.

In truth, however, botany and Latin names
might almost be said to be in the air at
Highlands. A villager met me in the street,
one day, and almost before I knew it, we
were discussing the specific identity of the
small yellow lady's-slippers, — whether there
were two species, or, as my new acquaintance
believed, only one, in the woods round about.
At another time, having called at a very
pretty unpainted cottage, — all the prettier
for the natural color of the weathered shin-
gles, — I remarked to the lady of the house
upon the beauty of Azalea Vaseyi, which I
had noticed in several dooryards, and which
was said to have been transplanted from the
woods. I did not understand why it was, I
told her, but I could n't find it described in
my Chapman's Flora. " Oh, it is there, I
am sure it is," she answered ; and going into

92 NORTH CAROLINA

the next room she brought out a copy of the
manual, turned to the page, and showed me
the name. It was in the supplement, where
in my haste I had overlooked it. I won-
dered how often, in a New England country
village, a stranger could happen into a house,
painted or unpainted, and by any chance
find the mistress of it prepared to set him
right on a question of local botany.

On a later occasion — for thus encouraged
I called more than once afterward at the
same house — the lady handed me an orchid.
I might be interested in it ; it was not very
common, she believed. I looked at it, think-
ing at first that I had never seen it before.
Then I seemed to remember something.
" Is it Pogonia verticillata? " I asked. She
smiled, and said it was ; and when I told her
that to the best of my recollection I had
never seen more than one specimen before,
and that upwards of twenty years ago (a
specimen from Blue Hill, Massachusetts),
she insisted upon believing that I must have
an extraordinary botanical memory, though
of course she did not put the compliment
thus baldly, but dressed it in some graceful,
unanswerable, feminine phrase which I, for

A MOUNTAIN POND 93

all my imaginary mnemonic powers, have
long ago forgotten.

The same lady had the rare Shortia gala-
cifolia growing — transplanted — in her
grounds, and her husband volunteered to
show me one of the few places in the neigh-
borhood of Highlands (this, too, on his own
land) where the true lily-of-the-valley —
identical with the European plant of our
gardens — grows wild. It was something I
had greatly desired to see, and was now in
bloom. Still another man — but he was
only a summer cottager — took me to look
at a specimen of the Carolina hemlock
(Tsuga Caroliniana), a tree of the very
existence of which I had before been igno-
rant. The truth is that the region is most
exceptionally rich in its flora, and the peo-
ple, to their honor be it recorded, are equally
exceptional in that they appreciate the fact.

A small magnolia-tree (JM. Fraseri), in
bloom everywhere along the brooksides, did
not attract me to any special degree till one
day, in an idle hour at Stewart's Pond, I
plucked a half-open bud. I thought I had
never known so rare a fragrance ; delicate
and wholesome beyond comparison, and yet

94 NORTH CAROLINA

most deliciously rich and fruity, a perfume
for the gods. The leaf, too, now that I came
really to look at it, was of an elegant shape
and texture, untoothed, but with a beautiful
" auriculated " base, as Latin-loving bota-
nists say, from which the plant derives its
vernacular name, — the ear-leaved umbrella-
tree. The waxy blossoms seemed to be quite
scentless, but I wished that Thoreau, whose
nose was as good as his eyes and his ears,
could have smelled of the buds.

The best thing that I found at the pond,
however, by long odds the most interesting
and unexpected thing that I found anywhere
in North Carolina (I speak as a hobbyist),
was neither a tree nor a human being, but a
bird. I had been loitering along the river-
bank just above the pond itself, admiring
the magnolias, the silver-bell trees, the lofty
hemlocks, — out of the depths of which a
" mountain boomer," known to simple North-
ern folk as a red squirrel, now and then
emitted his saucy chatter, — and the Indi-
an's paint-brush (scarlet painted-cup), the
brightest and among the most characteristic
and memorable of the woodland flowers ;
listening to the shouts of an olive-sided fly-

A MOUNTAIN POND 95

catcher and the music of the frogs, one of
them a regular Karl Formes for profundity ;
and in general waiting to see what would
happen. Nothing of special importance
seemed likely to reward my diligent idleness,
and I turned back toward the town. On the
way I halted at the bridge, as I always did,
and presently a carriage drove over it. In-
side sat a woman under an enormous black
sunbonnet. She did me, without knowing
it, a kindness, and I should be glad to thank
her. As the wheels of the carriage struck
the plank bridge, a bird started into sight
from under it or close beside it. A sand-
piper, I thought ; but the next moment it
dropped into the water and began swim-
ming. Then I knew it for a bird I had
never seen before, and, better still, a bird
belonging to a family of which I had never
seen any representative, a bird which had
never for an instant entered into my North
Carolina calculations. It was a phalarope,
a wanderer from afar, blown out of its course,
perhaps, and lying by for a day in this little
mountain pond, almost four thousand feet
above sea level.

My first concern, as I recovered myself,

96 NORTH CAROLINA

was to set down in black and white a com-
plete account of the stranger's plumage ; for
though I knew it for a phalarope, I must
wait to consult a book before naming it more
specifically. It would have contributed un-
speakably to my peace of mind, just then,
had I been better informed about the dis-
tinctive peculiarities of the three species
which compose the phalarope family; as I
certainly would have been, had I received
any premonition of what was in store for
me. As it was, I must make sure of every
possible detail, lest in my ignorance I should
overlook some apparently trivial item that
might prove, too late, to be all important.
So I fell to work, noting the white lower
cheek (or should I call it the side of the
upper neck?), the black stripe through and
behind the eye, the white line just over the
eye, the light-colored crown, the rich reddish
brown of the nape and the sides of the neck,
the white or gray-white under parts, the
plain (unbarred) wings, and so on. The
particulars need not be rehearsed here. I
was possessed by a recollection, or half recol-
lection, that the marginal membrane of the
toes was a prime mark of distinction (as

A MOUNTAIN POND 97

indeed it is, though the only manual I had
brought with me turned out not to mention
the point) ; but while for much of the time
the bird's feet were visible, it never for so
much as a second held them still, and as the
water was none too clear and the bottom
muddy, it was impossible for me to see how
the toes were webbed, or even to be certain
that they were webbed at all. Once, as the
bird was close to the shore, and almost at
my feet, I crouched upon a log, thinking to
pick the creature up and examine it ; but it
moved quietly away for a yard or so, just
out of reach, and though I could probably
have killed it with a stick, — as a friend of
mine killed one some years ago on a moun-
tain lake in New Hampshire,1 — it was hap-
pily'too late when the possibility of such a
step occurred to me. By that time I was
not on collecting terms with the bird. It
was " not born for death," I thought, or, if
it was, I was not born to play the execu-
tioner.

Its activity was amazing. If I had not
known this to be natural to the phalarope
family, I might have thought the poor thing

1 The case is recorded in The Auk, vol. vi. page 68.

98 NORTH CAROLINA

on the verge of starvation, eating for dear
life. It moved its head from side to side
incessantly, dabbing the water with its bill
picking something, — minute insects, I sup-
posed, — from the surface, or swimming
among the loose grass, and running its bill
down the green blades one after another.
Several times, in its eagerness to capture a
passing insect, it almost flew over the water,
and once it actually took wing for a stroke
or two, with some quick, breathless notes,
like cut, cut, cut. One thing was certain, it
did not care for polliwogs, shoals of which
darted about its feet unmolested.

Once a horseman frightened it as he rode
over the bridge, but even then it barely rose
from the water with a startled yip. The
man glanced at it (I was just then looking
carelessly in another direction), and passed
on — to my relief. At that moment the
most interesting mountaineer in North Car-
olina would have found me unresponsive.
As for my own presence, the phalarope
seemed hardly to notice it, though I stood
much of the time within a distance of ten
feet, and now and then considerably nearer
than that, — without so much as a grass-

A MOUNTAIN POND 99

blade for cover, — holding my glass upon it
steadily till a stitch in my side made the at-
titude all but intolerable. The lovely bird
rode the water in the lightest possible man-
ner, and was easily put about by slight puffs
of wind; but it could turn upon an insect
with lightning quickness. It was never still
for an instant except on two occasions, when
it came close to the shore and sat motionless
in the lee of a log. There it crouched upon
its feet, which were still under water, and
seemed to be resting. It preened its feath-
ers, also, and once it rubbed its bill down
with its claw, but the motion was too quick
for my eye to follow, though I was near
enough to see the nostril with perfect dis-
tinctness.

I was in love with the bird from the first
minute. Its tameness, the elegance of its
shape and plumage, the grace and vivacity
of its movements, these of themselves were
enough to drive a bird-lover wild. Add to
them its novelty and unexpectedness, and
the reader may judge for himself of my
state of mind. It was the dearest and tam-
est creature I had ever seen, I kept saying
to myself, forgetful for the moment of two

100 NORTH CAROLINA

blue-headed vireos which at different times
had allowed me to stroke and feed them as
they sat brooding on their eggs.

Another thing I must mention, as adding
not a little to the pleasure of the hour.
The moment I set eyes upon the phalarope,
before I had taken even a mental note of
its plumage, I thought of my friend and cor-
respondent, Celia Thaxter, and of her eager
inquiries about the " bay bird," which she
had then seen for the first time at the Isles
of Shoals — " just like a sandpiper, only
smaller, and swimming on the water like a
duck." And as the bird before me darted
hither and thither, so amazingly agile, I re-
membered her pretty description of this very
trait, a description which I here copy from
her letter : —

" He was swimming about the wharf near
the landing, a pretty, dainty creature, in
soft shades of gray and white, with the
' needle-like beak,' and a rapidity of motion
that I have never seen equaled in any living
thing except a darting dragon-fly or some
restless insect. He was never for one in-
stant still, darting after his food on the
surface of the water. He seemed perfectly

A MOUNTAIN POND 101

tame, was n't the least afraid of anything or
anybody, merely moving aside to avoid an
oar-blade, and swaying almost on to the
rocks with the swirl of the water. I watched
him till I was tired, and went away and left
him there still cheerfully frisking. I am so
glad to tell you of something you have n't
seen ! "

A year afterward (May 29, 1892), she
wrote again, with equal enthusiasm : " If I
only had a house of my own here I should
make a business of trying desperately hard
to bring you here, if only for one of your
spare Sundays, to see the ' bay birds ' that
have been round here literally by the thou-
sands for the last month, the swimming
sandpipers — so beautiful ! In great flocks
that wheel and turn, and, flying in long
masses over the water, show now dark, now
dazzling silver as they careen and show the
white lining of their wings, like a long, bril-
liant, fluttering ribbon. I never heard of so
many before, about here."

The birds seen at the Isles of Shoals were
doubtless either red phalaropes or northern
phalaropes, — or, not unlikely, both, — " sea
snipe," they are often called; two pelagic,

102 NORTH CAROLINA

circumpolar species, the presence of which
in unusual numbers off our Atlantic coast
was recorded by other observers in the
spring of 1892. My bird here in North
Carolina, if I read its characters correctly,
was of the third species of the family, Wil-
son's phalarope, larger and handsomer than
the others ; an inland bird, peculiar to the
American continent, breeding in the upper
Mississippi Valley and farther north, and
occurring in our Eastern country only as a
straggler.

That was a lucky hour, an hour worth a
long journey, and worthy of long remem-
brance. It brought me, as I began by say-
ing, a new bird and a new family ; a family
distinguished not more for its grace and
beauty than for the strangeness — the " new-
ness," as to-day's word is — of its domestic
relations ; for the female phalarope not only
dresses more handsomely than the male, but
is larger, and in a general way assumes the
rights of superiority. She does the court-
ing— openly and ostensibly, I mean — and,
if the books are to be trusted, leaves to
her mate the homely, plumage-dulling labor
of sitting upon the eggs. And why not?

A MOUNTAIN POND 103

Nature has made her a queen, and dowered
her with queenly prerogatives, one of which,
by universal consent, is the right to choose
for herself the father of her royal children.

Like Mrs. Thaxter, I stayed with my bird
till I was tired with watching such preter-
natural activity; and the next day I re-
turned to the place, hoping to tire myself
again in the same delightful manner. But
the phalarope was no longer there. Up and
down the road I went, scanning the edges of
the pond, but the bird had flown. I wished
her safely over the mountains, and a mate
to her heart's liking at the end of the jour-
ney.

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE

" I 'D rather do anything than to pack,"
said a North Carolina mountain man. His
tone bespoke a fullness of experience ; as if
a farm-bred Yankee were to say, " I 'd rather
do anything than to pick stones in cold
weather." He had found me talking with a
third man by the wayside on a sultry fore-
noon. The third man carried a bag of corn
on his back, and was on his way from Horse
Cove to Highlands (valleys are coves in that
part of the South), up the long steep moun-
tain side down which, with frequent stops
for admiration of the world below, I had
been lazily traveling. He was sick, he told
me ; and as his appearance corroborated his
words, I had been trying to persuade him to
leave his load where it was, trust its safety
to Providence, and go home. Just then it
happened that mountaineer number two
came along and delivered himself as above
quoted.

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 105

He was going to Highlands, also. He had
been " putting in a week " trying to buy a
cow to replace one that had mired herself
and broken her neck. " I would rather
have paid down twenty-five dollars in gold,"
he declared. (The air was full of political
silver talk ; but gold is the standard, after
all, when men come to business.) He knew
the invalid, it appeared, for presently he
turned into a trail, a short cut through the
woods, which till now had escaped my notice,
and remarked, " Well, John, I guess I '11
take the narrow way ; " and off he went up
the slope, while the other man and I con-
tinued our dialogue, — I still playing the
part of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Chris-
tian still unconvinced, but not indisposed to
parley.

He wished to know where I had come
from ; and when I told him, he said, " Mas-
sachusetts ! Well, I reckon it 's right hot
down there now." He held the common
belief of the mountain people that the rest
of the earth's surface is mostly uninhabitable
in summer-time. One morning, I remember,
I said something to an idler on the village
sidewalk about the cool night we had just

106 NORTH CAROLINA

passed. I meant my little speech as a kind
of local compliment, but he took me up at
once. It was " pretty hot," he thought, —
about as hot a night as he ever knew. He
did n't see how folks lived down in Charles-
ton ; and I partly agreed with him. He
had been "borned right here," and had
never been farther away than to Seneca;
and from his manner of expressing himself
I inferred that he hoped never to find him-
self so far from home again. This was in
the midst of a " heated term," when the
mercury, at four o'clock in the afternoon,
registered 74° on the hotel piazza.

However, it was many degrees warmer
than that in Horse Cove (at a considerably
lower level) on the day of which I am writ-
ing, and a sick man with a bag of corn on
his back had good reason to rest halfway up
the climb. He had killed " a pretty rattle-
snake " a little way back, he told me.
" Very dangerous they are," he added, with
an evident kindly desire to put a stranger
on his guard. As we separated, a man on
horseback turned a corner in the road above
us, and on looking round, a few minutes
later, I was relieved to see that he had lent

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 107

the pack-bearer his horse, and was pursuing
his own way on foot. And now I thought,
not of Bunyan's parable, but of an older
and better one.

Though the primary interest of my trip
to the North Carolina mountains was rather
with the fauna and flora than with the pop-
ulation (as we call it, in our lofty human
way of speaking, having no doubt that we
are the people), I found, first and last, no
small pleasure in the men, women, and chil-
dren, as I fell in with them out of doors here
and there, in the course of my daily peram-
bulations. Poverty-cursed as they looked
(the universal " packing " by both sexes
over those up-and-down roads, and the shift-
less, comfortless appearance of the cabins,
were proof enough of a pinched estate), they
seemed to be laudably industrious, and, as
the world goes, enjoyers of life. If they
said little, it was perhaps rather my fault
than theirs (the key must fit the lock), and
certainly they treated me with nothing but
kindness.

More than a fortnight after my interview
with the invalid, just described, I was re-
turning to the hotel from an early morning

108 NORTH CAROLINA

jaunt down the Walhalla road, when I met
a man driving a pair of dwarfish steers
hitched to a pair of wheels, on the axle-tree
of which was fastened a rude, widely ven-
tilated, home-made box, with an odd-shaped,
home-made basket hung on one side of it, —
the driver, literally, on the box. I greeted
him, and he pulled up. " Well, I see you
are still here," he said, after a good-morning.
" You have seen me before ? " I replied.
He was sallow and thin, — the usual moun-
taineer's condition, — but wore the pleasant-
est of smiles. " Yes ; I saw you down in
the Cove with the sick man." He was the
pilgrim who took the "narrow way," and
was hunting for a cow, though I should not
have remembered him. And now, peeping
through one of the holes in the box, I saw
that he had a calf inside. "A Jersey?"
said I. " Part Jersey," he answered. Mr.

S (one of the villagers, whom by this

time I counted as a friend, a white-haired,
youngish veteran of the civil war, on the
Union side, a neighbor I had " taken to "

from the moment I saw him), Mr. S

had given the calf to the man's father-in-law,
and he, the son-in-law, had driven up to the

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 109

village to fetch it home. He lived about six
miles out, on a side road. I inquired about
the two or three houses in sight in the valley
clearing below us. It was the " Webb
settlement," he said ; " so we always call it."
I remarked that all hands seemed to have
plenty of children. " Yes, plenty of chil-
dren," he responded, with a laugh ; and away
he drove.

It was only a few minutes before another
man appeared, a foot-passenger this time,
walking at a smart pace, with an umbrella
on his shoulder, and a new pair of boots
slung across it. " You travel faster than I
do," said I. " Yes, sir," he answered, smil-
ing (all men like the name of being active),
" I go pretty peert when I go." He, too, had
six miles before him, and believed it would
" begin to rain after a bit." It would have
been an imposition upon good nature to
detain him. There was a bend in the road
just below, and in another minute I heard
him spanking round it at a lively trot.

Five minutes more, and a second pedes-
trian hove in sight. He, likewise, was in
haste. " You are all in a hurry to-day," I
said to him. I was in pursuit of acquaint-

110 NORTH CAROLINA

ance, and in such places it is the part of
wisdom, and of good manners as well, to
make the most of chance opportunities.
" Yes, sir," he made answer, slackening his
pace ; "I want to get my road done. I 've
got till Saturday, and I want to get it done ; "
and he put on steam again, and was gone.
His countenance was familiar, but I could
not tell where I had seen him, — one of the
fathers of the Webb settlement, perhaps.
The mountaineers, all thin, all light-com-
plexioned, and all wearing the same drab
homespun, look confusingly alike to a new-
comer. Whoever the stranger was, he had
evidently undertaken to build some part of
the new road, and was returning from the
village with supplies. In one hand he car-
ried two heavy drills, and under the other
arm a strip of pork, a piece of brown paper
wrapped about the middle of it, and the
long ends dangling. It did my vacationer's
heart good to see men so cheerfully industri-
ous ; but I thought it a reproach to the
order of the world that so much hard work
should yield so little of comfort. But then,
who knows which was the more comfortable,
— the idle, criticising tourist or the sweating

BIRDS, FLOWEES, AND PEOPLE 111

laborer ? For the time being, at all events,
the laborer had the air of a person inwardly
well off. A mountain man with a " con-
tract " was not likely to be envious even of
a boarder at " Mrs. Davis's," as the hotel is
locally, and very properly, called.

As I went on, passing the height of land
and beginning my descent homeward, I met
two other foot-passengers, — two women :
one old and fat, — the only fat mountaineer
of either sex seen in North Carolina, — with
a red face and a staff ; the other young,
slightly built and pale, carrying an old-fash-
ioned shotgun (the ramrod projecting) over
her right shoulder. Both wore sunbonnets,
and the younger had a braid of hair hanging
down her back. With her slender figure,
her colorless face, her serious look, and the
long musket, she would have made a subject
for a painter. This pair I could think of
no excuse for accosting, much as I should
have enjoyed hearing them talk.1 Shortly

1 On a different road, and on a Sunday morning, I met
a young colored woman, — an unusual sight, colored peo-
ple being personce non gratce in the mountains. We bade
each other good-morning, as Christians should. My note-
book, I see, records her as dressed in her best clothes, —

112 NORTH CAROLINA

after they had gone, I stopped to speak with
a small boy who was climbing the hill, with
a mewing kitten hugged tightly to his breast.
He was taking it home to his cat, he said.
She brought in mice and things, and wanted
something to give them to. The little fel-
low was still young enough to understand
the mother instinct.

That was a truly social walk. I had
never before found one of the mountain
roads half so populous. Once, indeed, I
drove all day without seeing a passenger of
any sort, until, near the end of the after-
noon and within a mile or two of the town,
I met a solitary horseman.

The new road, of which I have spoken,
and concerning which I heard so much said
on all hands, was really not quite that, but
rather a new laying out — with loops here
and there to avoid the steeper pitches — of
the road from Walhalla, over which I had
driven on my entrance into the mountains.

My friend Mr. S had made the surveys

for the work, and the whole town was look-
ing forward eagerly to its completion. To-

a blue gown, I think, — with a handsome light-colored
silk parasol in one hand, and a tin pail in the other.

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 113

ward sunset, on a Sunday afternoon, I had
been out of the village in an opposite direc-
tion, and was sitting by the wayside in the
Stewart woods, full of flowers and music,
where I loved often to linger, when three
men approached on foot. " How far have
you come?" I inquired. " From Franklin,"
— about twenty miles distant, — they an-
swered. They were going to work " on the
new road up at Stooly " (Satulah Moun-
tain), or so I understood the oldest of the
trio, who acted throughout as spokesman.
(In my part of the country it is only the
professionally idle who walk twenty miles
at a stretch.) " Well," said I, none too
politely, being nothing but an outsider,
" I hope you '11 make it better than it was
when I came up." He replied, quite good-
humoredly, that they were making a good
road of it this time. And so they were,
comparatively speaking, for I went over the
mountain one day on purpose to see it, after I
knew who had laid it out, and had begun to
feel a personal interest in its success. One
of the men carried a hoe, and one a small
tin clock. They had no other baggage, I
think. When a man works on the road, he

114 NORTH CAROLINA

needs a hoe to work with, and a timepiece
to tell him when to begin and when to leave
off. So I thought to myself ; but I am
bound to add that these workmen seemed to
be going to their task as if it were a privi-
lege. It eases labor to feel that one is doing
a good job. That makes the difference, so
we used to be told, by Carlyle or some one
else, between an artist and an artisan ; and
I see no reason why such encouraging dis-
tinctions should not apply to road-menders
as well as to menders of philosophy. There
is no such thing as drudgery, even for a man
with a hoe, so long as quality is the end in
view.

Whatever else was to be said of the roads
hereabout, — and the question is of para-
mount importance in such a country, where
mails and supplies must be transported
thirty miles (a two days' journey for loaded
wagons), — they were almost ideally perfect
from a walking naturalist's point of view;
neither sandy nor muddy, the two evils of
Southern roads in general, and conducting
the traveler at once into wild and shady
places. The village is closely built, and no
matter in which direction I turned, the

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 115

houses were quickly behind me, and I was
as truly in the woods as if I had made a
day's march from civilization. A straggling
town, with miles of outlying farms and pas-
turelands, through the sunny stretches of
which a man must make his way forenoon
and afternoon, is a state of things at once so
usual and so disheartening that the point
may well be among the earliest to be con-
sidered in planning a Southern vacation.

In a new country an ornithologist thinks
first of all of the birds peculiar to it, if any
such there are ; and I was no sooner off the
hotel piazza for my first ante-breakfast stroll
at Highlands, than I was on the watch for
Carolina snowbirds and mountain solitary
vireos, two varieties (" subspecies " is the
more modern word) originally described a
few years ago, by Mr. Brewster,1 from speci-
mens taken at this very place. I had gone
perhaps a quarter of a mile over the road
by which I had driven into the town, after
dark, on the evening before, when I was
conscious that a bird had flown out from
under the overhanging bank just behind me.
I turned hastily, and on the instant put my
1 The Auk, vol. iii. pp. 108 and 111.

116 NOETH CAROLINA

eye upon the nest. My ear, as it happened,
had marked the spot precisely. " Here it
is," I thought, and in a fraction of a minute
more the anxious mother showed herself,

— a snowbird. The nest looked somewhat
larger than those I had seen in New Hamp-
shire, but that may have been a fault of
memory.1 It contained young birds and a
single egg. I was in great luck, I said to
myself; but in truth, as a longer experi-
ence showed, the birds were so numerous all
about me that it would have been no very
difficult undertaking to find a nest or two
almost any day.

Birds which had been isolated (separated
from the parent stock) long enough to have
taken on some constant physical peculiarity

— without which they could not be entitled
to a distinctive name, though it were only a
third one — might be presumed to have ac-
quired at the same time some slight but real
idiosyncrasy of voice and language. But if
this is true of the Carolina junco, I failed to
satisfy myself of the fact. On the first day,

1 My first impression was correct. Mr. Brewster, as I
now notice, says of the nest that it is " larger and com-
posed of coarser material " than that of Junco hyemalis.

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 117

indeed, I wrote with perfect confidence :
" The song is clearly distinguishable from
that of the northern bird, — less musical,
more woodeny and chippery ; " more like
the chipping sparrow's, I meant to say. If
I had come away then, with one bird's trill
to go upon, that would have been my ver-
dict, to be printed, when the time came,
without misgiving. But further observation
brought further light, or, if the reader will,
further obscurity. Some individuals were
better singers than others, — so much was to
be expected ; but taking them together, their
music was that of ordinary snowbirds such
as I had always listened to. For aught my
ears told me, I might have been in Fran-
conia. This is not to assert that the Alle-
ghanian junco has not developed a voice in
some measure its own ; I believe it has ;
probability has more authority than per-
sonal experience with me in matters of this
kind; but the change is as yet too incon-
siderable for my senses to appreciate on a
short acquaintance, with no opportunity for
a direct comparison. In such cases, it is
perhaps true that one needs to trust the first
lively impression, — which has, undeniably,

118 NORTH CAROLINA

its own peculiar value, — or to wait the re-
sult of absolute familiarity. My stay of
three weeks gave me neither one thing nor
another ; it was long enough to dissipate my
first feeling of certainty, but not long enough
to yield a revised and settled judgment.

The mountain vireo ( Vireo solitarius
alticola), like the Carolina snowbird, may
properly be called a native of Highlands ;
and, like the snowbird, it proved to be com-
mon. My first sight of it was in the hotel
yard, but I found it — single pairs — every-
where. A look at the feathers of the back
through an opera-glass showed at once the
principal distinction — apart from a supe-
riority in size, not perceptible at a distance
— on which its subspecific identity is based ;
but though to its original describer its song
sounded very much finer than the northern
bird's, I could not bring myself to the same
conclusion. I should never have remarked
in it anything out of the common. Once,
to be sure, I heard notes which led me to
say, " There ! that voice is more like a
yellow-throat's, — fuller and rounder than
a typical solitary's ; " but that might have
happened anywhere, and at all other times ;

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 119

although I had the point continually in mind,
I could only pronounce the song to be ex-
actly what my ear was accustomed to, —
sweet and everything that was beautiful, but
a solitary vireo's song, and nothing else.
And this, to my thinking, is praise enough.
There is no bird-song within my acquaintance
that excels the solitary's in a certain intimate
expressiveness, affectionateness, home-felt
happiness, and purity. Not that it has all
imaginable excellencies, — the unearthly,
spiritual quality of the best of our woodland
thrush music, for example ; but such as it is,
an utterance of love and love's felicity, it
leaves nothing to ask for. What a contrast
between it and the red-eye's comparatively
meaningless and feelingless music ! And
yet, so far as mere form is concerned, the two
songs may be considered as built upon the
same model, if not variations of the same
theme. There must be a world-wide differ-
ence between the two species, one would say,
in the matter of character and temperament.
My arrival at Highlands seemed to have
been coincident with that of an extraordi-
nary throng of rose-breasted grosbeaks. For
the first few days, especially, the whole

120 NORTH CAROLINA

countryside was alive with them, till I felt
as if I had never seen grosbeaks before.
Their warbling was incessant ; so incessant,
and at the same time so exceedingly smooth
and sweet, — " mellifluous " is precisely the
word, — that I welcomed it almost as a re-
lief when the greater part of the chorus
moved on. After such a surfeit of honeyed
fluency, I was prepared better than ever to
appreciate certain of our humbler musicians,
— with a touch of roughness in the voice and
something of brokenness in the tune ; birds,
for instance, like the black-throated green
warbler, the yellow-throated vireo, and the
scarlet tanager. But if I was glad the
crowd had gone, I was glad also that a
goodly sprinkling of the birds had remained ;
so that there was never a day when I did not
see and hear them. The rose-breast is a
lovely singer. In my criticism of him I am
to be understood as meaning no more than
this : that he, like every other artist, has the
defects of his good qualities. Smoothness
is a virtue in music as in writing ; but it is
not the only virtue, nor the one that wears
longest.

After the grosbeaks, whose great abun-

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 121

dance was but transitory, two of the most
numerous birds were the Canadian flycatch-
ing warbler and 'the black-throated blue, —
two Northerners, as I had always thought
of them. Every mountain stream was over-
hung, mile after mile, by a tangle of rhodo-
dendron and laurel, and out of every such
tangle came the hoarse drawling kree, kree,
kree of the black-throated blue, and the
sharp, vivacious, half-wrennish song of the
Canadian flycatcher. I had never seen
either species in anything near such num-
bers ; and I may include the Blackburnian
warbler in the same statement. Concerning
the black-throated blue, it is to be said that
within a year or two the Alleghanian bird
has been discriminated by Dr. Coues as a
local race, with a designation of its own, —
Dendroica ccerulescens cairnsi, — the points
of distinction being its smaller size and the
color of the middle back, black instead of
blue. I cannot recollect that I perceived
anything peculiar about its notes, nor, so
far as appears, did Mr. Brewster do so ; yet
it would not surprise me if such peculiarities
were found to exist. The best of ears (and
there can be very few to surpass Mr. Brew-

122 NOETH CAROLINA

ster's, I am sure) cannot take heed of every-
thing, especially in a strange piece of country,
with a voice out of every bush calling for
attention.

A few birds, too familiar to have attracted
any particular notice on their own account,
became interesting because of the fact that
they were not included among those found
here by Mr. Brewster. One of these was
the Maryland yellow-throat, of which Mr.
Brewster saw no signs above a level of 2100
feet. (The elevation of Highlands, I may
remind the reader, is 3800 feet.) At the
time of my visit, the song, witchery, witchery,
witchery, or fidgety, fidgety, fidgety (every
listener will transliterate the dactyls for him-
self), was to be heard daily from the hotel
piazza, though so far away that, with Mr.
Brewster's negative experience in mind, I
deferred listing the name till, after two or
three days, I found leisure to go down to the
swamp out of which the notes, whatever
they were, evidently proceeded. Then it
transpired that at least five males were in
song, in four different places. And later
(May 25) I happened upon one in still an-
other and more distant spot. Probably the

BIRDS, FLO WEBS, AND PEOPLE 123

species had come in since Mr. Brewster's
day (eleven years before), with some change
of local conditions, — the cutting down of a
piece of forest, perhaps, and the formation
of a bushy swamp in its place. A villager
closely observant of such things, and well
acquainted with the bird, assured me from
his own recollection of the matter (and he
remembered Mr. Brewster's visit well) that
such was pretty certainly the case.

Another bird seen almost daily, though in
limited numbers, was the red-winged black-
bird, which Mr. Brewster noticed only in a
few places in the lower valleys. It seemed
well within the range of probability that the
same changes which had brought in one
lover of sedgy tussocks and button-bushes
should have attracted also another. I made
no search for nests, but the fact that the
birds were seen constantly from May 7 to
May 27 may be taken as reasonably con-
clusive evidence that they were on their
breeding-grounds.

Two or more pairs of phcebes had settled
in the neighborhood, and two or more pairs
of parula warblers. The former were not
found by Mr. Brewster above a level of 3000

124 NORTH CAROLINA

feet, and the latter he missed at Highlands,
although, as he says, the presence of trees
hung with usnea lichens made their absence
a surprise.

Hardly less rememberable than these dif-
ferences of experience was one striking co-
incidence. On the 25th of May, when I
had been at Highlands more than a fort-
night, I was sitting on the veranda waiting
for the dinner-bell, and reading the praises of
" free silver " in a Georgia newspaper, when
I jumped to my feet at the whistle of a Bal-
timore oriole. I started at once in pursuit,
and presently came up with the fellow, a
resplendent old male, in a patch of shrub-
bery bordering the hotel grounds. I kept as
near him as I could (in Massachusetts he
would scarcely have drawn a second look),
and even followed him across the street into
a neighbor's yard. He was the only one I
had seen (he was piping again the next
morning, the last of my stay), and on refer-
ring to Mr. Brewster's paper I found that he
too met with one bird here, l and in exactly

1 " At Highlands I saw a single male. — an unusually
brilliant one, — which I was told was the only bird of the
kind in the vicinity."

BIRDS, FLOWEES, AND PEOPLE 125

the same spot. The keeper of the hotel re-
membered the circumstance and the pleasure
of Mr. Brewster over it. In my case, at
any rate, the lateness and unexpectedness of
the bird's appearance, together with what a
certain scholarly friend of mine would have
called his " uniquity," made him the bringer
of a most agreeable noonday excitement.
Where he had come from, and whether he
had brought a mate with him, were questions
I had no means of answering. He reminded
me of my one Georgia oriole, on the field of
Chickamauga.

The road to Horse Cove, of which I have
already spoken, offered easy access to a
lower and more summery level, the land at
this point dropping almost perpendicularly
for about a thousand feet. In half an hour
the pedestrian was in a new climate, with
something like a new fauna about him.
Here were such birds as the Kentucky war-
bler, the hooded warbler, the cardinal gros-
beak, and the Acadian flycatcher, none of
them to be discovered on the plateau above.
Here, also, — but this may have been no-
thing more than an accident, — were the
only bluebirds (a single family) that I saw

126 NORTH CAROLINA

anywhere until, on my journey out of the
mountains, I descended into the beautiful
Cullowhee Valley.

At Highlands the birds were a mixed
lot, Southerners and Northerners delight-
fully jumbled : a few Carolina wrens (one
was heard whistling from the summit of
Whiteside !) ; a single Bewick wren, sing-
ing and dodging along a fence in the heart
of the village ; tufted titmice ; Carolina
chickadees; Louisiana water thrushes and
turkey buzzards : and on the other side of
the account, brown creepers, red -bellied
nuthatches, black - throated blues, Canada
warblers, Blackburnians, snow-birds, and
olive-sided flycatchers.

An unexpected thing was the common-
ness of blue golden-winged warblers, chats,
and brown thrashers (the chats less common
than the other two) at an elevation of 3800
feet. Still more numerous, in song continu-
ally, even on the summit of Satulah, were
the chestnut-sided warblers, although Mr.
Brewster, in his tour through the region,
"rarely saw more than one or two in any
single day : " a third instance, as seemed
likely, of a species that had taken advan-

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 127

tage of new local conditions — an increase
of shrubby clearings, in the present case —
within the last ten years. Here, as every-
where, the presence of some birds and the
absence of others were provocative of ques-
tions. Why should the Kentucky warbler
sing from rhododendron thickets halfway
up the slope at the head of Horse Cove, and
never be tempted into other thickets, in all
respects like them, just over the brow of
the cliff, 500 feet higher ? Why should the
summer yellow-bird, which pushes its hardy
spring flight beyond the Arctic circle, re-
strict itself here in the Carolinas to the low
valley lands (I saw it at Walhalla and in
the Cullowhee Valley), and never once
choose a nesting -site in appropriate sur-
roundings at a little higher level ? Why
should the chat and the blue golden-wing
find life agreeable at Highlands, and their
regular neighbors, the prairie warbler and
the white-eyed vireo, so persistently refuse
to follow them ? And why, in the first half
of May, was there so strange a dearth
of migrants in these attractive mountain
woods ? — a few blackpoll warblers (last
seen on the 18th), a single myrtle-bird (on

128 NOETH CAROLINA

the 7th) , and a crowd of rose-breasted gros-
beaks and Blackburnian warblers (on the
8th and 9th, especially) being almost the
only ones to fall under my notice. After
all, one of the best birds I saw, not for-
getting the Wilson's phalarope, — my ad-
venture with which has been detailed in a
previous chapter, — was a song sparrow
singing from a dense swampy thicket on the
25th of May. So far as I am aware, no
bird of his kind has ever before been re-
ported in summer from a point so far south.
He looked natural, but not in the least com-
monplace, as, after a long wait on my part,
— for absolute certainty's sake, — he hopped
out into sight. I was proud to have made
one discovery!

In such a place, so limited in the range
of its physical conditions, — a village sur-
rounded by forest, — the birds, however
numerous they might be, counted as indi-
viduals, were sure to be of comparatively
few species. Omitting such as were cer-
tainly, or almost certainly, migrants or
strays, — the blackpoll, the myrtle-bird, the
barn swallow, the king-bird, the solitary
sandpiper, and the phalarope, — and such

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 129

as were found only at a lower level, in Horse
Cove and elsewhere ; omitting, too, all birds
of prey, — few, and for the most part but
imperfectly identified ; restricting myself to
birds fully made out and believed to be sum-
mering in the immediate neighborhood of
Highlands ; omitting the raven, of course,
— I counted but fifty-nine species.

All things considered, I was not incon-
solable at finding my ornithological activi-
ties in some measure abridged. I had the
more time, though still much too little, for
other pursuits. It would have been good to
spend the whole of it upon the plants, or in
admiring the beauties of the country itself.
As it was, I plucked a blossom here and
there, stored up a few of the more striking
of them in the memory, and enjoyed many
an hour in gazing upon the new wild world,
where, no matter how far I climbed, there
was nothing to be seen on all sides but a
sea of hills, wave rising beyond wave to the
horizon's rim.

The horizon was never far off. I was
twice on Satulah and twice on Whiteside,
from which latter point, by all accounts, I
should have had one of the most extensive

130 NORTH CAROLINA

and beautiful prospects to be obtained in
North Carolina ; but I had fallen upon one
of those " spells of weather," common in
mountainous places, which make a visitor
feel as if nothing were so rare as a trans-
parent atmosphere. For ordinary lowland
purposes the days were no doubt favorable
enough: a pleasing, wholesome alternation
of rain and shine, wind and calm, with no
lack of thunder and lightning, and once, at
least, a lively hailstorm. " Weather like
this I have never seen elsewhere. Such
air ! " So I wrote in my enthusiasm, think-
ing of physical comfort, — a man who
wished to walk and sit still by turns, and
be neither sunstruck nor chilled ; but withal,
there was never an hour of clear distance
till the morning I came away, when moun-
tain ascents were no longer to be thought of.
The world was all in a cover of mist, and
the outlying hills, one beyond another, with
the haze settling into the valleys between
them, were, as I say, like the billows of the
sea. Nothing could have been more beauti-
ful, perhaps ; but a curtain is a curtain, and
I longed to see it rise. A change of wind, a
puff from the northwest, and creation would

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 131

indeed have " widened in man's view."
That was not to be, and all those lofty North
Carolina peaks — of which, to a New Eng-
lander, there seem to be so many 1 — were
seen by me only from railway trains and
from the hotel veranda at Asheville, on my
journey homeward. On Satulah and White-
side I was forced to please myself with the
glory of the foreground. What lay beyond
the mist was matter for dreams.

But even as things were, I was not so
badly used. There was more beauty in sight
than I could begin to see, and, notwithstand-
ing the comparative narrowness of the out-
look, — partly because of it, — one of my
most enjoyable forenoons was spent on the
broad, open, slightly rounded summit of
Satulah. Here and there (" more here than
there," my pencil says) a solitary cabin was
visible, or a bit of road, a ribbon of brown
amidst the green of the forest, but no village,
nor so much as a hamlet. The only other
signs of human existence were a light smoke,

1 According to a publication of the State Board of
Agriculture, North Carolina contains forty-three peaks
more than 6000 feet high, eighty-two others more than
5000 feet high, and an " innumerable " multitude the alti-
tude of which is between 4000 and 5000 feet.

132 NORTH CAROLINA

barely distinguishable, rising from Horse
Cove as I guessed, and, for a few minutes, a
man whom my eye fell upon most unexpect-
edly, a motionless speck, though he was
walking, far down the Walhalla road. I
turned my glass that way, and behold, he
had the usual bag of grain on his back.

The date was May 12. I had been in
Highlands less than a week, and my thoughts
still ran upon ravens, the birds which, more
even than the southern snowbird and the
mountain vireo, I had come hither to seek.
They were said often to fly over, and this
surely should be a place to see them. They
could not escape me, if they passed within a
mile. But though I kept an eye out, as we
say, and an ear open, it was a vigil thrown
away. Buzzards, swifts, and a bunch of
twittering goldfinches were all the birds that
" flew over." A chestnut-sided warbler sang
so persistently from the mountain side just
below that his sharp voice became almost a
trouble! From the same quarter rose the
songs of an oven-bird, a rose-breasted gros-
beak, and a scarlet tauager. On the sum-
mit itself were snowbirds and chewinks ; and
once, to my delight, a field sparrow gave out

BIEDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 133

a measure or two. After all, go where you
will, you will hear few voices that wear better
than his, — clear, smooth, most agreeably
modulated, and temperately sweet.

The only trees I remember at the very
top of the mountain were a few dwarfed and
distorted pines and white oaks, — enough to
remind a Yankee that he was not in New
Hampshire. On the other hand, here grew
our Massachusetts huckleberry (Gaylus-
sacia resinosa), which I had seen nowhere
below, where a great abundance of the buck-
berry — so I think I heard it called ( G.
ursinci), — taller bushes, more comfortable
to pick from, with larger blossoms — seemed
to have taken its place. I should have been
glad to try the fruit, which was described as
of excellent quality. On that point, with
no thought of boasting, I could have spoken
as an expert. With the huckleberry was
chokeberry, another New England acquaint-
ance, fair to look upon, but a hypocrite, —
" by their fruits ye shall know them ; " and
underneath, among the stones, were common
yellow five-fingers, bird-foot violets, and
leaves of trailing arbutus, three-toothed
potentilla (a true mountain -lover), checker-

134 NORTH CAROLINA

berry, and galax. With them, but deserv-
ing a sentence by themselves, were the
exquisite vernal iris and the scarlet painted
cup, otherwise known as the Indian's paint-
brush and prairie fire, splendid for color, and
in these parts, to my astonishment, a fre-
quenter of the forest. I should have looked
for it only in grassy meadows. Here and
there grew close patches of the pretty, alpine-
looking sand myrtle (JLeiophyllum buxifo-
lium), thickly covered with small white
flowers, — a plant which I had seen for the
first time the day before on the summit of
Whiteside. Mountain heather I called it,
finding no English name in Chapman's
Flora. Stunted laurel bushes in small bud
were scattered over the summit. A little
later they would make the place a flower gar-
den. A single rose-acacia tree had already
done its best in that direction, with a full
crop of gorgeous rose-purple clusters. The
winds had twisted it and kept it down, but
could not hinder its fruitfulness.

These things, and others like them, I
noticed between times. For the most part,
my eyes were upon the grand panorama, a
wilderness of hazy, forest-covered mountains,

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 135

as far as the eye could go ; nameless to me,
all of them, with the exception of the two
most conspicuous, — Whiteside on the one
hand, and Rabun Bald on the other. For
my comfort a delicious light breeze was stir-
ring, and the sky, as it should be when one
climbs for distant prospects, was sprinkled
with small cumulus clouds, which in turn
dappled the hills with moving shadows.
One thing brought home to me a truth
which in our dullness we ordinarily forget :
that the earth itself is but a shadow, a some-
thing that appeareth, change th, and passeth
away. The rocks at my feet were full of
pot-holes, such as I had seen a day or two
before, the water still swirling in them, at
Cullasajah Falls. As universal time is reck-
oned, — if it is reckoned, — old Satulah and
all that forest-covered world which I saw, or
thotight I saw, from it, were but of yesterday,
a " divine improvisation," and would be gone
to-morrow.

More beautiful than the round prospect
from Satulah, though perhaps less stimulat-
ing to the imagination, was the view from
the edge of the mountain wall at the head of
Horse Cove. Here, under a chestnut tree,

136 NORTH CAROLINA

I spent the greater part of a half day, the
valley with its road and its four or five
houses straight at my feet. A dark preci-
pice of bare rock bounded it on the right, a
green mountain on the left, and in the dis-
tance southward were ridges and peaks with-
out number. A few of the nearer hills I
knew the names of by this time : Fodder-
stack, Bearpen, Hogback, Chimneytop, Ter-
rapin, Shortoff, Scaly, and Whiteside. Sa-
tulah was the only ^/me name in the lot ; and
that, for a guess, is aboriginal. The North
American Indians had a genius for names,
as the Greeks had for sculpture and poetry,
and will be remembered for it.

I had come to the brow of the cliffs, at a
place called Lover's Leap, in search of a
particular kind of rhododendron. It bore
a small flower, my informant had said, and
grew hereabout only in this one spot. It
proved to be R. punctatum, new to me, and
now (May 23) in early blossom. Four days
afterward, in the Cullowhee and Tuckasee-
gee valleys, I saw riverbanks and roadsides
lined with it ; very pretty, of course, being
a rhododendron, but not to be compared in
that respect with the purple rhododendron

BIRDS, FLO WEBS, AND PEOPLE 137

or mountain rose-bay (7?. Catawbiense).
That, also, was to be found here, but very
sparingly, as far as I could discover. I
felicitated myself on having seen it in its
glory on the mountains of southeastern Ten-
nessee. The common large rhododendron
(7?. maximum) stood in thickets along all
the brooks. I must have walked and driven
past a hundred miles of it, on the present
trip, it seemed to me ; but I have never been
at the South late enough to see it in flower.
What I shall remember longest about the
flora of Highlands — and there is no part of
eastern North America that is botanically
richer, I suppose — is the azaleas. When I
drove up from Walhalla, on the 6th of May,
the woods were bright, mile after mile, with
the common pink species (J.. nudiflora) ;
and at Highlands, in some of the dooryards,
I found in full bloom a much lovelier kind,
— also pink, and also leafless, — A. Vaseyi,
as it turned out : a rare and lately discov-
ered plant, of which the village people are
justly proud. I could not visit its wild
habitat without a guide, they told me.
Within a week or so after my arrival the
real glory of the spring was upon us : the

138 NORTH CAROLINA

woods were lighted up everywhere with the
flame-colored azalea ; and before it was gone,
— while it was still at its height, indeed, —
the familiar sweet-scented white azalea (yl.
viscosa), the " swamp pink " of my boyhood,
came forward to keep it company and lend
it contrast. By that time I had seen all the
rhododendrons and azaleas mentioned in
Chapman's Flora, including A. arborescens,
a tardy bloomer, which a botanical collector,
with whom I was favored to spend a day on
the road, pointed out to me in the bud.

The splendor of A. calendulacea, as dis-
played here, is never to be forgotten ; nor is
it to be in the least imagined by those who
have seen a few stunted specimens of the
plant in northern gardens. The color ranges
from light straw-color to the brightest and
deepest orange, and the bushes, thousands
on thousands, no two of them alike, stand,
not in rows or clusters, but broadly spaced,
each by itself, throughout the hiDside woods.

They were never out of sight, and I never
could have enough of them. Wherever I
went, I was always stopping short before one
bush and another ; admiring this one for the
brilliancy or delicacy of its floral tints, and

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 139

that one for its bold and pleasing habit. For
as the plants do not grow in close ranks, so
they do not put forth their flowers in a mass.
They know a trick better than that. Thou-
sands of shrubs, but every one in its own
place, to be separately looked at; and on
every shrub a few sprays of bloom, each well
apart from all the others ; one twig bearing
nothing but leaves, another full of blossoms ;
a short branch here, a longer one there ; and
again, a smooth straight stem shooting far
aloft, holding at the tip a bunch of leaves
and flowers ; everything free, unstudied, and
most irregularly graceful, as if the bushes
had each an individuality as well as a tint
of its own. Often it was not a bush that I
stood still to take my fill of, but a single
branch, — as beautiful, I thought, as if it
had been the only one in the world.

One walk on Satulah — not to the summit,
but by a roundabout course through the
woods to a bold cliff on the southern side
(all the mountains, as a rule, are rounded on
the north, and break off sharply on the
south) — was literally a walk through an
azalea show ; first the flame-colored, bushes
beyond count and variety beyond descrip-

140 NORTH CAROLINA

tion; and then, a little higher, a plentiful
display of the white viscosa, more familiar
and less showy, but hardly less attractive.

Better even than this wild Satulah garden
was a smaller one nearer home : a triangular
hillside, broad at the base and pointed at the
top, as if it were one face of a pyramid ;
covered loosely with grand old trees, — oaks,
chestnuts, and maples; the ground densely
matted with freshly grown ferns, largely the
cinnamon osmunda, clusters of lively green
and warm brown intermixed ; and every-
where, under the trees and above the ferns,
mountain laurel and flame-colored azalea, —
the laurel blooms pale pink, almost white,
and the azalea clusters yellow of every con-
ceivable degree of depth and brightness. A
zigzag fence bounded the wood below, and
the land rose at a steep angle, so that the
whole was held aloft, as it were, for the be-
holder's convenience. It was a wonder of
beauty, with nothing in the least to mar its
perfection, — the fairest piece of earth my
eye ever rested upon. The human owner of
it, Mr. Selleck (why should I not please my-
self by naming him, a land-owner who knew
the worth of his possession !), had asked me

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 141

to go and see it ; and for his sake and its
own, as well as for my own sake and the
reader's, I wish I could show it as it was.
It rises before me at this moment, like the
rhododendron cliffs on Walden's Ridge, and
will do so, I hope, to my dying day.

VIRGINIA

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES

I LEFT Boston at nine o'clock on the
morning of April 23, and reached Pulaski,
in southwestern Virginia, at ten o'clock the
next forenoon, exactly on schedule time, —
or within five minutes of it, to give the rail-
road no more than its due. It was a journey
to meet the spring, — which for a Massa-
chusetts man is always a month tardy, —
and as such it was speedily rewarded. Even
in Connecticut there were vernal signs, a
dash of greenness here and there in the
meadows, and generous sproutings of skunk
cabbage about the edges of the swamps ; and
once out of Jersey City we were almost in a
green world. At Bound Brook, I think it
was, the train stopped where a Norway
maple opposite my window stood all in a
yellow mist of blossoms, and chimney swifts
were shooting hither and thither athwart the

146 VIRGINIA

bright afternoon sky. By the time Philadel-
phia was reached, or by the time we were
done with running in and out of its several
stations, the night had commenced falling,
and I saw nothing more of the world, with
all that famous valley of the Shenandoah,
till I left my berth at Roanoke. There the
orchards — apple-trees and peach-trees to-
gether— were in full bloom, and on the
slopes of the hills, as we pushed in among
them, rounding curve after curve, shone gor-
geous red patches of the Judas-tree, with
sprinklings of columbines, violets, marsh-
marigolds, and dandelions, and splashes of
deep orange-yellow, — clusters of some flower
then unknown to me, but pretty certainly
the Indian puccoon; not the daintiest of
blossoms, perhaps, but among the most effec-
tive under such fugitive, arm's-length condi-
tions. A plaguing kind of pleasure it is to
ride past such things at a speed which makes
a good look at them impossible, as once, for
the better part of a long forenoon, in the
flatwoods of Florida and southern Georgia, I
rode through swampy places bright with
splendid pitcher-plants, of a species I had
never seen and knew nothing about ; strain-

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 147

ing my eyes to make out the yellow blossoms,
deploring the speed of the train, — which,
nevertheless, brought me into Macon several
hours after I should have been in Atlanta,
— wishing for my Chapman's Flora (packed
away in my trunk, of course), and bewail-
ing the certainty that I was losing the only
opportunity I should ever have to see so
interesting a novelty. And still, — I can
say it now, — half a look is better than no
vision.

For fifty miles beyond Roanoke we trav-
eled southward ; but an ascent of a thousand
feet offset, and more than offset, the change
of latitude, so that at Pulaski we found the
apple-trees not yet in flower, but showing
the pink of the buds. The venerable, pleas-
ingly unsymmetrical sugar maples in the
yard of the inn (the reputed, and real, com-
forts of which had drawn me to this particu-
lar spot) were hung full of pale yellow tassels,
and vocal with honey-bees. Spring was here,
and I felt myself welcome.

Till luncheon should be ready, I strayed
into the border of the wood behind the
town, and, wandering quite at a venture,
came by good luck upon a path which fol-

148 VIRGINIA

lowed the tortuous, deeply worn bed of a
brook through a narrow pass between steep,
sparsely wooded, rocky hills. Along the
bank grew plenty of the common rhododen-
dron, now in early bud, and on either side
of the path were trailing arbutus and other
early flowers. Yes, I had found the spring,
not summer. And the birds bore the same
testimony : thrashers, chippers, field sparrows,
black-and-white creepers, and a Carolina
chickadee. Summer birds, like summer
flowers, were yet to come. A brief song,
repeated at intervals from the ragged, half-
cleared hillside near a house, as I returned
to the village, puzzled me agreeably. It
should be the voice of a Bewick's wren, I
thought, but the notes seemed not to tally
exactly with my recollections of a year ago,
on Missionary Ridge. However, I made
only a half-hearted attempt to decide the
point. There would be time enough for
such investigations by and by. Meanwhile,
it would be a poor beginning to take a first
walk in a new country without bringing
back at least one uncertainty for expectation
to feed upon. It is always part of to-day's
wisdom to leave something for to-morrow's

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 149

search. So I seem to remember reasoning
with myself ; but perhaps a thought of the
noonday luncheon had something to do with
my temporizing mood.

In any case no harm came of it. The
singer was at home for the season, and the
very next morning I went up the hill and
made sure of him: a Bewick's wren, as I
had guessed. I heard him there on sundry
occasions afterward. Sometimes he sang
one tune, sometimes another. The song
heard on the first day, and most frequently,
perhaps, at other times, consisted of a pro-
longed indrawn whistle, followed by a trill
or jumble of notes (not many birds trill,
I suppose, in the technical sense of that
word), as if the fellow had picked up his
music from two masters, — a Bachman finch
and a song sparrow. It soon transpired,
greatly to my satisfaction, that this was one
of the characteristic songsters of the town.
One bird sang daily not far from my win-
dow (the first time I heard him I ran out in
haste, looking for some new sparrow, and
only came to my senses when halfway across
the lawn), and I never walked far in the
town (the city, I ought in civility to say)

150 VIRGINIA

without passing at least two or three. Some-
times as many as that would be within hear-
ing at once. They preferred the town to
the woods and fields, it was evident, and for
a singing-perch chose indifferently a fence
picket, the roof of a hen-coop, a chimney-
top, or the ridgepole of one of the churches,
— which latter, by the bye, were most un-
christianly numerous. The people are to
be congratulated upon having so jolly and
pretty a singer playing hide-and-seek — the
wren's game always — in their house-yards
and caroling under their windows. As a
musician he far outshines the more widely
known house wren, though that bird, too, is
excellent company, with his pert ways, at
once furtive and familiar, and his merry
gurgle of a tune. If he would only come
back to our sparrow-cursed Massachusetts
gardens and orchards, as I still hope he will
some time do, I for one would never twit
him upon his inferiority to his Bewickian
cousin or to anybody else.

The city itself would have repaid study,
if only for its unlikeness to cities in general.
It had not " descended out of heaven," so
much was plain, though this is not what I

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 151

mean by its unlikeness to other places ;
neither did it seem to have grown up after
the old-fashioned method, a " slow result of
time," — first a hamlet, then a village, then
a town, and last of all a city. On the con-
trary, it bore all the marks of something
built to order ; in the strictest sense, a city
made with hands. And so, in fact, it is ;
one of the more fortunate survivals of what
the people of southwestern Virginia are ac-
customed to speak of significantly as "the
boom," — a grand attempt, now a thing of
the past, but still bitterly remembered, to
make everybody rich by a concerted and
enthusiastic multiplication of nothing by no-
thing.

Such a community, I repeat, would have
been an interesting and very " proper
study ; " but I had not come southward in
a studious mood. I meant to be idle, hav-
ing a gift in that direction which I am sel-
dom able to cultivate as it deserves. It is
one of the best of gifts. I could never fall
in with what the poet Gray says of it in one
of his letters. " Take my word and experi-
ence upon it," he writes, " doing nothing is
a most amusing business, and yet neither

152 VIRGINIA

something nor nothing gives me any plea-
sure." He begins bravely, although the
trivial word " amusing " wakens a distrust
of his sincerity ; but what a pitiful conclu-
sion ! How quickly the boom collapses ! It
is to be said for him, however, that he was
only twenty years old at the time, and a
relish for sentiment and reverie — that is to
say, for the pleasures of idleness — is apt
to be little developed at that immature age.
I had passed that point by some years; I
was sure I could enjoy a week of dream-
ing ; and, unlike Bewick's wren, I took to
the woods.

To that end I returned again and again
to the brookside path, on which I had so
fortunately stumbled. A man on my errand
could have asked nothing better, unless,
perchance, there had been a mile or two
more of it. Following it past two or three
tumble-down cabins, the stroller was at once
out of the world ; a single bend in the
course of the brook, and the hills closed in
behind him, and the town might have been
a thousand miles away. Life itself is such
a path as this, I reflected. The forest shuts
behind us, and is open only at our feet, with

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 153

here and there a flower or a butterfly or a
strain of music to take up our thoughts, as
we travel on toward the clearing at the end.
For the first day or two the deciduous
woods still showed no signs of leafage, but
tall, tree-like shadbushes were in flower, —
fair brides, veiled as no princess ever was,

— and a solitary red maple stood blushing
at its own premature fruitfulness. Here a
man walked between acres of hepatica and
trailing arbutus, — the brook dividing them,

— while the path was strewn with violets,
anemones, buttercups, bloodroot, and hous-
tonia. In one place was a patch of some
new yellow flowers, like five-fingers, but
more upright, and growing on bracted
scapes ; barren strawberries ( Waldsteinia)
Dr. Gray told me they were called, and one
more Latin name had blossomed into a pic-
ture. A manual of botany, annotated with
place-names and dates, gets after a time to
be truly excellent reading, a refreshment to
the soul, in winter especially, as name after
name calls up the living plant and all the
wild beauty that goes with it. And with
the thought of the barren strawberry I can
see, what I had all but forgotten, though it

154 VIRGINIA

was one of the first things I noticed, the
sloping ground covered with large, round,
shiny, purplish-green (evergreen) leaves, all
exquisitely crinkled and toothed. With no-
thing but the leaves to depend upon, I could
only conjecture the plant to be galax, a
name which caught my eye by the sheerest
accident, as I turned the pages of the Man-
ual looking for something else ; but the con-
jecture turned out to be a sound one, as the
sagacious reader will have already inferred
from the fact of its mention.

In such a place there was no taking many
steps without a halt. My gait was rather a
progressive standing still than an actual
progress ; so that it mattered little whither
or how far the path might carry me. I
was not going somewhere, — I was already
there ; or rather, I was both at once.
Every stroller will know what I mean. Fru-
ition and expectation were on my tongue
together; to risk an unscriptural paradox,
what I saw I yet hoped for. The brook,
tumbling noisily downward, — in some
places over almost regular flights of stone
steps, — now in broad sunshine, now in the
shade of pines and hemlocks and rhododen-

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 155

drons, was of itself a cheerful companion-
ship, its inarticulate speech chiming in
well with thoughts that were not so much
thoughts as dumb sensations.

Here and there my footsteps disturbed a
tiny blue butterfly, a bumblebee, or an emer-
ald beetle, — lovers of the sun all of them,
and therefore haunters of the path. Once
a grouse sprang up just before me, and at
another time I stopped to gain sight of a
winter wren, whose querulous little song-
sparrow - like note betrayed his presence
under the overhanging sod of the bank,
where he dodged in and out, pausing be-
tween whiles upon a projecting root, to
emphasize his displeasure by nervous gestic-
ulatory bobbings. He meant I should know
what he thought of me ; and I would gladly
have returned the compliment, but saw no
way of doing so. It is a fault in the con-
stitution of the world that we receive so
much pleasure from innocent wild creatures,
and can never thank them in return. Black-
and-white creepers were singing at short in-
tervals, and several pairs of hooded warblers
seemed already to have made themselves
at home among the rhododendron bushes.

156 VIRGINIA

Just a year before I had taken my fill of
their music on Walden's Ridge, in Tennes-
see. Then it became almost an old story ;
now, if the truth must be told, I mistook the
voice for a stranger's. It was much better
than I remembered it ; fuller, sweeter, less
wiry. Perhaps the birds sang better here
in Virginia, I tried to think ; but that com-
fortable explanation had nothing else in its
favor. It was more probable, I was bound
to conclude, that the superior quality of the
Kentucky warbler's music, which was all the
time in my ears on Walden's Ridge, had
put me unjustly out of conceit with the per-
formance of its less taking neighbor. At
all events, I now voted the latter a singer
of decided merit, and was ready to unsay
pretty much all that I had formerly said
against it. I went so far, indeed, as to grow
sarcastic at my own expense, for in my field
memoranda I find this entry : " The hooded
warbler's song is very little like the red-
start's, in spite of what Torrey has written."
Verily the pencil is mightier than the pen,
and a note in the field is worth two in the
study. Yet that, after all, is an unfair way
of putting the matter, since the Tennessee

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 157

note also was made in the field. Let one
note correct the other ; or, better still, let
each stand for whatever of truth it expresses.
Happily, there is no final judgment on such
themes. One thing I remarked with equal
surprise and pleasure : the song reminded
me again and again of the singing of Swain-
son's thrush; not by any resemblance be-
tween the two voices, it need hardly be said,
but by a similarity in form. Oven-birds
were here, speaking their pieces in earnest
schoolroom fashion ; a few chippering snow-
birds excited my curiosity (common Junco
hyemalis, for aught I could discover, but I
profess no certainty on so nice a point) ;
and here and there a flock of migrating
white-throated sparrows bestirred themselves
lazily, as I brushed too near their browsing-

So I dallied along, accompanied by a
staid, good-natured, woodchuck-loving collie
(he had joined me on the hotel piazza, with
a friendly look in his face, as much as to
say, " The top of the morning to you, stran-
ger. If you are out for a walk, I 'm your
dog"), till presently I came to a clearing.
Here the path all . at once disappeared, and

158 VIRGINIA

I made no serious effort to pick it up again.
Why should I go farther? I could never
be farther from the world, nor was I likely
to find anywhere a more inviting spot ; and
so, climbing the stony hillside, over beds of
trailing arbutus bloom and past bunches
of birdfoot violets, I sat down in the sun, on
a cushion of long, dry grass.

The gentlest of zephyrs was stirring, the
very breath of spring, soft and of a delicious
temperature. My New England cheeks,
winter-crusted and still half benumbed, felt
it only in intermittent puffs, but the pine
leaves, more sensitive, kept up a continuous
murmur. Close about me — close enough,
but not too close — stood the hills. At my
back, filling the horizon in that direction,
stretched an unbroken ridge, some hundreds
of feet loftier than my own position, and
several miles in length, up the almost per-
pendicular slope of which, a very rampart
for steepness, ranks of evergreen trees were
pushing in narrow file. Elsewhere the land
rose in separate elevations ; some of them,
pale with distance, showing through a gap,
or peeping over the shoulder of a less remote
neighbor. Nothing else was in sight; and

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 159

there I sat alone, under the blue sky, —
alone, yet with no lack of unobtrusive soci-
ety.

At brief intervals a field sparrow some-
where down the hillside gave out a sweet
and artless strain, clear as running water
and soft as the breath of springtime. How
gently it caressed the ear ! The place and
the day had found a voice. Once a grouse
drummed, — one of the most restful of all
natural sounds, to me at least, " drum-
ming " though it be, speaking always of fair
weather and woodsy quietness and peace ;
and once, to my surprise, I heard a clatter
of crossbill notes, though I saw nothing of
the birds, — restless souls, wanderers up and
down the earth, and, after the habit of rest-
less souls in general, gregarious to the last.
A buzzard drifted across the sky. Like the
swan on still St. Mary's Lake, he floated
double, bird and shadow. A flicker shouted,
and a chewink, under the sweet-fern and
laurel bushes, stopped his scratching once in
a while to address by name a mate or fel-
low traveler. A Canadian nuthatch, calling
softly, hung back downward from a pine
cone ; and, nearer by, a solitary vireo sat

160 VIRGINIA

preening his feathers, with sweet soliloquis-
tic chattering, "the very sound of happy
thoughts." I was with him in feeling,
though no match for him in the expression
of it.

Again and again I took the brookside
path, and spent an hour of dreams in this
sunny clearing among the hills. Day by
day the sun's heat did its work, melting the
snow of the shadbushes and the bloodroot,
and bringing out the first scattered flushes
of yellowish-green on the lofty tulip-trees,
while splashes of lively purple soon made
me aware that the ground in some places
was as thick with fringed polygala as it was
in other places with hepatica and arbutus.
No doubt, the fair procession, beauty follow-
ing beauty, would last the season through.
A white violet, new to me ( Viola striata),
was sprinkled along the path, and on the
second day, as I went up the hill to my usual
seat, I dropped upon my knees before a per-
fect vision of loveliness, — a dwarf iris, only
two or three inches above the ground, of
an exquisite, truly heavenly shade, bluish-
purple or violet-blue, standing alone in the
midst of the brown last year's grass. Un-

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 161

less it may have been by the cloudberry on
Mount Clinton, I was never so taken captive
by a blossom. I worshiped it in silence, —
the grass a natural prayer-rug, — feeling all
the while as if I were looking upon a flower
just created. It would not be found in
Gray, I told myself. But it was; and be-
fore many days, almost to my sorrow, it
grew to be fairly common. Once I hap-
pened upon a white specimen, as to which,
likewise, the Manual had been before me.
New flowers are almost as rare as new
thoughts.

It was amid the dead grass and rust-
colored stones of this same hillside that I
found, also, the velvety, pansy-like variety
of the birdfoot violet, here and there a plant
surrounded by its relatives of the more
every-day sort. This was my first sight of
it ; but I saw it afterward at Natural Bridge,
and again at Afton, from which I infer that
it must be rather common in the mountain
region of Virginia, notwithstanding Dr.
Gray, who, as I now notice, speaks as if
Maryland were its southern limit. Indeed,
to judge from my hasty experience, Alle-
ghanian Virginia is a thriving-place of the

162 VIRGINIA

violet family in general. In ray very brief
visit, I was too busy (or too idle, but my
idleness was really of a busy complexion) to
give the point as much attention as I now
wish I had given to it, else I am sure I
could furnish the particulars to bear out
my statement. At Pulaski, without any
thought of making a list, I remarked abun-
dance of Viola pedata, V. palmata, and F.
sagittata, with V. pubescens, V. canina
Muhlenbergii, and four forms new to my
eyes, — V. pedata bicolor and V. striata,
just mentioned, V. hastata and V. pubes-
cens scabriuscula. If to these be added V.
Canadensis and V. rostrata, both of them
common at Natural Bridge, we have at least
a pretty good assortment to be picked up
by a transient visitor, whose eyes, moreover,
were oftener in the trees than on the
ground.

My single white novelty, F. striata, grew
in numbers under the maples in the grounds
of the inn. The two yellow ones were found
farther away, and were the means of more
excitement. I had gone down the creek, one
afternoon, to the neighborhood of the second
furnace (two smelting-furnaces being, as

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 163

far as a stranger could judge, the main
reason of the town's existence), and thence
had taken a side-road that runs among the
hills in the direction of Peak Knob, the
highest point near Pulaski. A lucky mis-
direction, or misunderstanding, sent me too
far to the right, and there my eye rested
suddenly upon a bank covered with strange-
looking yellow violets ; like pubescens in
their manner of growth, but noticeably dif-
ferent in the shape of the leaves, and notice-
ably not pubescent. A reference to the
Manual, on my return to the hotel, showed
them to be F. hastata, — " rare ; " and that
magic word, so inspiriting to all collectors,
made it indispensable that I should visit the
place again, with a view to additional speci-
mens. The next morning it rained heavily,
and the road, true to its Virginian character,
was a discouragement to travel, a diabolical
misconjunction of slipperiness and supreme
adhesiveness ; but I had come prepared for
such difficulties, and anyhow, in vacation
time and in a strange country, there was no
staying all day within doors. I had gath-
ered my specimens, of which, happily, there
was no lack, and was wandering about under

164 VIRGINIA

an umbrella among the dripping bushes,
seeing what I could see, thinking more of
birds than of blossoms, when behold ! I
stumbled upon a second novelty, still an-
other yellow violet, suggestive neither of V.
pubescens nor of anything else that I had
ever seen. It went into the box (I could
find but two or three plants), and then I
felt that it might rain never so hard, the
day was saved.

A hurried reference to the Manual brought
me no satisfaction, and I dispatched one of
the plants forthwith to a friendly authority,
for whom a comparison with herbarium
specimens would supply any conceivable
gaps in his own knowledge. " Here is some-
thing not described in Gray's Manual," I
wrote to him, " unless," I added (not to be
caught napping, if I could help it), " it be
V. pubescens scabriuscula." And I made
bold to say further, in my unscientific enthu-
siasm, that whatever the pl^nt might or
might not turn out to be, I did not believe
it was properly to be considered as a variety
of V. pubescens. In appearance and habit
it was too unlike that familiar Massachusetts
species. If he could see it growing, I was

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 165

persuaded he would be of the same opinion,
though I was well enough aware of my
entire unfitness for meddling with such high
questions.

He replied at once, knowing the symp-
toms of collector's fever, it is to be presumed,
and the value of a prompt treatment. The
violet was V. pubescens scabriuscula, he
said, — at least, it was the plant so desig-
nated by the Manual; but he went on to
tell me, for my comfort, that some botanists
accepted it as of specific rank, and that my
own impression about it would very likely
prove to be correct. Since then I have been
glad to find this view of the question sup-
ported by Messrs. Britton and Brown in
their new Illustrated Flora, where the plant
is listed as V. scabriuscula. As to all of
which it may be subjoined that the less a
man knows, the prouder he feels at having
made a good guess. It would be too bad if
so common an evil as ignorance were not
attended by some slight compensations.

These novelties in violets, so interesting
to the finder, if to nobody else (though since
the time here spoken of he has seen the
" rare " hastata growing broadcast, literally

166 VIRGINIA

by the acre, in the woodlands of southwest-
ern North Carolina), were gathered, as be-
fore said, not far from the foot of Peak
Knob. From the moment of my arrival in
Pulaski I had had my eye upon that emi-
nence, the highest of the hills round about,
looking to be, as I was told it was, a thou-
sand feet above the valley level, or some
three thousand feet above tide-water. I call
it Peak Knob, but that was not the name I
first heard for it. On the second afternoon
of my stay I had gone through the town and
over some shadeless fields beyond, following
a crooked, hard-baked, deeply rutted road,
till I found myself in a fine piece of old
woods, — oaks, tulip-trees (poplars, the
Southern people call them), black walnuts,
and the like ; leafless now, all of them, and
silent as the grave, but certain a few days
hence to be alive with wings and vocal with
spring music. In imagination I was already
beholding them populous with chats, indigo-
birds, wood pewees, wood thrushes, and
warblers (it is one of our ornithological
pleasures to make such anticipatory cata-
logues in unfamiliar places), when my pro-
phetic vision was interrupted by the ap-

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 167

proach of a cart, in which sat a man driving
a pair of oxen by means of a single rope
line. He stopped at once on being accosted,
and we talked of this and that ; the inquisi-
tive traveler asking such questions as came
into his head, and the wood-carter answering
them one by one in a neighborly, unhurried
spirit. Along with the rest of my interroga-
tories I inquired the name of the high moun-
tain yonder, beyond the valley. " That is
Peach Knob," he replied, — or so I under-
stood him. " Peach Knob ?" said I. "Why
is that ? Because of the peaches raised
there?" "No, they just call it that," he
answered ; but he added, as an afterthought,
that there were some peach orchards, he be-
lieved, on the southern slope. Perhaps he
had said " Peak Knob," and was too polite to
correct a stranger's hardness of hearing.
At all events, the mountain appeared to be
generally known by that more reasonable-
sounding if somewhat tautological appella-
tion.

By whatever name it should be called, I
was on my way to scale it when I found the
roadside bright with hastate-leaved violets,
as before described. My mistaken course,

168 VIRGINIA

and some ill-considered attempts I made to
correct the same by striking across lots,
took me so far out of the way, and so much
increased the labor of the ascent, that the
afternoon was already growing short when
I reached the crest of the ridge below the
actual peak, or knob ; and as my mood was
not of the most ambitious, and the clouds
had begun threatening rain, I gave over the
climb at that point, and sat down on the
edge of the ridge, having the wood behind
me, to regain my breath and enjoy the land-
scape.

A little below, on the knolls halfway up
the mountain, was a settlement of colored
mountaineers, a dozen or so of scattered
houses, each surrounded by a garden and
orchard patch, — apple-trees, cherry-trees,
and a few peach-trees, with currant and
gooseberry bushes ; a really thrifty-seeming
alpine hamlet, with a maze of winding by-
paths and half-worn carriage-roads making
down from it to the highway below. With
or without reason, it struck me as a thing to
be surprised at, this colony of black high-
landers.

The distance was all a grand confusion of

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 169

mountains, one crowding another on the
horizon ; some nearer, some farther away,
with one lofty and massive peak in the north-
east lording it over the rest. Close at hand
in the valley, at my left, lay the city of Pu-
laski, with its furnaces, — a mile or two
apart, having a stretch of open country be-
tween, — its lazy creek, and its multitudi-
nous churches. A Pulaskian would find it
hard to miss of heaven, it seemed to me.
Everywhere else the foreground was a grassy,
pastoral country, broken by occasional
patches of leafless woods, and showing here
and there a solitary house, — a scene widely
unlike that from any Massachusetts moun-
tain of anything near the same altitude.
Hereabout (and one reads the same story in
traveling over the State) men do not huddle
together in towns, and get their bread by
making things in factories, but are still
mostly tillers of the soil, planters and gra-
ziers, with elbow-room and breathing-space.
The more cities and villages, the more woods,
— such appears to be the law. In Massa-
chusetts there are six or seven times as many
inhabitants to the square mile as there are
in Virginia ; yet Massachusetts seen from

170 VIRGINIA

its hilltops is all a forest, and Virginia a
cleared country.

Kain began falling by the time the valley
was reached, on my return, and coming to a
store in the vicinity of the lower furnace, —
the one store of that suburb, so far as I
could discover, — I stepped inside, partly
for shelter, partly to see the people at their
Saturday shopping. A glance at the walls
and the show-cases made it plain that one
store was enough. You had only to ask for
what you wanted : a shotgun, a revolver, a
violin case, a shovel, a plug of tobacco, a
pound of sugar, a coffee-pot, a dress pattern,
a ribbon, a necktie, a pair of trousers, or
what not. The merchant might have written
over his door, '* Humani nihil alienum ; "
if he had been a city shopkeeper, he might
even have called his establishment a depart-
ment store, and filled the Sunday news-
papers with the wonders of it. Then it
would have been but a step to the governor's
chair, or possibly to a seat in the national
council.

The place was like a beehive ; customers
of both sexes and both colors going and
coming with a ceaseless buzz of gossip and

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 171

bargaining, while the proprietor and his
clerks — two of them smoking cigarettes —
bustled to and fro behind the counters, im-
proving the shining hour. One strapping
young colored man standing near me in-
quired for suspenders, and, on having an
assortment placed before him, selected with-
out hesitation (it is a good customer who
knows his own mind) a brilliant yellow pair
embroidered or edged with equally brilliant
red. Having bought them, at an outlay of
twelve cents, he proceeded to the piazza,
where he took off his coat and put them on.
That was what he had bought them for.
His taste was impressionistic, I thought.
He believed in the primary colors. And
why quarrel with him ? •" Dear child of
Nature, let them rail," I was ready to say.
It is not Mother Nature, but Dame Fash-
ion, another person altogether, and a most
ridiculous old body, who prescribes that
masculine humanity shall never consider it-
self " dressed " except in funereal black and
white.

What Nature herself thinks of colors, and
what freedom she uses in mixing them, was
to be newly impressed upon me this very

172 VIRGINIA

afternoon, on my walk homeward. In a wet
place near the edge of the woods, at some
distance from the road, — so sticky after the
rain that I was thankful to keep away from
it, — I came suddenly upon a truly magnifi-
cent display of Virginia lungwort, a flower
that I half remembered to have seen at one
time and another in gardens, but here grow-
ing in a garden of its own, and after a man-
ner to put cultivation to the blush. The
homely place, nothing but the muddy border
of a pool, was glorified by it ; the flowers a
vivid blue or bluish-purple, and the buds
bright pink. The plants are of a weedy
sort, little to my fancy, and the blossoms,
taken by themselves, are not to be compared
for an instant with such modest woodland
beauties as were spoken of a few pages back,
trailing arbutus, fringed polygala, and the
vernal fleur-de-lis ; but the color, seen thus
in the mass, and come upon thus unexpect-
edly, was a memorable piece of splendor.
Such pictures, humble as they may seem,
and little as they may be regarded at the
time, are often among the best rewards of
travel. Memory has ways of her own, and
treasures what trifles she will.

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 173

And with another of her trifles let me be
done with this part of my story. There was
still the end of the afternoon to spare, and,
the rain being over, I skirted the woods,
walking and standing still by turns, till all
at once out of a thicket just before me came
the voice of a bird, — a brown thrasher, I
took it to be, — running over his song in the
very smallest of undertones ; phrase after
phrase, each with its natural emphasis and
cadence, but all barely audible, though the
singer could be only a few feet away. It
was wonderful, the beauty of the muted
voice and the fluency and perfection of the
tune. The music ceased ; and then, after a
moment, I heard, several times repeated,
still only a breath of sound, the mew of a
catbird. With that I drew a step or two
nearer, and there the bird sat, motionless
and demure, as if music and a listener were
things equally remote from his conscious-
ness. What was in his thoughts I know not.
He may have been tuning up, simply, mak-
ing sure of his technique, rehearsing upon
a dumb keyboard. Possibly, as men and
women do, he had sung without knowing it,
— dreaming of a last year's mate or of sum-

174 VIRGINIA

mer days coming, — or out of mere comfort-
able vacancy of mind. Catbirds are not
among my dearest favorites ; a little too
fussy, somewhat too well aware of them-
selves, I generally think ; more than a little
too fragmentary in their effusions, begin-
ning and beginning, and never getting under
way, like an improviser who cannot find his
theme; but this bird in the Alleghanies
sang as bewitching a song as my ears ever
listened to.

My spring campaign in Virginia was
planned in the spirit of the old war-time
bulletin, " All quiet on the Potomac ; "
happiness was to be its end, and idleness its
means ; and so far, at least, as my stay at
Pulaski was concerned, this peaceful design
was well carried out. There was nothing
there to induce excessive activity : no glori-
ous mountain summit whose daily beckoning
must sooner or later be heeded ; no long
forest roads of the kind that will not let
a man's imagination alone till he has seen
the end of them. The town itself is small

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 175

and compact, so that it was no great jaunt
to get away from it, and such woods as
especially invited exploration lay close at
hand. In short, it was a place where even
a walking naturalist found it easy to go
slowly, and to spend a due share of every
day in sitting still, which latter occupation,
so it be engaged in neither upon a piazza
nor on a lawn, is one of the best uses of
those fullest parts of a busy man's life, his
so-called vacations.

The measure of my indolence may be
estimated from the fact that the one really
picturesque road in the neighborhood was
left undiscovered till nearly the last day of
my sojourn. It takes its departure from
the village1 within a quarter of a mile of
the hotel, and the friendly manager of the
house, who seemed himself to have some idea
of such pleasures as I was in quest of, com-
mended its charms to me very shortly after
my arrival. So I recollected afterward, but

1 Pulaski, or Pulaski City (the place goes by both
names, — the second a reminiscence of its " booming "
days, I should suppose), is so intermediate in size and
appearance that I find myself speaking of it by turns as
village, town, and city, -with no thought of inconsistency
or special iuappropriateness.

176 VIRGINIA

for the time I somehow allowed the signifi-
cance of his words to escape me, else I
should, no doubt, have traveled the road
again and again. As things were, I spent
but a single forenoon upon it, and went
only as far as the " height of land."

The mountain road, as the townspeople
call it, runs over the long ridge which fills
the horizon east of Pulaski, and down into
the valley on the other side. It has its
beginning, at least, in a gap similar in all
respects to the one, some half a mile to the
northward, into which I had so many times
followed a footpath, as already fully set
forth. The traveler has first to pass half
a dozen or more of cabins, where, if he is
a stranger, he will probably find himself
watched out of sight with flattering unanim-
ity by the curious inmates. In my time,
at all events, a solitary foot - passenger
seemed to be regarded as nothing short of
a phenomenon. What was more agreeable,
I met here a little procession of happy-look-
ing black children returning to the town
loaded with big branches of flowering apple-
trees ; a sight which for some reason put
me in mind of a child, a tiny thing, — a

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 177

veritable pickaninny, — whom I had passed,
some years before, near Tallahassee, and
who pleased me by exclaiming to a compan-
ion, as a dove cooed in the distance, " Listen
dat mournin' dove ! " I wondered whether
such children, living nearer to nature than
some of us, might not be peculiarly suscepti-
ble to natural sights and sounds.

Before one of the last cabins stood three
white children, and as they gazed at me fix-
edly I wished them " Good-morning ; " but
they stared and answered nothing. Then,
when I had passed, a woman's sharp voice
called from within, " Why don't you speak
when anybody speaks to you ? I 'd have
some manners, if I was you." And I per-
ceived that if the boys and girls were grow-
ing up in rustic diffidence (not the most
ill-mannered condition in the world, by any
means), it was not for lack of careful mater-
nal instruction.

This gap, like its fellow, had its own
brook, which after a time the road left on
one side and began climbing the mountain
by a steeper and more direct course than
the water had followed. Here were more of
the rare hastate-leaved violets, and another

178 VIRGINIA

bunch of the barren strawberry, with hepat-
ica, fringed polygala, mitrewort, blooclroot,
and a pretty show of a remarkably large
and handsome chickweed, of which I had
seen much also in other places, — Stellaria
pubera, or " great chickweed," as I made it
out.

I was admiring these lowly beauties as I
idled along (there was little else to admire
just then, the wood being scrubby and the
ground lately burned over), when I came to
a standstill at the sound of a strange song
from the bushy hillside a few paces behind
me. The bird, whatever it was, had let me
go by, — as birds so often do, — and then
had broken out into music. I turned back
at once, and made short work of the mys-
tery,— a worm-eating warbler. Thanks to
the fire, there was no cover for it, had it de-
sired any. I had seen a bird of the same
species a few days previously on the oppo-
site side of the town, — looking like a red-
eyed vireo rigged out with a fanciful striped
head-dress, — and sixteen years before I had
fallen in with a few specimens in the Dis-
trict of Columbia, but this was my first
hearing of the song. The queer little crea-

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 179

ture was picking about the ground, feeding,
but every minute or two mounted some low
perch, — a few inches seemed to satisfy its
ambition, — and delivered itself of a simple,
short trill, similar to the pine warbler's for
length and form, but in a guttural voice
decidedly unlike the pine warbler's clear,
musical whistle. It was not a very pleasing
song, in itself considered, but I was very
much pleased to hear it ; for let the worldly-
minded say what they will, a new bird-song
is an event. With a single exception, it
was the only new one, I believe, of my Vir-
ginia trip.

The worm-eating warbler, it may be worth
while to add, is one of the less widely known
members of its numerous family ; plainness
itself in its appearance, save for its showy
cap, and very lowly and sedate in its habits.
The few that I have ever had sight of, per-
haps a dozen in all, have been on the ground
or close to it, though one, I remember, was
traveling about the lower part of a tree-
trunk after the manner of a black-and-white
creeper ; and all observers, so far as I know,
agree in pronouncing the song an exception-
ally meagre and dry affair. Ordinarily it

180 VIRGINIA

has been likened to that of the chipper, but
my bird had nothing like the chipper's gift
of continuance.

This worm-eater's song must count as the
best ornithological incident of the forenoon,
since nothing else is quite so good as abso-
lute novelty ; but I was glad also to see
for the first time hereabouts four commoner
birds, — the pileated woodpecker, the sap-
sucker (yellow - bellied woodpecker), the
rose - breasted grosbeak, and the black-
throated blue warbler. I had undertaken a
local list, of course, — a lazier kind of col-
lecting, — and so was thankful for small
favors. In the way of putting a shine upon
common things the collecting spirit is second
only to genius. I was glad to see them, I
say ; but, to be exact, I saw only three out
of the four. The big woodpecker was heard,
not seen. And while I stood still, hoping
that he would repeat himself, and possibly
show himself, I heard" a chorus of crossbill
notes, — like the cries of barnyard chickens
a few weeks old, — and, looking up, descried
the authors of them, a flock of ten birds
flying across the valley. They were not
new, even to my Pulaski notebook, but they

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 181

gave me, for all that, an exhilarating sensa-
tion of unexpectedness. Crossbills are as-
sociated in my mind with Massachusetts
winters and New Hampshire summers and
autumns. On the 30th of April, and in
southwestern Virginia, — a long way from
New Hampshire to the mind of a creature
whose handiest mode of locomotion is by
rail, — they seemed out of place and out of
season ; the more so because, to the best
of my knowledge, there were no very high
mountains or extensive coniferous forests
anywhere in the neighborhood. However,
my sensation of surprise, agreeable though
it was, and therefore not to be regretted,
had, on reflection, no very good reason to
give for itself. Crossbills are a kind of
gypsies among birds, and one ought not to
be astonished, I suppose, at meeting them
almost anywhere. Some days after this
(May 12), in the national cemetery at Ar-
lington (across the Potomac from Washing-
ton), I glanced up into a low spruce-tree in
response to the call of an orchard oriole,
and there, at work upon the cones, hung a
flock of five crossbills, three of them in red
plumage. They were feeding, and had no

182 VIRGINIA

thought of doing anything else. For the
half-hour that I stayed by them — some
other interesting birds, a true migratory
wave, in fact, being near at hand — they
remained in that treetop without uttering a
syllable ; and two hours later, when I came
down the same path again, they had moved
but two trees away, and were still eating in
silence, paying absolutely no heed to me
as I walked under them. Many kinds of
northward-bound migrants were in the ceme-
tery woods. Perhaps these ravenous cross-
bills l were of the party. I took them for
stragglers, at any rate, not remembering at
the time that birds of their sort are believed
to have bred, at least in one instance, within
the District of Columbia. Probably they
were stragglers, but whether from the for-
ests of the North or from the peaks of the
southern Alleghanies is of course a point
beyond my ken.

So far as our present knowledge of them
goes, crossbills seem in a peculiar sense to

1 Mr. H. W. Henshaw once told me about a flock that
appeared in winter in the grounds of the Smithsonian In-
stitution, so exhausted that they could be picked off the
trees like apples.

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 183

be a law unto themselves. In northern New
England they are said to lay their eggs in
late winter or early spring, when the tem-
perature is liable, or even certain, to run
many degrees below zero. Yet, if the no-
tion takes them, a pair will raise a brood in
Massachusetts or in Maryland in the middle
of May ; which strikes me, I am bound to
say, as a far more reasonable and Christian-
like proceeding. And the same erratic qual-
ity pertains to their ordinary, every -day
behavior. Even their simplest flight from
one hill to another, as I witnessed it here in
Virginia, for example, has an air of being
all a matter of chance. Now they tack to
the right, now to the left, now in close order,
now every one for himself; no member of
the flock appearing to know just how the
course lies, and all hands calling incessantly,
as the only means of coming into port to-
gether.

When I spoke just now of the worm-
eating warbler's song as almost the only
new one heard in Virginia, I ought perhaps
to have guarded my words. I meant to say
that the worm-eater was almost the only
species that I there heard sing for the first

184 VIRGINIA

time, — a somewhat different matter; for
new songs, happily, — songs new to the in-
dividual listener, — are by no means so in-
frequent as the songs of new birds. On the
very forenoon of which I am now writing, I
heard another strain that was every whit as
novel to my ear as the worm-eater's, — as
novel, indeed, as if it had been the work of
some bird from the other side of the planet.
Again and again it was given out, at tanta-
lizing intervals, and I could not so much as
guess at the identity of the singer ; partly,
it may be, because of the feverish anxiety I
was in lest he should get away from me in
that endless mountain-side forest. Every
repetition I thought would be the last, and
the bird gone forever. Finally, as I edged
nearer and nearer, half a step at once, with
infinite precaution, I caught a glimpse of a
chickadee. A chickadee ! Could he be
doing that ? Yes ; for I watched him, and
saw it done. And these were the notes, or
the best that my pencil could make of them :
twee, twee, twee (very quick), twitty, twitty,
— the first measure in a thin, wire-drawn
tone, the second a full, clear whistle. Some-
times the three twees were slurred almost

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 185

into one. Altogether, the effect was most
singular. I had never heard anything in
the least resembling it, familiar as I had
thought myself for some years with the nor-
mal four-syllabled song of Pants carolinen-
sis. For the moment I was half disposed
to be angry, — so much excitement, and so
absurd an outcome ; but on the whole it is
very good fun to be fooled in this way by a
bird who happens to have invented a tune
of his own. Besides, we are all believers in
originality, — are we not ? — whatever our
own practice.

Human travelers were infrequent enough
to be little more than a welcome diversion :
two young men on horseback; a solitary
foot-passenger, who kindly pointed out a
trail by which a long elbow in the road
could be saved on the descent ; and, near
the top of the mountain, a four-horse cart,
the driver of which was riding one of the
wheel-horses. At the summit I chose a seat
(not the first one of the jaunt, by any means)
and surveyed the valley beyond. It lay
directly at my feet, the mountain dropping
to it almost at a bound, and the stunted
budding trees offered the least possible ob-

186 VIRGINIA

struction to the view. Narrow as the valley
was, there was nothing else to be seen in
that direction. Immediately behind it dense
clouds hung so low that from my altitude
there was no looking under them. In one
respect it was better so, as sometimes, for
the undistracted enjoyment of it, a single
painting is better than a gallery.

There was nothing peculiar or striking
in the scene, nothing in the slightest degree
romantic or extraordinary : a common patch
of earth, without so much as the play of sun-
light and shadow to set it off ; a pretty val-
ley, closely shut in between a mountain and
a cloud ; a quiet, grassy place, fenced into
small farms, the few scattered houses, per-
haps half a dozen, each with its cluster of
outbuildings and its orchard of blossoming
fruit-trees. Here and there cattle were graz-
ing, guinea fowls were calling potrack in
tones which not even the magic of distance
could render musical, and once the loud baa
of a sheep came all the way up the mountain
side. If the best reward of climbing be to
look afar off, the next best is to look down
thus into a tiny valley of a world. In either
case, the gazer must take time enough, and

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGE ANTES 187

be free enough in his spirit, to become a
part of what he sees. Then he may hope to
carry something of it home with him.

It was soon after quitting the summit, on
my return, — for I left the valley a picture
(I can see it yet), and turned back by the
way I had come, — that I fell in with the
grosbeaks before alluded to : a single taci-
turn female with two handsome males in
devoted and tuneful attendance upon her.
Happy creature ! Among birds, so far as
I have ever been able to gather, the gentler
and more backward sex have never to wait
for admirers. Their only anxiety lies in
choosing one rather than another. That, no
doubt, must be sometimes a trouble, since,
as this imperfect world is constituted, choice
includes rejection.

The law is general. Even in the modern
pastime which we dignify as the " observa-
tion of nature " there is no evading it. If
we see one thing, we for that reason are
blind to another. I had ascended this
mountain road at a snail's pace, never walk-
ing many rods together without a halt, —
whatever was to be seen, I meant to see it ;
yet now, on my way down, my eyes fell all

188 VIRGINIA

at once upon a bank thickly set with plants
quite unknown to me. There they stood,
in all the charms of novelty, waiting to be
discovered : low shrubs, perhaps two feet in
height, of a very odd appearance, — not con-
spicuous, exactly, but decidedly noticeable,
— covered with drooping racemes of small
chocolate-colored flowers. They were di-
rectly upon the roadside. With half an eye,
a man would have found it hard work to
-miss them. " The observation of nature " !
Verily it is a great study, and its devotees
acquire an amazing sharpness of vision.
How many other things, equally strange and
interesting, had I left unseen, both going
and coming? I ought perhaps to have been
surprised and humiliated by such an experi-
ence ; but I cannot say that either emotion
was what could be called poignant. I have
been living with myself for a good many
years ; and besides, as was remarked just
now, all our doings are under the universal
law of selection and exclusion. On the
whole, I am glad of it. Life will relish the
longer for our not finding everything at
once.

The identity of the shrub was quickly

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 189

made out, the vivid yellow of the inner bark
furnishing a clue which spared me the labor
of a formal "analysis." It was Xanihor-
rhiza apiifolia, shrub yellow-root, — a name
long familiar to my eye from having been
read so many times in turning the leaves of
the Manual, on one hunt and another. With
a new song and a new flowering plant, the
mountain road had used me pretty well, after
all my neglect of it.

My one new bird at Pulaski — and the
only one seen in Virginia — was stumbled
upon in a grassy field on the farther border
of the town. I had set out to spend an hour
or two in a small wood beyond the brickyard,
and was cutting the corner of a field by a
footpath, still feeling myself in the city, and
not yet on the alert, when a bird flew up
before me, crossed the street, and dropped
on the other side of the wall. Half seen as
it was, its appearance suggested nothing in
particular ; but it seemed not to be an Eng-
lish sparrow, — too common here, as it is
getting to be everywhere, — and of course it
might be worth attention. It is one capital
advantage of being away from home that we
take additional encouragement to investigate

190 VIRGINIA

whatever falls in our way. Before I could
get to the wall, however, the bird rose, along
with two or three Britishers, and perched
before me in a thorn-bush. Then I saw at
a glance that it must be a lark sparrow
(Chondestes). With those magnificent
headstripes it could hardly be anything else.
What a prince it looked ! — a prince in most
ignoble company. It would have held its
rank even among white-crowns, of which it
made me think not only by its head-mark-
ings, but by its general color and — what
was perhaps only the same thing — a certain
cleanness of aspect. Presently it flew back
to the field out of which I had frightened it ;
and there in the short grass it continued
feeding for a long half-hour, while I stood,
glass in hand, ogling it, and making penciled
notes of its plumage, point by point, for
comparison with Dr. Coues's description
after I should return to the inn. I was al-
most directly under the windows of a house,
— of a Sunday afternoon, — but that did
not matter. Two or three carriages passed
along the street, but I let them go. A
new bird is a new bird. And it must be
admitted that neither the occupants of the

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 191

house nor the people in the carriages be-
trayed the slightest curiosity as to my un-
conventional behavior. The bird, for its
part, minded me little more. It was en-
grossed with its dinner, and uttered no sound
beyond two or three tseeps, in which I could
recognize nothing distinctive. Its silence
was a disappointment ; and since I could not
waste the afternoon in watching a bird, no
matter how new and handsome, that would
do nothing but eat grass seed (or something
else), I finally took the road again and
passed on. I did not see it afterward, though,
under fresh accessions of curiosity, and for
the chance of hearing it sing, I went in
search of it twice.

From a reference to Dr. Rives's Catalogue
of the Birds of the Virginias, which I had
brought with me, I learned, what I thought I
knew already, that the lark sparrow, abun-
dantly at home in the interior of North Amer-
ica, is merely an accidental visitor in Vir-
ginia. The only records cited by Dr. Rives
are those of two specimens, one captured,
the other seen, in and near Washington. It
seemed like a perversity of fate that I,
hardly more than an accidental visitor my-

192 VIRGINIA

self, should be shown a bird which Dr. Rives
— the ornithologist of the state, we may
fairly call him — had never seen within the
state limits. But it was not for me to com-
plain ; and for that matter, it is nothing new
to say that it takes a green hand to make
discoveries. I knew a man, only a few
years ago, who, one season, was so unin-
structed that he called me out to see a Hens-
low's bunting, which proved to be a song
sparrow ; but the very next year he found a
snowbird summering a few miles from Bos-
ton (there was no mistake this time), — a
thing utterly without precedent. In the
same way, I knew of one lad who discovered
a brown thrasher wintering in Massachusetts,
the only recorded instance ; and of another
who went to an ornithologist of experience
begging him to come into the woods and see
a most wonderful many-colored bird, which
turned out, to the experienced man's aston-
ishment, to be nothing less rare than a non-
pareil bunting ! Providence favors the be-
ginner, or so it seems ; and the beginner,
on his part, is prepared to be favored, because
to him everything is worth looking at.
Dr. Rives's catalogue helped me to a some-

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 193

what lively interest in another bird, one so
much an old story to me for many years
that of itself its presence or absence here
would scarcely have received a second
thought. I speak of the blue golden-winged
warbler. It is common in Massachusetts,
— in that part of it, at least, where I happen
to live, — and I have found it abundant in
eastern Tennessee. That it should be at
home here in southwestern Virginia, so near
the Tennessee line and in a country so well
adapted to its tastes, would have appeared
to me the most natural thing in the world.
But when I had noted my first specimens —
on this same Sunday afternoon — and was
back at the hotel, I took up the catalogue to
check the name ; and there I found the bird
entered as a rare migrant, with only one
record of its capture in Virginia proper, and
that near Washington. Dr. Rives had never
met with it !

This was on the 28th of April. Two days
later I noticed one or two more, — probably
two, but there was no certainty that I had
not run upon the same bird twice ; and on
the morning of May 1, in a last hurried visit
to the woods, I saw two together. All were

194 VIRGINIA

males in full plumage, and one of the last
two was singing. The warbler migration
was just coming on;, and I could not help
believing that with a little time blue golden-
wings would grow to be fairly numerous.
That, of course, was matter of conjecture.
I found no sign of the species at Natural
Bridge, which is about a hundred miles from
Pulaski in a northeasterly direction. In
Massachusetts this beautiful warbler's dis-
tribution is decidedly local, and its common-
ness is believed to have increased greatly in
the last twenty years. Possibly the same
may be true in Virginia. Possibly, too, my
seeing of five or six specimens, on opposite
sides of the city, was nothing but a happy
chance, and my inference from it a pure de-
lusion.

I have implied that the warbler migration
was approaching its height on the 1st of May.
In point of fact, however, the brevity of my
visit — and perhaps also its date, neither
quite early enough nor quite late enough —
rendered it impossible for me to gather much
as to the course of this always interesting
movement, or even to understand the sig-
nificance of the little of it that came under

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 195

my eye. My first day's walks — very short
and altogether at haphazard, and that of the
afternoon as good as thrown away — showed
but three species of warblers ; an anomalous
state of things, especially as two of the birds
were the oven-bird and the golden warbler,
neither of them to be reckoned among the
early comers of the family. The next day I
saw six other species, including such prompt
ones as the pine-creeper and the myrtle bird,
and such a comparatively tardy one as the
Blackburnian. On the 26th three additional
names were listed, — the blue yellow-back,
the chestnut-side, and the worm-eater. Not
until the fourth day was anything seen or
heard of the black-throated green. This
fact of itself would establish the worthless-
ness of any conclusions that might be drawn
from the progress of events as I had noted
them.

On the 28th, when my first blue golden-
wings made their appearance, there were
present also in the same place three palm
warblers, — my only meeting with them in
Virginia, where Dr. Rives marks them " not
common." With them, or in the same small
wood, were a group of silent red-eyed vireos,

196 VIRGINIA

several yellow-throated vireos, also silent,
myrtle birds, one or two Blackburnians, one
or two chestnut-sides, two or three redstarts,
and one oven-bird, with black-and-white
creepers, and something like a flock (a rare
sight for me) of white-breasted nuthatches,
— a typical body of migrants, to which may
be added, though less clearly members of
the same party, tufted titmice, Carolina
chickadees, white-throated sparrows, Caro-
lina doves, flickers, downy woodpeckers, and
brown thrashers.

It is a curious circumstance, universally
observed, that warblers, with a few partial
exceptions, — blackpolls and myrtle birds
especially, — travel thus in mixed compa-
nies ; so that a flock of twenty birds may be
found to contain representatives of six, eight,
or ten species. Whatever its explanation,
the habit is one to be thankful for from the
field student's point of view. The pleasur-
able excitement which the semi-annual war-
bler movement affords him is at least several
times greater than it could be if each species
made the journey by itself. Every observer
must have realized, for example, how com-
paratively uninteresting the blackpoll migra-

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 197

tion is, particularly in the autumn. Com-
paratively uninteresting, I say; for even
with the birch-trees swarming with black-
polls, each exactly like its fellow, the hope,
slight as it may be, of lighting upon a stray
baybreast among them may encourage a man
to keep up his scrutiny, leveling his glass
upon bird after bird, looking for a dash of
telltale color along the flanks, till at last he
says, " Nothing but blackpolls," and turns
away in search of more stirring adventures.
Students of natural history, like less
favored people, should cultivate philosophy ;
and the primary lesson of philosophy is to
make the best of things as they are. If an
expected bird fails us, we are not therefore
without resources and compensations ; we
may be interested in the fact of its absence ;
and so long as we are interested, though it
be only in the endurance of privation, life
has still something left for us. Herein, in
part, lies the value to the traveling student
of a local list of the things in his own line.
It enables him to keep in view what he is
missing, and so to increase the sum of his
sensations. One of my surprises at Pulaski
(and a surprise is better than nothing, even

198 VIRGINIA

if it be on the wrong side of the account)
was the absence of the phrebe, — " almost
everywhere a common summer resident,"
says Dr. Rives. Another unexpected thing
was the absence of the white-eyed vireo, —
also a " common summer resident," — for
which portions of the surrounding country
seemed to be admirably suited. I should
have thought, too, that Carolina wrens would
have been here, — a pair or two, at least.
As it was, Bewick seemed to have the field
mostly to himself, although a house wren
was singing on the morning of May 1, and I
have already mentioned a winter wren which
was seen on three or four occasions. He,
however, may be assumed to have taken his
departure northward (or southward) very
soon after my final sight of him. Thrashers
and catbirds are wrens, I know, — though I
doubt whether they know it, — but it has
not yet become natural for me to speak of
them under that designation. The mocking-
bird, another big wren, I did not find here,
nor had I supposed myself likely to do so.
Robins were common, I was glad to see, —
one pair were building a nest in the vines of
the hotel veranda, — and several pairs of

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 199

song sparrows appeared to have established
themselves along the banks of the creek
north of the city. I saw them nowhere else.
One need not go much beyond Virginia to
find these omnipresent New Englanders en-
dowed with all the attractions of rarity.

Two or three spotted sandpipers about the
stony bed of the creek (a dribbling stream
at present, though within a month or so it
had carried away bridges and set houses
adrift), and a few killdeer plovers there and
in the dry fields beyond, were the only
water birds seen at Pulaski. One of the
killdeers gave me a pretty display of what
I took to be his antics as a wooer. I was
returning over the grassy hills, where on the
way out a colored boy's dog in advance of
me had stirred up several killdeers, when
suddenly I heard a strange humming noise,
— a sort of double-tonguing, I called it to
myself, — and very soon recognized in it, as
I thought, something of the killdeer's vocal
quality. Sure enough, as I drew near the
place I found the fellow in the midst of a
real lover's ecstasy ; his tail straight in the
air, fully spread (the value of the bright
cinnamon-colored rump and tail feathers

200 VIRGINIA

being at once apparent), and he spinning
round like a dervish, almost as if standing
on iis head (it was a wonder how he did it),
all the while emitting that quick throbbing
whistle. His mate (that was, or was to be)
maintained an air of perfect indifference, —
maidenly reserve it might have been called,
for aught I know, by a spectator possessed
of a charitable imagination, — as female
birds generally do in such cases ; unless, as
often happens, they repel their adorers with
beak and claw. I have seen courtships that
looked more ridiculous, because more human-
like, — the flicker's, for example, — but never
a crazier one, or one less describable. In
the language of the boards, it was a star
performance.

The same birds amused me at another
time by their senseless conduct in the stony
margins of the creek, where they had taken
refuge when I pressed them too nearly.
There they squatted close among the pebbles,
as other plovers do, till it was all but im-
possible to tell feather from stone, though I
had watched the whole proceeding ; yet while
they stood thus motionless and practically
invisible (no cinnamon color in sight, now !),

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 201

they could not for their lives keep their
tongues still, but every little while uttered
loud, characteristic cries. Their behavior
was a mixture of shrewdness and stupidity
such as even human beings would have been
hard put to it to surpass.

Swallows were scarce, almost of course.
A few pairs of rough-wings were most likely
at home in the city or near it, and more
than once two or three barn swallows were
noticed hawking up and down the creek.
There was small prospect of their settling
hereabout, from any indications that I could
discover. Chimney swifts, happily, were
better provided for ; pretty good substitutes
for swallows, — so good, indeed, that people
in general do not know the difference. And
even an ornithologist may be glad to confess
that the rarity of swallows throughout the
Alleghanies is not an unmitigated misfor-
tune, if it be connected in any way with the
immunity of the same region from the plague
of mosquitoes. It would be difficult to ex-
aggerate the luxury to a dreaming naturalist,
used to New England forests, of woods in
which he can lounge at his ease, in warm
weather, with no mosquito, black fly, or

202 VIRGINIA

midge — "more formidable than wolves,"
as Thoreau says — to disturb his meditations.

By far the most characteristic birds of the
city were the Bewick wrens, of whose town-
loving habits I have already spoken. Con-
stantly as I heard them, I could never be-
come accustomed to the unwrennish charac-
ter of their music. Again and again, when
the bird happened to be a little way off, so
that only the concluding measure of his tune
reached me, I caught myself thinking of him
as a song sparrow. If I had been in Massa-
chusetts, I should certainly have passed on
without a suspicion of the truth.

The tall old rock maples in the hotel
yard — decaying at the tops — were occu-
pied by a colony of bronzed grackles, busy
and noisy from morning till night ; excellent
company, as they stalked about the lawn
under my windows. In the same trees a
gorgeous Baltimore oriole whistled for three
or four days, and once I heard there a
warbling vireo. Neither oriole nor vireo
was detected elsewhere.

Of my seventy-five Pulaski species (April
24-May 1), eighteen were warblers and
fifteen belonged to the sparrow-finch family.

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 203

Six of the seventy-five names were added in
a bunch at the very last moment, making
me think with lively regret how much more
respectable my list would be if I could re-
main a week or two longer. With my trunk
packed and everything ready for my de-
parture, I ran out once more to the border
of the woods, at the point where I had first
entered them a week before ; and there, in
the trees and shrubbery along the brookside
path, I found myself all at once surrounded
by a most interesting bevy of fresh arrivals,
among which a hurried investigation dis-
closed a scarlet tanager, a humming-bird, a
house wren, a chat, a wood pewee, and a Lou-
isiana water thrush. The pewee was calling
and the house wren singing (an unspeakable
convenience when a man has but ten min-
utes in which to take the census of a thicket
full of birds), and the water thrush, as he
flew up the stream, keeping just ahead of me
among the rhododendrons, stopped every
few minutes to sing his prettiest, as if he
were overjoyed to be once more at home
after a winter's absence. I did not wonder
at his happiness. The spot had been made
for him. I was as sorry to leave it, per-
haps, as he was glad to get back to it.

204 VIRGINIA

And while I followed the water thrush,
Bruce, the hotel collie, my true friend of a
week, whose frequent companionship on the
mountain road and elsewhere has been too
much ignored, was having a livelier chase on
his own account, — a chase which I found
time to enjoy, for the minute that it lasted,
in spite of my preoccupation. He had stolen
out of the house by a back door, and fol-
lowed me to the woods without an invita-
tion, — though he might have had one, since,
being non-ornithological in his pursuits, he
was never in the way, — and now was thrown
into a sudden frenzy by the starting up be-
fore him of a rabbit. Hearing his bark, I
turned about in season to see the two crea-
tures going at lightning speed up the hill-
side, the rabbit's " cotton tail " "(a fine
"mark of direction," as naturalists say)
immediately in front of the collie's nose.
Once the rabbit ran plump into a log, and
for an instant was fairly off its legs. I trem-
bled for its safety ; but it recovered itself,
and in a moment more disappeared from
view. Then after a few minutes Bruce came
back, panting. It had been a great morn-
ing for him as well as for me, — a morning

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 205

to haunt his after-dinner dreams, and set his
legs twitching, for a week to come. I hope
he has found many another walking guest
and " fellow woodlander " since then, with
whom to enjoy the pleasures of the road and
the excitement of the chase.

For myself, there was no leisure for senti-
ment. I posted back to the inn on the run,
and only after boarding the train was able
to make a minute of the good things which
the rim of the forest had shown me.

It was quite as well so. With prudent
forethought, my farewell to the brook path
and the clearing at the head of it had been
taken the afternoon before. Here, again,
Fortune smiled upon me. After three days
of cloudiness and rain the sun was once
more shining, and I took my usual seat on
the dry grassy knoll among the rusty boul-
ders for a last look at the world about me,
— this peaceful, sequestered nook in the
Alleghanies, into which by so happy a
chance I had wandered on my first morning
in Virginia. (How well I remembered the
years when Virginia was anything but an
abode of quietness !) The arbutus was still
in plentiful bloom, and the dwarf fleur-de-

206 VIRGINIA

lis also. On my way up the slope I had
stopped to admire a close bunch of a dozen
blossoms. The same soft breeze was blpw-
ing, and the same field sparrow chanting.
Yes, and the same buzzard floated overhead
and dropped the same moving shadow upon
the hillside. Now a prairie warbler sang or
a hyla peeped, but mostly the air was silent,
except for the murmur of pine needles and
the faint rustling of dry oak leaves. And
all around me stood the hills, the nearest of
them, to-day, blue with haze.

For a while I went farther up the slope,
to a spot where I could look through a
break in the circle and out upon the world.
In one direction were green fields and blos-
soming apple-trees, and beyond them, of
course, a wilderness of mountains. But I
returned soon to my lower seat. It was
pleasanter there, where I was quite shut in.
The ground about me was sprinkled with
low azalea bushes, unnoticed a week ago,
now brightening with clustered pink buds.
What a picture the hill would make a few
days hence, and again, later still, when the
laurel should come into its glory !

Parting is sweet pain. It must be a

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 207

mark of inferiority, I suppose, to be fonder
of places than of persons, — as cats are in-
ferior to dogs. But then, on a vacation one
goes to see places. And right or wrong, so
it was. Kindly as the hotel people had
treated me, — and none could have been
kinder or more efficient, — there was no-
thing in Pulaski that I left with half so
much regret, or have remembered half
so often, as this hollow among the hills,
wherein a man could look and listen and be
quiet, with no thought of anything new or
strange, contented for the time with the old
thoughts and the old dreams.

AT NATURAL BRIDGE

WITH the exception of a tedious delay at
East Radford it was a very enjoyable fore-
noon's ride from Pulaski to Natural Bridge,
through a country everywhere interesting,
and for much of the distance gloriously wild
and beautiful. Splendid hillside patches of
mingled Judas-tree and flowering dogwood
— one of a bright peach-bloom color, the
other royal masses of pure white — bright-
ened parts of the way south of Roanoke.
There, also, hovering over a grassy field,
were the first bobolinks of the season.
From Buchanan northward (new ground to
me by daylight) we had the company of
mountains and the James River, the road
following the windings of a narrow bank
between the base of the ridge and the water.
It surprised me to see the James so large
and full at such a distance from its mouth,

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 209

— almost as wide, I thought, as the Tennes-
see at Chattanooga. Shortly before reach-
ing the Natural Bridge station the train
stopped for water, and on getting off the
steps of the car I heard a Maryland yel-
low-throat singing just below me at the foot
of the bank, and in a minute more a king-
fisher flew across the stream, — two addi-
tional names for my vacation catalogue.
Then, while I waited at the station for a
carriage from the hotel, — two miles and a
half away, — I added still another. In the
cloudy sky, between me and the sun, was a
bird which in that blinding light might have
passed for a buzzard, only that a swallow
was pursuing it. Seeing that sign, I raised
my glass and found the bird a fish-hawk.
Trifles these things were, perhaps, with
mountains and a river in sight ; but that
depends upon one's scale of values. To me
it is not so clear that a pile of earth is more
an object of wonder than a swallow that
soars above it ; and for better or worse,
mountains or no mountains, I kept an orni-
thological eye open.

On the way to the Bridge (myself the
only passenger) the colored driver of the

210 VIRGINIA

wagon picked up a brother of his own race,
who happened to be traveling in the same
direction and was thankful for a lift. And
a real amusement and pleasure it was to
listen to the two men's palaver, especially to
their " Mistering " of each other at every
turn of the dialogue. I never saw two
schoolmasters, even, who could do more in
half an hour for the maintenance and in-
crease of their mutual dignity. It was
" Mr. Brown " and " Mr. Smith " with every
other breath, until the second man was set
down at his own gate. From their appear-
ance they must have been of an age to re-
member the days " before the war," and I
did not think it surprising that men who
had once been pieces of property should be
disposed to make the most of their present
condition of manhood, and so to give and
take, between themselves, as many remind-
ers and tokens of it as the brevity of their
remaining time would permit.

Once at the hotel, installed (literally) in
my little room, the only window of which
was in the door, — opening upon the piazza,
for all the world as a prison cell opens upon
its corridor, — once domiciled, I say, and a

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 211

bite taken, I bought a season ticket of ad-
mission to the "glen," and went down the
path and a flight of steps, amid a flock of
trilling goldfinches and past a row of lordly
arbor-vitse trees, to the brook, and up the
bank of the brook to the famous bridge.
Of this, considered by itself, I shall attempt
no description. The material facts are, in
the language of the guidebook, that it is " a
huge monolithic arch, 215 feet high, 100
feet wide, and 90 feet in span, crossing the
ravine of Cedar Brook." Magnificent as it
is, there is, for me at least, not much to say
concerning it, or concerning my sensations
in the presence of it. Not that it disap-
pointed me. On the contrary, it was from
the first more imposing than I had expected
to find it. I loved to look at it, from one
side and from the other, from beneath and
from above. I walked under it and over it
(on the public highway, for it is a bridge
not only in name, but in fact) many times,
by sunlight and by moonlight, and should
be glad to do the same many times more ;
but perhaps my taste is peculiar ; at all
events, such " wonders of nature " do not
charm me or wear with me like a beautiful

212 VIRGINIA

landscape. It was so, I remember, at Au-
sable Chasm ; interesting, grand, impressive,
but a place in which I had no passion for
staying, no sense of exquisite delight or
solemnity. In Burlington, just across Lake
Champlain, I could sit by the hour, even on
the flat roof of the hotel, and gaze upon the
blue water and the blue Adirondacks be-
yond,— the sight was a feast of beauty;
but this cleft in the rocks, — well, I was
glad to walk through it and to shoot the
rapids ; there was nothing to be said in
disparagement of the place, but it put me
under no spell. I fear it would be the same
with those marvelous Colorado canons and
"gardens of the gods." A wooded moun-
tain side, a green valley, running water, a
lake with islands, best of all, perhaps (for
me, that is, and taking the years together),
a New England hill pasture, with boulders
and red cedars, berry bushes and fern
patches, the whole bounded by stone walls
and bordered with gray birches and pitch
pines, — for sights to live with, let me have
these and things like them in preference to
any of nature's more freakish work, which
appeals rather to curiosity than to the ima-
gination and the affections.

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 213

Having gone under the arch (and looked
in vain for Washington's initials on the
wall), the visitor to Natural Bridge finds
himself following up the brook — a lively
stream — between iofty precipitous cliffs,
that turn to steep wooded slopes as he pro-
ceeds. If he is like me, he pursues the path
to the end, stopping here and there, — at
the saltpetre cave, at Hemlock Island, and
at Lost River, if nowhere else, — till he
comes to the end at the falls, a distance of a
mile, more or less. That is my way always.
I must go straight through the place once ;
then, the edge of my curiosity dulled, I am
in a condition to see and enjoy.

The ravine is a botanist's paradise : that,
I should say, must be the first thought of
every appreciative tourist. The elevation
(fifteen hundred feet), the latitude, and the
limestone rocks work together to that end.
In a stay of a week I could see, of course,
but one set of flowers; and in my preoc-
cupation I passed many herbs and shrubs,
mostly out of bloom, the names of which
I neither knew nor attempted to discover.
One of the things that struck my admira-
tion on the instant was the beauty of the

214 VIRGINIA

columbine as here displayed ; a favorite with
me always, for more reasons than one, but
never beheld in all its loveliness till now.
If the election could be held here, and on
the 1st of May, there .would be no great
difficulty in securing a unanimous vote for
Aquilegia Canadensis as the " national
flower." It was in its glory at the time of
my earlier visits, brightening the face of the
cliffs, not in a mass, but in scattered sprays,
as high as the eyesight could follow it ;
looking, even under the opera-glass, as if it
grew out of the rock itself. With it were
sedges, ferns, and much of a tufted white
flower, which at first I made no question
must be the common early saxifrage. When
I came upon it within reach, however, I saw
at once that it was a plant of quite another
sort, some member of the troublesome mus-
tard family, — Draba ramosissima, as after-
ward turned out. It was wonderful how
closely it simulated the appearance of Saxi-
fraga Virginiensis, though the illusion was
helped, no doubt, by the habit I am in of
seeing columbine and saxifrage together.

The ground in many places was almost a
mat of violets, three kinds of which were in

AT NATUEAL BRIDGE 215

special profusion : the tall, fragrant white
Canadensis, the long-spurred rostrata, —
of a very pale blue, with darker streaks and
a darker centre (like our blue meadow vio-
lets in that respect), — and the common
palmata. The long-spurred violet was new
to me, and both for that reason and for it-
self peculiarly attractive. As I passed up
the glen on the right of the brook beyond
Hemlock Island, so called, carpeted with
partridge-berry vines bearing a wondrous
crop (" See the berries ! " my notebook
says), I began to find here and there the
large trillium {T. grandiflorum), some of
the blossoms clear white, others of a delicate
rosy tint. The rosy ones had been open
longer than the others, it appeared ; for the
flowers blush with age, — a very modest and
graceful habit. Like the spurred violet, the
trillium is a plant also of northern New
England, but happily for my present enjoy-
ment I had never seen it there. And the
same is to be said of the large yellow bell-
wort, which was here the trillium's neighbor,
and looked only a little less distinguished
than the trillium itself.

If I were to name all the plants I saw, or

216 VIRGINIA

even all that attracted my particular notice,
the non-botanical reader would quit me for
a tiresome chronicler. Hepatica and blood-
root had dropped their last petals ; but
anemone and rue anemone were still in
bloom, with cranesbill, spring beauty, rag-
wort, mitrewort, robin's plantain, Jack-in-
the-pulpit, wild ginger (two thick handsome
leaves hiding a dark-purplish three-horned
urn of an occult and almost sinister aspect),
two or more showy chickweeds, two kinds of
white stone-crop {Sedum ternatum and S.
Nevii, the latter a novelty), mandrake
(sheltering its precious round bud under an
umbrella, though to-day it neither rained
nor shone), pepper-root, gill-over-the-ground
(where did it come from, I wondered),
Dutchman's breeches (the leaves only),
Orchis spectabilis (which I did not know
till after a few days it blossomed), and
many more. A new shrub — almost a tree —
was the bladder-nut, with drooping clusters
of small whitish flowers, like bunches of
currant blossoms in their manner of growth
and general appearance ; especially dear to
humble-bees, which would not be done with
a branch even while I carried it in my hand.

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 217

In one place, as I stooped to examine a
boulder covered thickly with the tiny walk-
ing fern, of which the ravine contains a
great abundance, — faded, ill conditioned,
and homely, but curious, and, better still, a
stranger, — I found the ground littered with
bright yellowish magnolia petals ; and if I
looked into the sky for a passing bird, it
was almost as likely as not that I should
find myself looking through the branches of
a soaring tulip-tree, — a piece of magnifi-
cence that is one of the most constant of my
Alleghanian admirations. All the upper
part of the glen is pervaded by a dull rum-
bling or moaning sound, — the voice of Lost
River, out of which the tourist is supposed
to have drunk at the only point where it
shows itself (and there only to those who
look for it), a quarter of a mile back. An-
other all-pervasive thing is the wholesome
fragrance of arbor-vitse. It is fitting, surely,
that the tree of life should be growing in
this floral paradise. There are few places,
I imagine, where it flourishes better.

On my way back toward the bridge I dis-
covered, as was to be expected, many things
that had been overlooked on my way out ;

218 VIRGINIA

and every successive visit was similarly re-
warded. A pleasing sight at the bridge
itself was the continual fluttering of butter-
flies — Turnus and his smaller and paler
brother Ajax, especially — against the face
of the cliffs, sipping from the deep honey-
jars of the columbines. Here, too, I often
stopped awhile to enjoy the doings of sev-
eral pairs of rough-winged swallows that had
their nests in a row of holes in the rock,
between two of the strata. Most romantic
homes they looked, under the overhanging
ledge, — a narrow platform below, ferns and
sedges nodding overhead, with tall arbor-
vitae trees a little higher on the cliff, and
water dropping continually before the doors.
One of the nests, I noticed, had directly in
front of it a patch of low green moss, the
neatest of door-mats. The holes were only
a few feet above the level of the stream,
but there was no approach to them without
wading ; for which reason, perhaps, the
owners paid little attention to me, even
when I got as near them as I could. In
and out they went, quite at their ease, rest-
ing now and then upon a jutting shelf, or
perching in the branches of some tree near

AT NATURAL BEIDGE 219

at hand. Once three of them sat side by
side before one of the openings, which after
all may have admitted to some sizable cav-
ern wherein different pairs were living to-
gether. They are the least beautiful of
swallows, but for this time, at all events,
they had displayed a remarkably pretty taste
in the choice of a nesting-site.

The birds of Cedar Creek, however, were
not the rough-wings, but the Louisiana water
thrushes. On my first jaunt through the
ravine (May 1) I counted seven of them,
here one and there another, the greater part
in free song ; and while I never found so
many again at any one visit, I was never
there without seeing and hearing at least
two or three. It was exactly such a spot as
the water thrush loves, — a quick stream,
with boulders and abundant vegetation. The
song, I am sorry to be obliged to confess, as
I have confessed before, is not to me all that
it appears to be to other listeners ; probably
not all that a longer acquaintance and a
more intimate association would make it. It
is loud and ringing, — for a warbler's song,
I mean ; in that respect well adapted to the
bird's ordinary surroundings, being easily

220 VIRGINIA

heard above the noise of a pretty lively
brook. It is heard the better, too, because
of its remarkably disconnected, staccato char-
acter. Every note is by itself. Though the
bird haunts the vicinity of running water,
there is no trace of fluidity in its utterance.
No bird-song could be less flowing. It
neither gurgles nor runs smoothly, note
merging into note. It would be too much
to call it declamatory, perhaps, but it goes
some way in that direction. At least we
may call it emphatic. At different times I
wrote it down in different words, none of
which could be expected to do more than
assist, first the writer's memory, and then
the reader's imagination, to recall and divine
the rhythm and general form of the melody.
For that — I speak for myself — a verbal
transcription, imperfect as it must be, in the
nature of the case, is likely to prove more
intelligible, and therefore more useful, than
any attempt to reproduce the music itself
by a resort to musical notation. As most
frequently heard here, the song consisted of
eight notes, like " Come — come — come —
come, — you 're a beauty," delivered rather
slowly. "Lazily" was the word I some-

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 221

times employed, but "slowly" is perhaps
better, though it is true that the song is cool
and, so to speak, very unpassionate. Dynam-
ically I marked it ^CC^5*? while the vari-
ations in pitch may be indicated roughly

thus : -. Two of the lower notes,

the fifth and sixth, were shorter than the
others, — half as long, if my ear and memory
are to be trusted. Sometimes a bird would
break out into a bit of flourish at the end,
but to my thinking such improvised caden-
zas, as they had every appearance of being,
only detracted from the simplicity of the
strain without adding anything appreciable
to its beauty or its effectiveness.

This song, which the reader will perhaps
blame me for trying thus to analyze (I shall
not blame kirn), very soon grew to be almost
a part of the glen ; so that I never recall the
brook and the cliffs without seeming to hear
it rising clear and sweet above the brawling
of the current; and when I hear it, I can
see the birds flitting up or down the creek,
just in advance of me, with sharp chips of
alarm or displeasure ; now balancing un-
easily on a boulder in mid-stream (a posterior
bodily fluctuation, half graceful, half comical,

222 VIRGINIA

slanderously spoken of as teetering) and
singing a measure or two, now taking to an
overhanging branch, sometimes at a consid-
erable height, for the same tuneful purpose.
One acrobatic fellow, I remember, walked
for some distance along the seemingly per-
pendicular face of the cliff, slipping now and
then on the wet surface and having to " wing
it " for a space, yet still pausing at short
intervals to let out a song. In truth, the
happy creatures were just then brimming
over with music ; and if I seem to praise
their efforts but grudgingly, it is to be said,
on the other hand, in justice to the song and
to myself, that my appreciation of it grew as
the days passed. Whatever else might be
true of it, it was the voice of the place.

Of birds beside the rough-wings and the
water thrushes there were surprisingly few
in the glen, though, to be sure, there may
well have been many more than I found
trace of. The splashing of a mountain brook
is very pleasing music, — more pleasing, in
itself considered, than the great majority of
bird-songs, perhaps, — but an ornithological
hobbyist may easily have too much of it. I
call to mind how increasingly vexatious, and

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 223

at last all but intolerable, a turbulent Ver-
mont stream (a branch of Wait's River)
became to me, some years ago, as it followed
my road persistently mile after mile in the
course of a May vacation. One gets on the
track of the smaller birds through hearing
their faint calls in the bushes and treetops ;
and how was I to catch such indispensable
signals with this everlasting uproar in my
ears ? So it was here in Cedar Creek ravine ;
it would have to be a pretty loud voice to be
heard above the din of the hurrying water.
And the birds, on their side, had something
of the same difficulty ; or so I judged from
the unconventional behavior of a blue yellow-
backed warbler that flitted through the
hanging branches of a tree within a few
inches of my hat, having plainly no suspicion
of a human being's proximity. The tufted
titmouse could be heard, of course. He
would make a first-rate auctioneer, it seemed
to me, with his penetrating, indefatigable
voice and his genius for repetition. Now
and then, too, I caught the sharp, sermoniz-
ing tones of a red-eyed vireo. Once an oven-
bird near me mounted a tree hastily, branch
by branch, and threw himself from the top

224 VIRGINIA

for a burst of his afternoon medley ; and at
the bridge a phrebe sat calling. These, with
a pair of cardinal grosbeaks, were all the
birds I saw in the glen during my first day's
visit.

In fact, I had the place pretty nearly to
myself, not only on this first day, but for the
entire week. Once in a great while a human
visitor was encountered, but for the most
part I went up and down the path with no
disturbance to my meditations. Happily for
me, the Bridge was now in its dull season.
Many tourists had been here. The trunks
of the older trees, the beeches especially,
were scarred thickly with inglorious initials,
some of them so far from the ground that the
authors of them must have stood on one
another's shoulders in their determination to
get above the crowd. (In work of this kind
an inch or two makes all the difference be-
tween renown and obscurity.) The fact
was emblematic, I thought. So do men hoist
and boost themselves into fame, not only
in Cedar Creek ravine, but in the " great
world," as we call it, outside. Who so lowly-
minded as not to believe that he could make
a name for himself if only he had a step-

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 225

ladder ? At the arch, likewise, such auto-
graphers had been busy ever since Wash-
ington's day. I peeped into a crevice to
obtain a closer view of a tiny fern, and there
before me was a penciled name, invisible
till I came thus near to it. One of the meek
the writer must have been ; a lead pencil,
and so fine a hand ! Dumphy of New
Orleans. Why should I not second his
modest bid for immortality ? A good name
is rather to be chosen than great riches. By
all means let Dumphy of New Orleans be
remembered.

As for Washington's " G. W.," the let-
ters are said to be still decipherable by those
who know exactly where to look and exactly
what to look for ; but I can testify to no-
thing of myself. I was told where the
initials were; one was much plainer than
the other, my informant said, — which seemed
to imply that one of them, at least, was
more or less a matter of faith ; he would go
down with me some day and point them out ;
but the hour convenient to both of us never
came, and so, although I almost always spent
a minute or two in the search as I passed
under the arch, I never detected them or

226 VIRGINIA

anything that I could even imagine to stand
for them. I have had experience enough of
such things, however, to be aware that my
failure proves nothing as against the wit-
ness of other men's eyesight. Certainly I
know of no ground for doubting that Wash-
ington cut his initials on the cliff ; and if he
did, it seems reasonable to believe that tra-
dition would have preserved a knowledge of
the place, and so have made it possible to
find them now in all their inevitable indis-
tinctness after so long an exposure to the
wear of the elements. Neither do I esteem
it anything but a natural and worthy curi-
osity for the visitor to wish to see them ; and
I may add my hope that all young men who
are destined to achieve Washington's mea-
sure of distinction will cut their names large
and deep in every such wall, for the benefit
of future generations. As for the rest of
us, if we must scratch our names in stone or
carve them on the bark of trees, let us seek
some sequestered nook, where the sight of
our doings will neither be an offense to
others nor make of ourselves a laughing-
stock.

I have said that I discovered Dumphy of

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 227

New Orleans while leaning against the cliff
to peer into a crevice in search of a diminu-
tive fern. This fern was of much interest
to me, being nothing less than the wall-rue
spleen wort {Asplenium Ruta-muraria), for
which I had looked without success in years
past on the limestone cliffs of northern Ver-
mont, at Willoughby and elsewhere. The
fronds, stipe and all, last-year plants in full
fruit, were less than three inches in length.
Another fern, one size larger, but equally
new and interesting, was the purple-stemmed
cliff -brake (Pellcea atropurpurea^), which
also had eluded my search in its New Eng-
land habitat. Both these rarities (plants
which will grow only on limestone cannot
easily be degraded into commonness) I could
have gathered here in moderate numbers,
but of course collecting is not permitted ; in
the nature of the case it cannot be, in a spot
so frequented by curiosity-seekers. It was
pleasure enough for me, at any rate, to see
them.

Along the bottom of the ravine I had re-
marked a profusion of a strikingly beautiful
larger fern (but still " smallish," as my
pencil says), with showy red stems and a

228 VIRGINIA

most graceful curving or drooping habit.
This I could not make out for a time ; but
it proved to be, as I soon began to suspect,
Cystopteris bulbifera, to my thinking one
of the loveliest of all things that grow. I
had seen it abundant at Willoughby, Ver-
mont, and at Owl's Head, Canada, ten years
before ; but either my memory was playing
me a trick, or there was here a very consid-
erable diminution in the length of the fronds,
accompanied by a decided heightening in the
color of the stalk and rhachis. Before long,
however, I found a specimen already begin-
ning to show its bulblets, and these, with a
study of Dr. Eaton's description, left me in
no doubt as to the plant's identity.

What other ferns may have been growing
in the ravine I cannot now pretend to say.
I remember the Christmas fern, a goodly
supply of the dainty little Asplenium tricho-
manes, and tufts of what I took with rea-
sonable certainty for Cystopteris fragilis
in its early spring stage, than which few
things can be more graceful. On the upper
edge of the ravine, when I left the place
one day by following a maze of zigzag cattle-
paths up the steep slope, and found myself,

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 229

to my surprise, directly in the rear of the
hotel, I came upon a dense patch of a small-
ish, very narrow, dark-stemmed fern, new to
my eyes, — the hairy lip-fern, so called
(Cheilanthes vestita). These fronds, too,
like those of the cliff-brake and the wall-rue
spleenwort, were of last year's growth,
thickly covered on the back with brown
" fruit-dots," and altogether having much
the appearance of dry herbarium specimens ;
but they were good to look at, nevertheless.
Here, as in the case of Pellcea atropurpurea,
it was a question not only of a new species,
but of a new genus.

From my account of the scarcity of birds
in Cedar Creek ravine the reader will have
already inferred, perhaps, that I did not
spend my days there, great as were its
botanical attractions. My last morning's
experience at Pulaski, the evidence there
seen that the vernal migration was at full
tide, or near it, had brought on a pretty
acute attack of ornithological fever, — a
spring disease which I am happy to believe
has become almost an epidemic in some
parts of the United States within recent
years, — and not even the sight of new ferns

230 VIRGINIA

and new flowers could allay its symptoms. I
had counted upon finding a similar state of
things here, — all the woods astir with wings.
Instead of that, I found the fields alive with
chipping sparrows, the air full of chimney
swifts, the shade trees in front of the hotel
vocal with goldfinch notes, and, compara-
tively speaking, nothing else. By the end
of the second day I was fast becoming dis-
consolate. " No birds here," I wrote in my
journal. " I have tried woods of all sorts.
A very few parula warblers, two or three
red-eyed vireos, one yellow-throated vireo,
seven Louisiana water thrushes in the glen,
one prairie warbler, and a few oven-birds !
No Bewick wrens. Two purple finches and
one or two phoebes have been the only addi-
tions to my Virginia list." A pitiful tale.
Vacations are short and precious, and it
goes hard with us to see them running to
waste.

The next evening (May 3) it was the
same story continued. " It is marvelous, the
difference between this beautiful place, diver-
sified with fields and woods, — hard wood,
cedar, pine, — it is marvelous, the difference
between this heavenly spot and Pulaski in

AT NATUEAL BRIDGE 231

the matter of birds. There I registered
six new arrivals in half an hour Wednesday
morning ; here I have made but six additions
to my list in two full days. There is scarcely
a sign of warbler migration. Was it that in
Pulaski the woods were comparatively small,
and the birds had to congregate in them ?
Or does Pulaski lie in a route of migration ? "
Wild surmises, both of them ; but wisdom
is not to be looked for in a fever patient.

" Six additions in two full days," I wrote ;
but the second day was not yet full. As
evening came on I went out to stand awhile
upon the bridge ; and while I listened to the
brawling of the creek and admired the
beautiful scene below me, the moon shining
straight down upon it, a nighthawk called
from the sky, and afterward — not from the
sky — a whippoorwill. Here, then, were two
more names for my catalogue ; but even so,
— six or eight, — it was a beggarly rate of
increase in such a favored spot and in the
very nick of the season. The " six addi-
tions," it may ease the reader's curiosity to
know, were the Carolina wren, the summer
tanager, the purple finch, the indigo bunting,
the blue-gray gnatcatcher, and the phoebe.

232 VIRGINIA

One compensation there was for the orni-
thological barrenness of these first few days :
I had the more leisure for botany. And
the hours were not thrown away, although
at the time I was almost ready to think they
were, with so many of them devoted to ran-
sacking the Manual ; for a man who does
not collect specimens to carry home with
him must, as it were, drive his field work
and his closet work abreast ; he must study
out his findings as he goes along. On the
evening of the second day, for example, I
wrote in my journal thus, — the final entry
under that date, as the reader may guess :
" In bed. Strange how we flatter ourselves
with a knowledge of names. I have spent
much time to-day looking up the names of
flowers and ferns, and somehow feel as if I
had learned something in so doing. Really,
however, I have learned only that some one
else has seen the things before me, and
called them so and so. At best that is
nearly all I have learned." But after set-
ting down the results of my investigations,
especially of those having to do with the
pretty draba and the bulbiferous fern, I
concluded in a less positive strain : " Well,

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 233

the hunt for names does quicken observa-
tion and help to relate and classify things."
That was a qualification well put in. The
whole truth was never written on one side
of the leaf. If all our botany were Latin
names, as Emerson says, we should have
little to boast of; yet even that would be
one degree better than nothing, as Emerson
himself felt when he visited a museum and
saw the cases of shells. " I was hungry for
names," he remarks ; and so have all men of
intelligence been since the day of the first
systematic, name-conferring naturalist, the
man who dwelt in Eden. Let us be thank-
ful for manuals, I say, that offer on easy
terms a speaking acquaintance, if nothing
more, with the world of beauty about us.
Things take their value from comparison,
and my own ignorance was but a little while
ago so absolute that now I am proud to
know so much as a name.

Meanwhile, to come back to Natural
Bridge, I had found the country of a most
engaging sort. In truth, while the bridge
itself is the " feature " of the place, as we
speak in these days, it is by no means its
only, or, as I should say, its principal attrac-

234 VIRGINIA

tiori, so far, at least, as a leisurely visit is
concerned. A man may see it and go, — as
most tourists do ; but if he stays, he will
find that the region round about not only
has charms of its own, but is one of the
prettiest he has ever set eyes on ; and that,
I should think, though he be neither a bot-
anist, nor an ornithologist, nor any other
kind of natural historian. For myself, at
all events, I had already come to that con-
clusion, notwithstanding I had yet to see
some of the most beautiful parts of the
country, and was, besides, far too much con-
cerned about the birds (the absentees in
particular) and the flowers to have quieted
down to any adequate appreciation of the
general landscape. I have never yet learned
to see a prospect on the first day, or while
in the eager expectation of new things, al-
though, like every one else, I can exclaim
with a measure of shallow sincerity, " Beau-
tiful ! beautiful ! " even at the first moment.
As my mood now was, at any rate, fine
scenery did not satisfy me ; and on the
morning of May 4, after two days and a
half of botanical surfeit and ornithological
starvation, I packed my trunk preparatory

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 235

to going elsewhere. First, however, I would
try the woods once more, if perchance some-
thing might have happened overnight. Oth-
erwise, so I informed the landlord, I would
return in season for an early luncheon, and
should expect to be driven to the station for
the noon train northward.

I went to a promising-looking hill covered
with hard-wood forest, a spot already visited
more than once, — Buck Hill I heard it
called afterward, — and was no sooner well
in the woods than it became evident that
something had happened. The treetops were
swarming with birds, and I had my hands
full with trying to see and name them. Old
trees are grand creations, — among the no-
blest works of God, I often think ; but for
a bird-gazer they have one disheartening
drawback, especially when, as now, the
birds not only take to the topmost boughs
(even the hummer and the magnolia war-
bler, so my notes say, went with the multi-
tude to do evil), but, to make matters worse,
are on the move northward or southward, or
flitting in simple restlessness from hill to
hill. However, I did my best with them
while the fun lasted. Then all in a mo-

236 VIRGINIA

ment they were gone, though I did not see
them go ; and nothing was left but the wea-
risome iterations of oven-birds and red-eyes
where just now were so many singers and
talkers, among which, for aught I could tell,
there might have been some that it would
have been worth the price of a long vaca-
tion to scrape even a treetop acquaintance
with.

Indeed, it was certain that one member
of the flock was a rarity, if not an absolute
novelty. That was the most exciting and by
all odds the most deplorable incident of
the whole affair. I had obtained several
glimpses of him, but had been unable to
determine his identity; a warbler, past all
reasonable doubt, with pure white under
parts (the upper parts quite invisible) ex-
cept for a black or blackish line, barely
made out, across the lower throat or the
upper breast. He, of course, had vanished
with the rest, the more was the pity. I had
made a guess at him, to be sure ; it is a
poor. naturalist who cannot do as much as
that (but a really good naturalist would
"form a hypothesis," I suppose) under al-
most any circumstances. I had called him

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 237

a cerulean warbler. Once in my life I had
seen a bird of that species, but only for a
minute. If he wore a black breast-band, I
did not see it, or else had forgotten it. If
I could only have had a look at this fellow's
back and wings ! As it was, I was not
likely ever to know him, though the printed
description would either demolish or add a
degree of plausibility to my offhand conjec-
ture.

The better course, after losing a bevy of
wanderers in this way, is perhaps to remain
where one is and await the arrival of an-
other detachment of the migratory host.
This advice, or something like it, I seem to
remember having read, at all events ; but I
have never schooled myself to such a pitch
of quietism. For a time, indeed, I could
not believe that the birds were lost, and
must hunt the hilltop over in the hope of
another chance at them. An empty hope.
So I did what I always do : the game hav-
ing flown, I took my own departure also. I
should not find the same flock again, but
with good luck — which now it was easy to
expect — I might find another ; and ex-
cept for the single mysterious stranger, that

238 VIRGINIA

would be better still. One thing I was sure
of, — Natural Bridge was not to be left out
of the warbler migration ; and one thing I
forgot entirely, — that I had planned to
leave it by the noonday train.

My useless chase over the broad hilltop
had brought me to the side opposite the one
by which I had ascended, and to save time,
as I persuaded myself, I plunged down, as
best I could, without a trail, — a piece of
expensive economy, almost of course. In
the first place, this haphazardous descent
took me longer than it would have done to
retrace my steps ; and in the second place, I
was compelled for much of the distance to
force my way through troublesome under-
brush, in doing which I made of necessity
— being a white man — no little noise, and
so was the less likely to hear the note of any
small bird, or to come close upon him with-
out putting him to flight. In general, let
the bird-gazer keep to the path, except in
open woods, or as some specific errand may
lead him away from it. In one way and
another, nevertheless, I got down at last,
and after beating over a piece of pine wood,
with little or no result, I crossed a field and

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 239

a road, and entered a second tract of hard-
wood forest.

The trees were comfortably low, with
much convenient shrubbery, and after a lit-
tle, seeing myself at the centre of things, as
it were, I dropped into a seat and allowed
the birds to gather about me. At my back
was a bunch of white-throated sparrows.
From the same quarter a chat whistled now
and then, and white-breasted nuthatches and
a Carolina chickadee did likewise, the last
with a noticeable variation in his tune,
which had dwindled to three notes. Here,
as on the hill I had just left, wood pewees
and Acadian flycatchers announced them-
selves, in tones so dissimilar as to suggest
no hint of blood relationship. The wood
pewee is surely the gentleman of the family,
so far as the voice may serve as an indica-
tion of character. In dress and personal
appearance he is a flycatcher of the flycatch-
ers ; but what a contrast between his soft,
plaintive, exquisitely modulated whistle, the
very expression of refinement, and the wild,
rasping, over - emphatic vociferations that
characterize the family in general ! The
more praise to him. The Acadians seemed

240 VIRGINIA

to have come northward in a body. No-
thing had been seen or heard of them before,
but from this morning they abounded in all
directions. In a single night they had taken
possession of the woods. Here was the first
Canadian warbler of the season, singing
from a perch so uncommonly elevated (he
is a lover of bushy thickets rather than of
trees) that for a time it did not come to me
who he was, — so exceedingly earnest and
voluble. A black - throated blue w?,rbler
almost brushed my elbow. Redstarts were
never so splendid, I thought, the white of
the dogwood blossoms, now in their prime,
setting off the black and orange of the birds
in a most brilliant manner, as was true also
of the deep vermilion of the summer tana-
ger. A Blackburnian warbler, whose flame-
colored throat needs no setting but its own,
had fallen into a lyrical mood very unusual
for him, and sang almost continuously for at
least half an hour, — a poor little song in
a thin little voice, but full of pleasant sug-
gestions in every note. The first Swainson
thrush was present, with no companion of
his own kind, so far as appeared. I pro-
longed my stay on purpose to hear him sing,

AT NATURAL BRIDGE . 241

but was obliged to content myself with the
sight of him and the sound of his sweet,
quick whistle.

All the while, as I watched one favorite
another would come between us. Once it
was a humming-bird, a bit of animate beauty
that must always be attended to ; and once,
when the place had of a sudden fallen silent,
and I had taken out a book, I was startled
by a flash of white among the branches, —
a red-headed woodpecker, in superb color,
new for the year, and on all accounts wel-
come. He remained for a time in silence,
and then in silence departed (he had been
almost too near me before he knew it) ; but
having gone, he began a little way off to
play the tree-frog for my amusement. After
him a hairy woodpecker made his appear-
ance, with sharp, peremptory signals, highly
characteristic ; and then, from some point
near by, a rose-breasted grosbeak's hie was
heard.

It was high noon before I was done with
" receiving " (one of the prettiest " func-
tions " of the year, though none of the news-
papers got wind of it), and returned to the
hotel, where the landlord smiled when I told

242 . VIRGINIA

him that some friends of mine had arrived,
and I should stay a few days longer.

My enjoyment of the country about the
Bridge may be said to have begun with
my settling down for a more leisurely stay.
Hurry and discontent are poor helps to
appreciation. That afternoon, the morning
having been devoted to ornithological ex-
citements, I strolled over to Mount Jeffer-
son, and spent an hour in the observatory,
where a delicious breeze was blowing. The
" mountain " proved to be nothing more
than a round grassy hilltop, — the highest
point in a sheep-pasture, — but it offered,
nevertheless, a wide and charming prospect :
mountains near and far, a world of green
hills, with here and there a level stretch,
most restful to the eye, of the James River
valley, in the great Valley of Virginia. Up
from the surrounding field came the tinkle
of sheep-bells, and down in one corner of it
young men were slowly gathering, some in
wagons, some on horseback, for a game of
ball. There was to be a "match" that

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 243

" evening," I had been told, between the
Bridge nine (I am sorry not to remember
its name) and the Buena Vistas. It turned
out, however, so I learned the next day, that
a supposed case of smallpox at Buena Vista
had made such an interchange of athletic
courtesies inexpedient for the time being,
and the Bridge men were obliged to be con-
tent with a trial of skill among themselves,
for which they chose up (" picked off ")
after the usual fashion, the two leaders de-
ciding which should have the first choice by
the old Yankee test of grasping a bat alter-
nately hand over hand, till one of them
should be able to cover the end of it with
his thumb. Such things were pleasant to
hear of. I accepted them as of patriotic
significance, tokens of national unity. My
informant, by the way, was the same man,
a young West Virginian, who had told me
where to look for Washington's initials on
the wall of the bridge. My specialties ap-
pealed to him in a measure, and he con-
fessed that he wished he were a botanist.
He was always very fond of flowers. His
side had been victorious in the ball game,
he said, in answer to my inquiry. Some of

244 VIRGINIA

the players must have come from a consid-
erable distance, it seemed, as there was no
sign of a village or even of a hamlet, so far
as I had discovered, anywhere in the neigh-
borhood. The Bridge is not in any township,
but simply in Rockbridge County, after a Vir-
ginia custom quite foreign to a New Eng-
lander's notions of geographical propriety.

The prospect from Mount Jefferson was
beautiful, as I have said, but on my return
I happened upon one that pleased me better.
I had been down through Cedar Creek ra-
vine, and had taken my own way out, up
the right-hand slope through the woods,
noting the flowers as I walked, especially
the blue-eyed grass and the scarlet catchfly
(battlefield pink), a marvelous bit of color,
and was following the edge of the cliff to-
ward the hotel, when, finding myself still
with time to spare, I sat down to rest and
be quiet. By accident I chose a spot where
between ragged, homely cedars I looked
straight down the glen — over a stretch of
the brook far below — to the bridge, through
which could be seen wooded hills backed by
Thunder Mountain, long and massive, just
now mostly in shadow, like the rest of the

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 245

world, but having its lower slopes touched
with an exquisite half-light, which produced
a kind of prismatic effect upon the freshly
green foliage. It was an enchanting spec-
tacle and a delightful hour. Now my eye
settled upon the ravine and the brook, now
upon the arch of the bridge, now upon the
hills beyond. And now, as I continued to
look, the particulars fell into place, — drop-
ping in a sense out of sight, — and the
scene became one. By and by the light in-
creased upon the broad precipitous face of
the mountain, softness and beauty inexpres-
sible, while the remainder of the landscape
lay in deep shadow.

I fell to wondering, at last, what it is that
constitutes the peculiar attractiveness of a
limited view — limited in breadth, not in
depth — as compared with a panorama of
half the horizon. The only answer I gave
myself was that, for the supreme enjoyment
of beauty, the eye must be at rest, satisfied,
with no temptation to wander. We are
finite creatures with infinite desires. The
sight must go far, — to the rim of the world,
or to some grand interposing object so re-
mote as to be of itself a natural and satisfy-

246 VIRGINIA

ing limit of vision ; and the eye must be held
to that point, not by a distracting exercise
of the will, but by the quieting constraint of
circumstances.

Let my theorizing be true or false, I
greatly enjoyed the picture ; the deep, dark,
wooded ravine, with the line of water run-
ning through it lengthwise, the magnificent
stone arch, the low hills in the middle dis-
tance, and Thunder Mountain a background
for the whole. The mountain, as has been
said, was a long ridge, not a peak; and
sharp as it looked from this point of view, it
was very likely flat at the top. Like Look-
out Mountain and Walden's Ridge, it might,
for anything I knew, be roomy enough to
hold one or two Massachusetts counties upon
its summit. While I sat gazing at it the
sun went down and left it of a deep sombre
blue. Then, of a sudden, a small heron
flew past, and a pileated woodpecker some-
where behind me set up a prolonged and
lusty shout ; and a few minutes later I was
startled to see between me and the sunset
sky a flock of six big herons flying slowly in
single file, like so many pelicans. From
their size they should have been Ardea hero-

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 247

dias, but in that light there was no telling
of colors. It was a ghostly procession, so
silent and unexpected, worthy of the place
and of the hour. I was beginning to feel
at home. A wood thrush sang for me as I
continued my course to the hotel, and my
spirit sang with him. " I 'm glad I am
alive," my pencil wrote of its own accord at
the end of the day's jottings.

I woke the next morning to the lively
music of a whippoorwill, — the same, I
suppose, that had sung me to sleep the even-
ing before. He performed that service faith-
fully as long as I remained at the Bridge,
and always to my unmixed satisfaction.
Whippoorwills are among my best birds,
and of recent years I have had too little of
them. Immediately after breakfast I must
go again to the roadside wood, and then to
Buck Hill, as a dog must go again to bark
under a tree up which he has once driven a
cat or a squirrel. But there is no duplicat-
ing of experiences. The birds — the flocks
of travelers — were not there. Chats were
calling ceow, ceow, with the true country-
man's twang ; and what was much better, a
Swainson thrush was singing. Better still,

248 VIRGINIA

a pair of blue yellow-backed warblers (the
most abundant representatives of the family
thus far) had begun the construction of a
nest in a black -walnut -tree, suspending it
from a rather large branch (" as big as my
thumb ") at a height of perhaps twenty feet.
It was little more than a frame as yet, the
light shining through it everywhere ; and
the bird, perhaps because of my presence,
seemed in no haste about its completion. I
saw her bring what looked like a piece of
lichen and adjust it into place (though she
carried it elsewhere first — with wonderful
slyness !), but my patience gave out before
she came back with a second one.

On Buck Hill, in the comparative absence
of birds, I amused myself with a " dry land
tarrapin," as my West Virginia acquaint-
ance had called it (otherwise known as a
box turtle), a creature which I had seen
several times in my wanderings, and had
asked him about; a new species to me, of
a peculiarly humpbacked appearance, and
curious for its habit of shutting itself up in
its case when disturbed, the anterior third
of the lower shell being jointed for that
purpose. A phlegmatic customer, it seemed

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 249

to be ; looking at me with dull, unspecu-
lative eyes, and sometimes responding to a
pretty violent nudge with only a partial
closing of its lid. It is very fond of may
apples (mandrake), I was told, and is really
one of the " features " of the dry hill woods.
I ran upon it continually.

A lazy afternoon jaunt over a lonely wood
road, untried before, yielded little of men-
tionable interest except the sight of a blue
grosbeak budding the upper branches of a
tree in the manner of a purple finch or a
rose-breast. I call him a blue grosbeak, as
I called him at the time ; but he went into
my book that evening with a damnatory
question mark attached to his name. He
had been rather far away and pretty high ;
and the possibilities of error magnified them-
selves on second thought, till I said to my-
self, " Well, he may have been an indigo-
bird, after all." Second thought is the
mother of uncertainty ; and uncertainties
are poor things for a man's comfort. The
seasons were met here ; for even while I
busied myself with the blue grosbeak (as he
pretty surely was, for all my want of assur-
ance) a crossbill flew over with loud calls.

250 VIRGINIA

In the same place I heard a tremendous
hammering a little on one side of me, so
vigorous a piece of work that I was per-
suaded the workman could be nobody but
a pileated woodpecker. A long time I stood
with my gaze fastened upon the tree from
which the noise seemed to come. Would
the fellow never show himself ? Yes, he put
his head out from behind a limb at last
(what a fiery crest !), saw me on the instant,
and was gone like a flash. Then from a
little distance he set up a resounding halloo.
This was only the second time that birds of
his kind had been seen hereabout, but the
voice had been heard daily, and more than
once I had noticed what I could have no
doubt were nest-holes of their making. One
of these, on Buck Hill, — freshly cut, if
appearances went for anything, — I under-
took to play the spy upon ; but if the nest
was indeed in use the birds were too wary
for me, or I was very unfortunate in my
choice of hours. Time was precious, and
the secret seemed likely to cost more than it
would bring, with so many other matters in-
viting my attention. Nest or no nest, I was
glad to be within the frequent sound of that

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 251

wild, ringing, long-drawn shout, a true voice
of the wilderness ; as if the Hebrew pro-
phecy were fulfilled, and the mountains and
the hills had found a tongue.

It was not until the sixth day that I went
to Lincoln Heights, a place worth all the
rest of the countryside, I soon came to think,
with the single exception of Cedar Creek
ravine. A winding wood road carried me
thither (the distance may be two miles ; but
I have little idea what it is, though I covered
it once or twice a day for the next four days),
and might have been made — half made,
just to my liking — for my private conven-
ience. I believe I never met any one upon
it, going or coming.

The glory of the spot is its trees ; but with
me, as things fell out, these took in the
order of time a second place. My first ad-
miration was not for them, admirable as they
were, but for a few birds in the tops of them.
In short, at my first approach to the Heights
(there is no thought of climbing, but only
the most gradual of ascents) I began to
hear from the branches overhead, now here,
now there, an occasional weak warbler's song
that set my curiosity on edge. It was not

252 VIRGINIA

the parula's (blue yellow-back's), but like
it. What should it be, then, except the
cerulean's ? By and by I caught a glimpse
of a bird, clear white below, with a dark
line across the breast ; and yes, I saw what
I was looking for, — though the bird flew to
another branch the next moment, — black
streaks along the sides of the body. There
were at least eight or ten others like him in
the treetops ; and it was a neck-breaking
half-hour that I passed in watching them,
determined as I was to gain a view not only
of the under parts, but of the back and
wings. The labor and difficulty of the search
were increased indefinitely by the confusing
presence of numerous other warblers of
various kinds in the same lofty branches,
making it inevitable that many opera-glass
shots should be wasted. It is no help to a
man's equanimity at such a time to spend a
priceless three minutes — any one of which
may be the last — in getting the glass upon
a tiny thing that flits incessantly from one
leafy twig to another, only to find in the end
that it is nothing but a myrtle warbler ; a
pretty creature, no doubt, but of no more
consequence just now than an English spar-

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 253

row. To-day, however, the birds favored
me ; no untimely whim hurried them away
to another wood, and patience had its re-
ward. Little by little my purpose was
accomplished and my mind cleared of all
uncertainty. Then I took out my pencil to
characterize the song while it was still in
my ears, and still new. " Greatly like one
of the more broken forms of the parula's," I
wrote, a bird repeating it at that very instant
by way of confirmation. " I can imagine a
fairly sharp ear being deceived by it, espe-
cially in a place like this, where parulas
have been singing from morning till night,
until the listener has tired of them and be-
come listless." This sentence the reader
may keep in mind, if he will, to glance back
upon for his amusement in the light of a
subsequent experience which it will be my
duty to relate before I have done with my
story.

Between the migratory " transients " and
the birds already at home, the place was
pretty full of wings. A Swainson thrush
sang, and from a bushy slope came a nasal
thrush voice that should have been a veery's.
I took chase at once, and caught a glimpse

254 VIRGINIA

of a reddish-brown bird darting out of sight
before me. Do my best, I could find nothing
more of it. If it was a veery, as I suppose,
it was the only one I saw in Virginia, where
the species, from Dr. Kives's account of the
matter, seems to be a rather uncommon mi-
grant. Unhappily, I could not bring my
scientific conscience to list it on so hurried
a sight, even with the note as corroborative
testimony. That, for aught I could posi-
tively assert, might have been a gray-cheek's,
while the reddish color might with equal
possibility have belonged to a wood thrush,
clear as it had seemed at the moment that
what I was looking at was the back of the
bird itself, and not the back of its head.
Doubt is credulous. All kinds of negatives
are plausible to it, and once it has adopted
one it will maintain it in the face of the five
senses.

On the opposite side of the path, in the
bushy angles of a Virginia fence, a hooded
warbler showed himself, furtive and silent,
— my only Bridge specimen, to my great
surprise ; and near him was a female black-
throated blue, a queer-looking body, like
nothing in particular, yet labeled past mis-

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 255

take, which I can never see without a kind
of wonder. Among the treetop birds were
Blackburnian warblers, black-throated greens
and blues, chestnut-sides, redstarts, myrtle-
birds, red-eyed and yellow-throated vireos,
and indigo - birds. Many white - throated
sparrows still lingered ; singing flat, as
usual, — the only birds I know of that find
it impossible to hold the pitch. The de-
fect has its favorable side ; it makes their
concerts amusing. I remember seeing a
quiet gentleman thrown into fits of uncon-
trollable laughter by the rehearsal of a
spring flock, bird after bird starting the
tune, and not one in ten of them keeping its
whistle true to the conclusion of the measure.
All these things, — though they may seem
not many, — with the long rests and numer-
ous side excursions that went with them,
consumed the morning hours before I knew
it, so that I was hardly at the end of the
way before it was time to return for dinner.
For the afternoon nothing was to be
thought of but another visit to the same
place, — " the finest place I have seen yet,
and the finest walk." So I had put down
the morning's discovery. The cerulean war-

256 VIRGINIA

bier I found spoken of by Dr. Rives as
" accidental or very rare ; " in the light of
which entry the dozen or so of specimens
seen and heard during the forenoon acquired
a fresh interest.

The second jaunt, because it was a second
one, could be taken more at leisure ; and as
the birds gave me less employment, my eyes
were more upon the trees. These, as I had
felt before, were a wonder and a comfort ; it
was a benediction to walk under them, as if
one were within the precincts of a holy
place : oaks for the most part (of several
kinds), with black walnut, shagbark, tulip,
chestnut, and other species, set irregularly,
or rather left standing irregularly, two or
three deep, beside the road on either hand ;
a royal uphill avenue, which near the top
became an open grove. * Except in Florida,
I had never seen a more magnificent growth.
Some of the trees had grapevines and Vir-
ginia creeper clinging about them. Up one
huge oak, with strange flaky bark, like a
shagbark-tree's (a white oak, nevertheless,
to judge from its half -grown leaves), a grape-
vine had mounted for a height of forty feet,
as I estimated the distance, not making use

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 257

of the bole, but of the limbs, seeming to leap
from one to another, even when they were
ten feet apart. It must have been of the
tree's age, I suppose, and had grown with
its growth. In the shadow of these giants,
yet not overshadowed by them, were flower-
ing dogwoods and redbuds. It is a pretty
habit these two have of growing side by
side, as if they knew the value of contrasted
colors.

At a point on the edge of the grove I
turned to enjoy the prospect southward:
mountains everywhere, with the more pointed
of the twin Peaks of Otter showing between
two oaks that barely gave it room ; all the
mountains radiantly beautiful, with cloud
shadows flecking their wooded slopes. Not
a house was in sight ; but in one place be-
yond the middle-diptance hills a thin blue
smoke was rising. There, doubtless, lay the
valley of the James. Just before me, on
the left of the open field, stood a peculiarly
graceful dogwood, all in a glory of white,
one fan-shaped branch above another, — a
miracle of loveliness. The eye that saw it
was satisfied with seeing. Beyond it a chat
played the clown (knowing no better, even

258 VIRGINIA

to-day), and a rose-breast began warbling.
It seemed a tender story, — sweetness beyond
words, and happiness without a shadow.
From a second point, a little farther on, the
entire southern horizon came into view, with
both the Peaks of Otter visible ; a truly
enchanting picture, the sky full of sunlight
and floating white clouds.

In a treetop behind me a cerulean warbler
had been singing, but flew away as I turned
about. My only sight of him was on the
wing, a mere speck in the air. Afterward a
parula gave out his tune, running the notes
straight upward and snapping them off at
the end in whiplash fashion, as much as to
say, " Now see if you can tell the difference."
And then, just as I was ready to leave the
grove, stepping along a footpath through a
bramble patch, I descried almost at my feet
a warbler, — a female by her look and de-
meanor, and a stranger ; blue and white,
with dark streakings along the sides. I lost
her soon ; but she had seemed to be looking
for nest materials, and of course I waited for
her to return. This she presently did, and
now I saw her strip bits of bark from plant
stems till she had her bill full of short pieces.

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 259

Carrying these, she disappeared in a bramble
and grapevine thicket. I waited, but she
did not come back. Then I stole into the
place after her, and in a moment there she
was before me ; but without complaint or
any symptom of perturbation she passed
quietly along, and again I lost her. I kept
my position till I was tired, and then went
back to the wood and sat down ; and in a
few minutes — how it happened I could not
tell — there she stood once more, wearing
the same innocent, preoccupied air. This
time I saw her fly down the slope and dis-
appear in a clump of undergrowth. I fol-
lowed, took a seat, waited, and continued to
wait. All was in vain. That was the last
of her. She had played her cards well, or
perhaps I had played mine poorly ; and
finally I turned my steps homeward, where
a comparison of my notes with Dr. Coues's
description proved the bird to be, as I had
believed, a female cerulean warbler. Her
nest would probably be the first one of its
kind ever found in Virginia.

On the way a male sang and showed him-
self. Now, too, I discovered for the first
time that there were tupelo-trees among the

260 VIRGINIA

large oaks and walnuts ; much smaller than
they, and for that reason, it is to be supposed,
not noticed in my three previous passages
along the avenue. They are particular favor-
ites of mine, and I made them sincere apolo-
gies. In another place was a patch of what
I knew must be the fragrant sumach, some-
thing I had wished to see for many years :
low, upright shrubs, yet resembling poison
ivy so closely that for a minute I shrank
from gathering a specimen, although I was
certain beyond a peradventure that the
plant was not poison ivy and could not be
noxious to the touch ; just as people in gen-
eral, through force of early instruction and
example (miscalled instinct), shiver at the
thought of handling a snake, though it be of
some kind which they know to be as harm-
less as a kitten. While in chase of the ceru-
lean, also, I had stumbled on several bunches
of cancer-root (Conopholis*), rising out of
the dead leaves, a dozen or more of stems in
each close bunch ; queer, unwholesome-look-
ing, yellowish things, reminding me of ears
of rice-corn, so called. I had never seen the
plant till the day before.

The next morning my course was beyond

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 261

discussion or argument. I must go again to
Lincoln Heights. The thought of the female
cerulean warbler and her nest would not
suffer me to do anything else. But for that
matter, I should probably have taken the
same path had I never seen her. The trees,
the prospects, and the general birdiness of
the place were of themselves an irresistible
attraction. On the way I skirted a grove of
small pines, standing between the road and
the edge of Cedar Creek ravine : dull, scrubby
trees, like pitch-pines, but less bright in color ;
of the same kind as those amid which, on
Cameron Hill and Lookout Mountain, in
Tennessee, there had been so notable a gath-
ering of warblers the year before. Pinus
pungens. Table Mountain pine, I suppose
they were, though it must be acknowledged
that I was never at the pains to settle the
point. Here at Natural Bridge I had found
all such woods deserted day after day, till I
had ceased to think them worth looking into.
Now, however, as I idled past, I caught the
faint sibilant notes of a bird-song, and
stopped to listen. Not a blackpoll's, I said
to myself, but wonderfully near it. And
then it flashed into my mind what a friend

262 VIRGINIA

had told me a few years before. " When
you hear a song that is like the blackpoll's,
but different," he had said, " look the bird
up. It will most likely be a Cape May."
He was one of the lucky men (almost the
only one of my acquaintance) who had heard
that rare warbler's voice. I turned aside, of
course, and made a cautious entry among the
pines. The bird continued its singing. Yes,
it was like the blackpoll's, but with a zip
rather than a zee. Nearer and nearer I crept,
inch by inch. If the fellow were a Cape
May, it would be carelessness inexcusable
not to make sure of the fact. And soon I
had my glass upon him, — in high plumage,
red cheeks and all. He had not been dis-
turbed in the least, and kept up his music
till I had had my fill and could stay no
longer, — all the while in low branches and
in clear view. Few songs could be less in-
teresting in themselves, but few could have
been more welcome, — for the better part of
twenty years I had been listening for it:
about five notes, a little louder and more
emphatic than the blackpoll's, it seemed to
me, but still faint and, as I expressed it to
myself, " next to nothing." The handsome

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 263

creature — olive and bright yellow, boldly
marked with black and white — remained
the whole time in one tree, traveling over
the limbs in a rather listless fashion, and
singing almost incessantly. He was my
hundredth Virginia bird, — as my list then
stood, question marks included, — and the
second one whose song I had heard for the
first time on this vacation trip. The day
had begun prosperously.

After such a stirring up, a man's ears are
apt to be abnormally sensitive, not to say
imaginative ; then, if ever, he will hear won-
ders : for which reason, it may be, I had
turned but a corner or two before I was
stopped by another set of notes, a strain
that I knew, or felt that I ought to know,
but could not place a name upon at the mo-
ment. This bird, too, was run down with-
out difficulty, and proved to be a magnolia
warbler, — another yellow - rump, like the
Cape May and the myrtle-bird. The song,
unlike its owner, is but slightly marked, and
to make matters worse, is heard by me only
in the season of the bird's spring passage ;
but I laughed at myself for not recognizing
it. I was still in a mood for discoveries,

264 VIRGINIA

however, and within half an hour was again
in eager chase, this time over a crazy zigzag
fence into a dense thicket, all for a black-
and-white creeper (niy fiftieth specimen,
perhaps, in the last fortnight), whose notes,
as they came to me from a distance, sounded
like a creeper's, to be sure, but with such a
measure of difference as kept me on nettles
till the author of them was in sight. I felt
like a fool, as the common expression is, but
was having " a good time," notwithstanding.
Here were the first trailing blackberry
blossoms. The season was making haste.
" Come, children, it is the 7th of May," I
seemed to hear the "bud-crowned spring"
saying. The woods had burst into almost
full leaf within a week. This morning,
also, I found the first flowers of the Dode-
catheon ; three plants, each with only one
bloom as yet; white, odd-looking, pointed,
— like a stylographic pen, my profane cleri-
cal fancy suggested. American cowslip and
shooting star the flower is called in the
Manual. American cyclamen would hit it
pretty well, I thought, its most striking pe-
culiarity being the reflexed, cyclamenic car-
riage of the petals. I had been wondering

AT NATURAL BEIDGE 265

what those broad root -leaves were, as I
passed them here and there in the woods.
The present was only my second sight of
the blossom in a wild state, the first one
having been on the battlefield of Chicka-
mauga. It is matter for thankfulness, an
enrichment of the memory, when a pretty
flower is thus associated with a famous
place.

Among the old trees on the Heights a
cerulean warbler and a blue yellow-back
were singing nearly in the same breath. If
I did not become lastingly familiar with the
distinction between the two songs, it was not
to be the birds' fault. A second cerulean
(or possibly the same one ; it was impossible
to be certain on that point, nor did it mat-
ter) was near the grapevine tangle, and at
the moment of my approach was holding a
controversy with a creeper. He had re-
served the spot, as it appeared, and was
insisting upon his claim. My spirits rose.
It was this clump of shrubbery that I had
come to sit beside, on the chance of seeing
again, and tracking to her nest, the female
whose behavior had so excited my hopes the
afternoon before. "Nest small and neat,

266 VIRGINIA

in fork of a bough 20-50 feet from the
ground : " so I had read in the Key, and
henceforth knew what I was to look for.
For a full hour I remained on guard.
Twice the male cerulean chased some other
bird about in a manner extremely suspi-
cious ; but he kept her (or him) so con-
stantly on the move that I had no fair sight
of her plumage. Beyond that my vigil went
for nothing. I must try again. If a man
cannot waste an hour once in a while, he had
better not undertake the finding of birds'
nests.

For the walk homeward I took a course
of my own down the open face of the hill,
climbing a fence or two (I could tell far in
advance the safest places at which to get
over — the soundest spots — by seeing the
lumps of dry red clay left on the rails by
the boots of previous travelers across lots),
past prairie warblers and my first Natural
Bridge bluebird, to the bottom of the valley.
Then, finding myself ahead of time, I turned
aside to see what might be in the woods of
Buck Hill. There was little to mention : a
blossom of the exquisite vernal fleur-de-lis,
not before noticed here, and at the top two

AT NATURAL BBIDGE 267

cerulean warblers in full song. I had begun
by this time to believe that this rare Vir-
ginia species would turn out to be pretty
common hereabout in appropriate places.

Partly to test the truth of this opinion I
planned an afternoon trip to a more distant
eminence, which, like Buck Hill and Lin-
coln Heights, was covered with a deciduous
forest. In the valley woods a grouse was
drumming — a pretty frequent sound here
— and Swainson thrushes were singing.
These "New Hampshire thrushes," by the
bye, are singers of the most generous sort,
not only at home, but on their travels, all
statements to the contrary notwithstanding.
From May 5 to May 12 — including the
latter half of my stay at Natural Bridge,
two days at Afton, and one day in the cem-
etery woods at Arlington — I have them
marked as singing daily, and one day at the
Bridge they were heard in four widely sepa-
rate places.

The hill for which I had set out lay on
the left of the road, and between me and it
stood a row of negro cabins. As I came
opposite them I suddenly caught from the
hillsides the notes of a Nashville warbler,

268 VIRGINIA

— or so I believed. This was a bird not
yet included in my Virginia list. I had
puzzled over its absence — the country
seeming in all respects adapted to it — till
I consulted Dr. Rives, by whom it is set
down as "rare." Even then, emboldened
by more than one happy experience, I told
myself that I ought to find it. It is com-
mon enough in New England ; why should
it skip Virginia ? And here it was ; only I
must go through the formality of a visual
inspection, especially as just now the song
came from rather far away. I entered one
of the house-yards, — nobody objecting ex-
cept a dog, — climbed the rear fence, and
posted up the steep, rocky hill, past a hum-
ming-bird sipping at a violet, and by and
by lifted my glass upon the singer, which
had been in voice all the while. By this
time I was practically sure of its identity.
In imagination I could already see its bright
yellow breast. The name was as good as
down in my book, — Helminthophila rujica-
pilla. But the glass, having no imagina-
tion, showed me a white breast with a dark
line across it, — a cerulean warbler ! Verily,
an ear is a vain thing for safety. See your

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 269

bird, I say, and take a second look; and
then go back and look again. In another
tree a parula warbler was singing. About
him, by good luck, I made no mistake. As
for the other bird, even after I had seen his
white breast, his tune — with which he was
literally spilling over — continued to sound
amazingly Nashvillian ; though there are
few warbler songs with which I should have
supposed myself more thoroughly acquainted
than with this same clearly characterized
Nashville ditty, — a hurried measure fol-
lowed by a still more hurried trill. Perhaps
this particular cerulean had a note pecul-
iarly his own. I should be glad to think
so. Perhaps, on the other hand, the fault
was all with the man who heard it ; in which
case the less said the better. In either
event, my theory as to the cerulean's com-
monness was in a fair way to be verified.
It was well I had that comfort.

Before I could get down the hill again
I must stop to listen to a gnatcatcher's
squeaky voice, and the next moment I saw
the bird, and another with him. The sec-
ond one proceeded immediately to a nest, —
conspicuously displayed on an oak branch,

270 VIRGINIA

— while her mate hovered about, squeak-
ing in the most affectionate manner. Then
away they flew in company, and after a long
absence were back again for another turn at
building. They were making a joy of their
labor, the male especially ; but it is true he
made little else of it. With him I was at
once taken captive, — so happy, so proud,
and so devoted. A paragon of amorous be-
havior, I called him ; having the French
idea of " assistance," no doubt, but a lover
in every movement. Never was the good
old-fashioned phrase " waiting upon her "
more prettily illustrated. Birds are imagi-
native creatures, says Richard Jefferies, and
I believe it ; and this fellow, I am sure, had
endowed his spouse with all the graces of
all the birds that ever were or ever will be.
In other words, he was truly in love. The
nest was already shingled throughout with
bits of gray lichen, laid on so skillfully that
Father Time himself might have done it.
That is the right way. Let the house look
as if it were a growth, a something native
to the spot, only less old than the ground
it rests on. The gnatcatcher's nest is always
a work of art. Gnatcatcher eggs could

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 271

hardly be counted upon to hatch in any
other.

As I passed up the road, on my way
homeward, a flock of eight nighthawks were
swimming overhead. Their genius runs, not
to architecture, but to grace of aerial mo-
tion. They do not shoot like the swifts, nor
skim and dart like the swallows, nor circle
on level wings like the hawks, but have an
easy, slow - seeming, wavering, gracefully
" limping " flight, which is strictly their own.
At the same time two buzzards met in mid-
air, one going with the breeze, the other
against it. I could have told the fact, with-
out other knowledge of the wind's course,
by the different carriage of the two pairs
of wings. So "the bird trims her to the

Having the cerulean warbler question still
upon my mind, and seeing another hard-
wood hill within easy reach, I turned my
steps thither. Yes, I was hardly there be-
fore I heard a bird singing ; but the reader
may be sure I did not take my ear's word
for it. This was the fourth hilltop I had
visited to-day, and on every one the " rare "
warbler (but it is well known to be abun-

272 VIRGINIA

dant in West Virginia) had been found
without so much as a five-minute search.

The next thing, of course, was to find the
nest, and so establish the fact of the birds'
breeding. For that I had one day left ; and
it may be said at once that I spent the
greater share of the next forenoon in the
vicinity of the grapevine thicket, before
mentioned, on Lincoln Heights. A male
cerulean was there, — I both heard and saw
him, — but no female showed herself ; and
when at last my patience ran out, I gave up
the point for good. She had been seen in
the diligent collection of building materials,
and that, considered as evidence, was nearly
the same as a discovery of the nest itself.
With that I must be content. The com-
fortable way of finding birds' nests is to
happen upon them. A regular hunt — a
"dead set," as we call it — is apt to be a
discouraging business.

My present attempt, it is true, was a
quiet, inactive piece of work, little more
than an idle waiting for the lady of the nest
to "give herself away;" and even that was
relieved by much looking at mountain pro-
spects and frequent turns in the surround-

AT NATURAL BBID'GE 273

ing woods. Once a crossbill called and a
cardinal whistled almost in the same breath,
— a kind of northern and southern duet.
Then a cuckoo and a dove fell to cooing on
opposite sides of me ; very different sounds,
though in our poverty we designate them by
the same word. The dove's voice is a thou-
sand times more plaintive than the cuckoo's,
and to hear it, no matter how near, might
come from a mile away; as I have known
the little ground dove to be "mourning"
from a fig-tree at my elbow while I was en-
deavoring to sight it far down the field. The
dove's note is the voice of the future or of
the past, I am not certain which. A few
rods from the spot where I had taken my
station, a single deerberry bush ( Vaccinium
stamineum) was in profuse bloom, and
made a really pretty show ; loose sprays of
white flaring blossoms all hanging down-
ward, each with its cluster of long protrud-
ing stamens, till the bush, I thought, was
like a miniature candelabrum of electric
lights. As Thoreau might have said, for so
homely a plant the deerberry is very hand-
some. Either from association or for some
other reason, it wears always a certain com-

274 VIRGINIA

mon look. When we see an azalea shrub
or even an apple-tree in bloom, we seem to
see the very object of its being. The flower
calls for no ulterior result, though it may
have one ; its fruit is in itself. But a blos-
soming blueberry bush, no matter of what
kind, looks like a plant that was made to
bear something edible, a plant whose end is
use rather than beauty.

If the forenoon had been indolent, the
noonday hour was more so. I descended
the hill by a way different from any I had
yet taken, and found myself at the foot in
a public road running through a cultivated
valley. The day was peculiarly comfort-
able, with a bright sun and a temperate
breeze, — ideal weather for such inactivities
as I was engaged in. Coming to an old
cherry-tree, I rested awhile in its shadow.
A farmhouse was not far off, with apple-
trees before it, a barn across the way, and
two or three men at work in the sloping
ploughed field beyond. To one as lazy as I
then was, it is almost a luxury to see other
men m hoeing or ploughing, so they be far
enough off to become a part of the land-
scape. Near the barn stood a venerable

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 275

weeping willow, huge of girth, a very patri-
arch, yet still green as youth itself. Here
were good farm-loving birds, a pleasant soci-
ety. A pair of house wrens came at once
to look at the stranger, and one of them in-
terested me by dusting itself in the road.
Two kingbirds were about the apple-trees
(apple-tree flycatchers would be my name
for them, if a name were in order), now sit-
ting quiet for a brief space, now scaling the
heavens, as if to see how nearlv perpendicu-
lar a bird's flight could be made, and then
tumbling about ecstatically with rapid vocif-
erations, after the half-crazy manner of their
kind. The kingbird is plentifully endowed
not only with spirit, but with spirits. A
goldfinch sang and twittered in the softest
voice, and a catbird mewed. From a quince
bush, a little farther off, a wild bobolinkian
strain was repeated again and again, — an
orchard oriole, I thought most likely. I
went nearer (to the shade of a low cedar),
and soon had him in sight, — a young male
in yellow plumage, with a black throat-
patch. The song was extremely taking, and
the more I heard it, the more it seemed to
have the true bobolink ring. The quince

276 VIRGINIA

bushes were in pale pink bloom, and the
branches of a tall snowball - tree in the
unfenced front yard of the house fairly
drooped under their load of white globular
clusters. Just opposite was a sweet-brier
bush, "the pastoral eglantine," half dead
like others that I had noticed here, and like
the whole tribe of its New England brothers
and sisters. Here as in Massachusetts a
blight was upon them ; they were living
with difficulty. It would be good, I thought,
to see the sweet-brier once where it flour-
ishes ; where the beauty of the plant matches
the beauty and sweetness of the rose it
bears. Can it be that it is not quite hardy
even in Virginia?

My seat under the snowball-tree (to the
coolness of which I had moved from under
the cedar) had presently to be given up.
The women of the house became aware of
me, and out of a bashful regard for my own
comfort I took the road again. Soon I
passed a double house, with painted doors
and two-sash windows ! And in one of the
windows were lace curtains ! It was won-
derful, — I was obliged to confess it, in spite
of a deep-seated masculine prejudice against

AT NATUEAL BRIDGE 277

all such contrivances, — it was wonderful
what an air of elegance they conferred,
though the paint of the doors was to be con-
sidered, of course, in the same connection.

By this time the road was approaching the
slope of Buck Hill, and high noon as it was,
I must run up for another half -hour among
the old trees at the top, — with no special
result except to disturb a summer tanager,
who fired off volley after volley of objurga-
tory expletives, and altogether seemed to be
in a terrible state of mind. His excitement
was all for nothing ; unless — what was
likely enough — it served to give him favor
in the eyes of his mate, who may be pre-
sumed to have been somewhere within hear-
ing. Lovers, I believe, are supposed to
welcome an opportunity to play the hero.

My last afternoon at the Bridge was de-
voted to a longish tramp into a new piece of
country, where for an hour I had hopes of
adding at least a name or two to my Virginia
bird-list, which for twenty-four hours had
been at a standstill. I came unexpectedly
upon a mill, and what was of greater ac-
count, a millpond, — "a long, dirty pond,"
as my uncivil pencil describes it. Here were

278 VIRGINIA

swallows, as might have been foreseen, but
the most careful scrutiny revealed nothing
beyond the two species already catalogued,
— the barn swallow and the rough-wing.
Here, too, in an apple orchard, were a Balti-
more oriole gathering straws, a phoebe, a
golden warbler, and several warbling vireos,
the only ones so far noticed with the excep-
tion of a single bird at Pulaski. About the
border of the pond were spotted sandpipers
(no solitaries, to my disappointment) and
two male song sparrows. This last species I
saw but twice in Virginia, — along the bushy
shore of the creek at Pulaski, and here be-
side this millpond. Wherever the song spar-
row is scarce, it is likely to be restricted to
the immediate neighborhood of water. Even
in Massachusetts it is pretty evident that
such places are its first choice. As I some-
times say, the song sparrow likes a swamp
as well as the swamp sparrow; but the
species being so exceedingly abundant, there
are not swampy spots enough to go round,
and the majority of the birds have to shift
as they can, along bushy fence-rows and in
pastures and scrub-lands.

The building interested me almost as much

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 279

as the sandpipers and the sparrows. It was
painted red, and served not only as a mill,
but as a post-office (" Red Mills ") and a
" department store," with its sign, " Dry
Goods, Groceries, &c." A tablet informed
the passer-by that the mill had been " estab-
lished " in 1798, destroyed in 1881, and re-
opened in 1891 ; and on the same tablet,
or another, was the motto, "Laborare est
orare." I regretted not to meet the pro-
prietor, but he was nowhere in sight, and I
felt a scruple about intruding upon the time
of a man who was at once postmaster, miller,
farmer, storekeeper, and scholar. With that
motto before me, — "Apologia pro vita sua,"
he might have called it, — such an intrusion
would have seemed a sacrilege.

What I remember best about the whole
establishment is the song of a blue-gray
gnatcatcher, to which I stopped to listen
under a low savin-tree on a bluff above the
mill. He was directly over my head, sing-
ing somewhat in the manner of a catbird,
but I had almost to hold my breath to hear
him. It was amazing that a bird's voice
could be spun so fine. A mere shadow of a
sound, I was ready to say. It was only by

280 VIRGINIA

the happiest accident that I did not miss it
altogether. Then, when the fellow had fin-
ished his music, he began squeaking in that
peculiarly teasing manner of his, and kept
it up till I was weary. The gnatcatcher is a
creature by himself, a miniature bird, won-
derfully slender, with a strangely long tail,
which he carries jauntily and makes the
most of on all occasions. But if he only
knew it, his chief claim to distinction is his
singing voice. If the humming-bird's is
attenuated in the same proportion (and who
can assert the contrary ?), he may be the
finest vocalist in the world, and we none the
wiser.

I was to start northward by the next
noonday train, and had already laid out my
forenoon's work. Before breakfast I took
my last look at the famous bridge, and my
last stroll through Cedar Creek ravine. I
had been there every day, I think, and had
always found something new. This time it
was a slippery-elm-tree by the saltpetre cave.
I had brought away a twig, and was sitting
in my door putting a lens upon it and upon
a sedum specimen, when the veranda was
suddenly taken possession of by a dozen or

AT NATURAL BRIDGE 281

more of young men. They were just up from
the railway station, and were deep in a dis-
cussion of ways and means, — tickets, lunch-
eons, and time-tables. Then, in a momen-
tary lull in the talk, I heard a quiet voice
say, " Sedum." They were a company of
Johns Hopkins men out upon a geological
trip. So I learned at noon when we met at
the railway station ; and a pleasant botanical
hour I had with one or two of them as we
rode northward. Now, on the piazza, they
did not tarry long ; time was precious to
them also ; and as soon as they had gone
down to the bridge I set off in the opposite
direction. My final ramble was to be to
Lincoln Heights, to see once more that
magnificent avenue of trees and that beauti-
ful mountain prospect. The cerulean war-
bler was singing as usual, but there was no
sign of his mate, though I could not do less
than to wait a little while by the grapevine
thicket in a vain hope of her appearance.
Here, as in the ravine, I had not yet seen
everything. Straight before me stood a locust
tree, every branch hung with long, fragrant
white clusters. I had overlooked it com-
pletely till now. If I learned nothing else

282 VIRGINIA

in Virginia, I ought to have learned some-
thing about my limitations as an " observer."
But I need not have traveled so far for such
a purpose. Wisdom so common as that may
be picked up any day in a man's own door-
yard.

INDEX

ANEMONE, 153, 216.

Arbor-vitae, 217.

Arbutus, trailing, 133, 148,

153, 158,205.
Asplenium Kuta - muraria,

227.
Azalea: —

arborescens, 138.

calendulacea, 138.

nudiflora, 137, 206.

vaseyi, 137.

viscosa, 138.

Barren strawberry, 153, 178.
Blackbird: —

crow, 202.

red-winged, 123.
Bladder-nut, 216.
Bloodroot, 153, 160, 178, 216.
Bluebird, 125, 266.
Blue-eyed grass, 244.
Bobolink, 208.
Box turtle, 248.
Butterflies, 218.
Buzzard, turkey, 126, 132,
159, 271.

Cancer-root, 260.
Carolina hemlock, 93.
Catbird, 51, 173, 198, 275.
Catchfly, scarlet, 244.
Chat, 5, 126, 203, 239, 247,

257.

Checkerberry, 133.
Cheilanthes vestita, 229.
Chewink, 132, 159.
Chickadee, Carolina, 126,

148, 184, 196, 239.
Chinaberry-tree, 8.

Chokeberry, 132.
Clintonia, white - flowered,

46.

Columbine, 214, 218.
Cowslip, 264.
Crab-apple tree, 50.
Cranesbill, 216.
Creeper : —

black-and-white, 148,

155, 196, 264.
brown, 41. 74, 78, 126.
Crossbill, red, 159, 180, 249,

272.

Cuckoo, 273.
Cystopteris bulbifera, 228.

Deerberry, 273.

Dogwood, flowering, 208,

257.
Dove: —

Carolina, 196, 273.
ground, 273.
Draba, ramosissima, 214.

Finch, purple, 230.
Fish-hawk, 209.
Flycatcher : —

Acadian, 125, 239.

least, 45.

olive-sided, 41, 94, 126.
Fringed polygala, 160.

Galax, 134, 154.
Gaylussacia ursina, 133.
Ginger, wild, 216.
Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 21,

23, 231, 269, 279.
Goldfinch, 132, 211, 230, 275.
Grackle, bronzed, 202.

284

INDEX

Grosbeak : —

Painted-cup, 94, 134.

blue, 249.
cardinal, 125, 224, 272.
rose-breasted, 51, 119,

Pellaea atropurpurea, 227.
Pewee, wood, 203, 239.
Phalarope, Wilson's, 95.

128, 132, 180, 187, 258.
Grouse, ruffed, 155, 159, 267.

Phoebe, 75, 123, 224, 230, 278.
Potentilla tridentata, 133.

Halesia-tree, 38, 50.

Ragwort, 216.

Hepatica, 153, 160, 178, 216.

Raven, 22, 68.

Houstonia, 153.

Redstart, 240.

Huckleberry, 132.

Rhododendron : —

Humming-bird, 23, 203, 235,

Catawbiense, 137, 141.

241, 268, 280.

maximum, 137.

punctatum, 136.

Indigo-bird, 231, 255.

Robin, 51, 198.

Iris, vernal, 134, 160, 205,

Rose acacia, 134.

266.

Sand myrtle, 134.

Judas-tree, 146, 208, 257.

Sandpiper : —

solitary, 72.

Killdeer, 199.

spotted, 73, 199, 278.

Kingbird, 275.
Kingfisher, 49, 208.

Shadbush, 153, 160.
Shortia galacifolia, 93.

Snowbird, Carolina, 78, 115,

Lady's slipper, yellow, 46.

126, 132.

Laurel, mountain, 140.

Sparrow : —

Lungwort, 172.

chipping, 148, 230.

field, 132, 148, 159, 205.

Magnolia Fraseri, 93.

lark, 190.

Mandrake, 216.

song, 128, 199, 278.

Maryland yeUow-throat,122,

white-throated, 30, 157,

209.

196, 239, 255.

Mitrewort, 178, 216.

Spring beauty, 216.

Stone-crop, 216.

Night-hawk, 231, 271.

Sumach, fragrant, 260.

Nuthatch: —

Swallow : —

red-breasted (Canadian),

barn, 74, 75, 201, 278.

40, 126, 159.

rough - winged, 32, 75,

white-breasted, 196, 239.

201, 218, 278.
Sweetbrier (Eglantine) 67,

Orchis spectabilis, 216.
Oriole: —

276.
Swift, chimney, 132, 145,

Baltimore, 124, 202, 278.

201, 230.

orchard, 275.

Osprey, 209.

Tanager: —

Oven-bird, 132, 157, 195, 196,
223, 230.

scarlet, 132, 203.
summer, 23, 231, 240, 277-

INDEX

285

Thrasher, brown, 30, 51, 126,

Canadian, 121, 126, 240.

148, 196, 198.

Cape May, 261.

Thrush: —

Warbler : -

Louisiana water, 66,

cerulean, 236, 251, 255,

126, 203, 219, 230.
olive - backed (Swain-

258, 265, 267, 268, 271,

son), 23, 240, 247, 253,

chestnut-sided, 126, 132,

267.

195, 196, 255.

wood, 51, 247.

golden-winged, 21. 51,

Trillium : —

126, 193, 195.

grandiflorum, 215.
stylosum, 56.
Tufted titmouse, 126, 196,

hooded, 125, 155, 254.
Kentucky, 125, 127, 156.
magnolia, 235, 263.

223.

myrtle, 127, 195, 196,

Tulip-tree, 160, 166, 217.

255.

Nashville, 269.

Violets, 133, 160, 161, 162,

pine, 23, 195.

166, 177, 214.

prairie, 23, 127, 206, 230,

Vireo: —

266.

mountain solitary, 118.

redpoll, 195.

red-eyed, 119, 195, 223,

summer yellow (golden),

230, 255.

127, 195, 278.

warbling, 202, 278.

worm-eating, 178, 195.

white-eyed, 127.
yellow - throated, 196,

Whippoorwill, 5, 59, 231, 247.
Woodpecker: —

230,255.

downy, 196.

hairy, 241.

Walking fern, 217.

golden-winged, 159, 196.

Warbler: —

pileated,32,48,180,246,

Blackburnian, 126,128,

250.

195, 240, 255.

red-headed, 241.

blackpoll, 127, 196.
black - throated blue,

yellow-bellied, 180.
Wren : —

121, 126, 180, 240, 254,

Bewick, 126, 148, 198,

255.

202.

black - throated green,

Carolina, 126, 231.

23, 195, 255.

house, 150, 198, 203, 275.

blue yellow-backed (pa-
rula),45,123,195, 223,

winter, 155, 198.

230, 248, 258, 265.

Xanthorrhiza, 189.

OThr liilirrsibr

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A.

ELECTROTVPED AND PRINTED BY

H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.

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