Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

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 description; 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 everywhere, 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 conceivable 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 beholder’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 myself by naming him, a land-owner who knew the worth of his possession!), had asked me 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