Chapter II (1)

Fairmount, as has already been said, is but a clearing in the forest. Instead of a solitary cabin, as elsewhere, there are perhaps a dozen or two of cabins and houses scattered along the road, which emerges from the woods at one end of the settlement, and, after a mile or so in the sun, drops into them again at the other end. The glory of the place, and the reason of its being, as I suppose, is a chalybeate spring in a woody hollow before the post-office. There may be a shop of some kind, also, but memory retains no such impression. One building, rather larger than most of its neighbors, and apparently unoccupied, I looked at more than once with a measure of that curiosity which is everywhere the stranger's privilege. It sat squarely on the road, and boasted a sort of portico or piazza,--it puzzled me what to call it,--but there was no vestige of a chimney. One day a ragged, bright-faced boy met me at the right moment, and I asked, "Did some one use to live in that house?" "That?" said he, in a tone I shall never forget. "That's a barn. That over there is the dwelling." My ignorance was fittingly rebuked, and I had no spirit to inquire about the piazza. Probably it was nothing but a lean-to. Even in my humiliation, however, it pleased me to hear what I should have called that good literary word "dwelling" on such lips. A Yankee boy might have said "dwelling-house," but no Yankee of any age, or none that I have ever known, would have said "dwelling," though he might have read the word in books a thousand times. I thought of a spruce colored waiter in Florida, who, when I asked him at breakfast how the day was likely to turn out, answered promptly, "I think it will be inclement." It may reasonably be counted among the minor advantages of travel that it enriches one's every-day vocabulary.

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

Fairmounters, living in the woods, have no outlook upon the world. If they wish to see off, they must go to the Brow, which, by a stroller's guess, may be two miles distant. My first visit to it was the pleasanter--the more vacational, so to speak--for being an accident. I sauntered aimlessly down the road, past the scattered houses and orchards (the raising of early apples seemed to be a leading industry on the Ridge, though a Chattanooga gentleman had assured me that the principal crops were blackberries and rabbits), and almost before I knew it, was in the same delightful woods that had welcomed me wherever I had gone. And in the same woods the same birds were singing. My notes make particular record of hooded and Kentucky warblers, these being two of my newer acquaintances, as well as two of the commoner Ridge songsters; but I halted for some time, and with even a livelier interest, to listen to an old friend (no acquaintance, if you please),--a black-throated green warbler. It was one of the queerest of songs: a bar of five or six notes, uniform in pitch, and then at once, in perfect form and voice,--the voice being a main part of the music in the case of this warbler,--the familiar _trees_, _trees_, _murmuring trees_. Where could the fellow have picked up such a ditty? No doubt there was some story connected with it. Nothing is born of itself. A dozen years ago, in the Green Mountains,--at Bread-Loaf Inn,--I heard from the forest by the roadside a song utterly strange, and hastened in search of its author. After much furtive approach and diligent scanning of the foliage, I had the bird under my opera-glass,--a black-throated blue warbler! With my eye still upon him, he sang again and again, and the song bore no faintest resemblance to the _kree_, _kree_, _kree_, which all New England bird-lovers know as the work of _Dendroica cærulescens_. In what private school he had been educated I have no idea; but I believe that every such extreme eccentricity goes back to something out of the common in the bird's early training.

I felt in no haste. Life is easy in the Tennessee mountains. A pile of lumber, newly unloaded near the road,--in the woods, of course,--offered a timely seat, and I took it. Some Chattanooga gentleman was planning a summer cottage for himself, I gathered. May he enjoy it for twenty years as much as I did for twenty minutes. Not far beyond, near a fork in the road, a man of twenty-five or thirty, a youth of sixteen or seventeen, and a small boy were playing marbles in a cabin yard. I interrupted the sport long enough to inquire which road I had better take. I was going nowhere in particular, I explained, and wanted simply a pleasant stroll. "Then I would go to the Brow, if I were you," said the man. "Keep a straight road. It isn't far." I thanked him, and with a cheery "Come on!" to his playmates he ran back, literally, to the ring. Yes, life is easy in the Tennessee mountains. It is not to be assumed, nevertheless, that the man was a do-nothing: probably he had struck work for a few minutes only; but, like a sensible player, he was enjoying the game while it lasted. Perhaps it is a certain inborn Puritanical industriousness, against which I have never found the courage effectually to rebel, that makes me look back upon this dooryard comedy as one of the brightest incidents of my Tennessee vacation. Fancy a Massachusetts farmer playing marbles at nine o'clock in the forenoon!

At that moment, it must be owned, a rebuke of idleness would have fallen with a poor grace from my Massachusetts lips. If the player of marbles had followed his questioner round the first turn, he would have seen him standing motionless beside a swamp, holding his head on one side as if listening,--though there was nothing to be heard,--or evoking ridiculous squeaking noises by sucking idiotically the back of his hand. Well, I was trying to find another bird, just as he was trying to knock another marble out of the ring.

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

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

Meanwhile there was no forgetting that undiscovered stranger in the swamp. Whoever he was, he must be made to show himself; and the next day, when the usual noonday deluge was past, I looked at the clouds, and said: "We shall have another, but in the interval I can probably reach the Brow. There I will take shelter on the piazza of an unoccupied cottage, and, when the rain is over, go back to the swamp, see my bird, and thence return home." So it turned out--in part. The clouds hurried me, but I reached the Brow just in season, climbed the cottage fence, the gate being padlocked, and, thoroughly heated as I was, paced briskly to and fro on the piazza in a chilling breeze for an hour or more, the flood all the while threatening to fall, and the thunder shaking the house. There was plenty to look at, for the cottage faced the Great Smokies, and though we were under the blackest of clouds, the landscape below was largely in the sun. The noise of the locusts was incessant. Nothing but the peals of thunder kept it out of my ears.

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

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

Not far beyond these wayside musicians I came upon a boy sitting beside a wood-pile, with his saw lying on the ground. "It is easier to sit down than to saw wood, isn't it?" said I. Possibly he was unused to such aphoristic modes of speech. He took time to consider. Then he smiled, and said, "Yes, sir." The answer was all-sufficient. We spoke from experience, both of us; and between men who _know_, whatever the matter in hand, disagreement is impossible and amplification needless.

Three days later--my last day on the Ridge--I had better luck at the swamp. The stranger was singing on the nearer edge as I approached, and I had simply to draw near and look at him,--a Louisiana water-thrush. He sang, and I listened; and farther along, at the little bridge where I had first heard the song, another like him was in tune. The strain, as warbler songs go ("water-thrushes" being not thrushes, but warblers), is rather striking,--clear, pretty loud, of about ten notes, the first pair of which are longest and best. I speak of what I heard, and give, of course, my own impression. Audubon pronounces the notes "as powerful and mellow, and at times as varied," as those of the nightingale, and Wilson waxes almost equally enthusiastic in his praise of the "exquisitely sweet and expressive voice." Here, as in Florida, I was interested to perceive how instantly the bird's appearance and carriage distinguished it from its Northern relative, although the descriptions of the two species, as given in books, sound confusingly alike. It is matter for thankfulness, perhaps, that language is not yet so all-expressive as to render individual eyesight superfluous.

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

The most fatiguing, and perhaps the most interesting of my days on the Ridge was the one day in which I did not travel on foot. Passing through the village, on my return from one of my earlier visits to Falling Water, I stopped a nice-looking man (if he will pardon the expression, copied from my notes), driving a horse with a pair of clothes-line reins. He had an air of being at home, and naturally I took him for a native. Would he tell me something about the country, especially about the roads, so that I might improve my scanty time to the best advantage? Very gladly, he answered. He had walked and driven over the mountain a good deal, surveying, and if I would call at his house, a short distance down the road,--the house with the big barn,--he would make me a rough map, such as would answer my purpose. At the same time he mentioned two or three shorter excursions which I ought not to miss; and when I had thanked him for his kindness, he gathered up the reins and drove on. Intending no disrespect to the inhabitants of the Ridge, I may perhaps be allowed to say that I was considerably impressed by a certain unexpected propriety, and even elegance, of diction, on the part of my new acquaintance. I remember in particular his description of a pleasant cold spring as being situated not far from the "confluence" of two streams. _Con-fluens_, I thought, flowing together. Having always something else to do, I omitted to call at his house, and one day, when we met again in the road, I apologized for my neglect, and asked another favor. He was familiar with the country, and kept a horse. Could he not spare a day to take me about? If he thought this proposal a bit presumptuous, courtesy restrained him from letting the fact be seen, and, after a few minutes of deliberation,--his hands being pretty full just then, he explained,--he promised to call for me two mornings later, at seven o'clock. We would take a luncheon along, and make a day of it.

He appeared at the gate in due season, and in a few minutes we were driving over a road new to me, but through the same spacious oak woods to which I had grown accustomed. We went first to Burnt Cabin Spring, one of the famous chalybeate springs of the mountain,--a place formerly frequented by picnic parties, but now, to all appearance, fallen into neglect. We stretched our legs, drank of the water, admired the flowers and ferns, talking all the while (it was here that my companion told a story of a young theologian from Grant University, who, in a solemn discourse, spoke repeatedly of Jacob as having "euchred his brother out of his birthright"), and then, while a "pheasant" drummed near by, took our places again in the buggy.

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

It would have been delightful to spend a long day there, lying upon the cliffs and enjoying the prospect, which, without being so far-reaching as from Point Lookout, or even from the eastern brim of Walden, is yet extensive and surpassingly beautiful. The visitor is squarely above the river, which here, in the straitened valley between the Ridge and Raccoon Mountain, grows narrower and narrower till it rushes through the "Suck." Even at that elevation we could hear the roar of the rapids. A short distance above the Suck, and almost at our feet, lay Williams Island. A farmer's Eden it looked, with its broad, newly planted fields, and its house surrounded by out-buildings and orchard-trees. The view included Chattanooga, Missionary Ridge, and much else; but its special charm was its foreground, the part peculiar to itself,--the valley, the river, and Raccoon Mountain. Along the river-banks were small clearings, each with its one cabin, and generally a figure or two ploughing or planting. A man in a strangely long boat--a dugout, probably--was making his difficult way upstream with a paddle. The Tennessee, in the neighborhood of Chattanooga, at all events, is too swift for pleasure-boating. Seen from above, as I commonly saw it, it looked tranquil enough; but when I came down to its edge, now and then, the speed and energetic sweep of the smooth current laid fast hold upon me. From the mountains to the sea is a long, long journey, and no wonder the river felt in haste.

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

Our next start--far too speedy, for the day was short--was for Williams Point; but on our way thither we descended into the valley of Shoal Creek, down which, with the creek to keep it company, runs the old mountain road, now disused and practically impassable. Here we hitched the horse, and strolled downwards for perhaps half a mile. I was never in a lovelier spot. The mountain brook, laughing over the stones, is overhung with laurel and rhododendron, which in turn are overhung by precipitous rocks broken into all wild and romantic shapes, with here and there a cavern--"rock-house"--to shelter a score of travelers. The place was rich in ferns and other plants, which, unhappily, I had no time to examine, and all the particulars of which have faded out of my memory. We walked far enough to look over the edge of the mountain, and up to the Signal Point cliffs. If I could have stayed there two or three hours, it would have been a memorable season. As it was, the stroll was enlivened by one little adventure, at which I have laughed too many times ever to forget it.

I had been growing rapturous over the beauty of things, when my companion said, "There are some people whom it is no pleasure to take into places like this. They can't keep their eyes off the ground, they are so bitten with the fear of snakes." He was a few paces ahead of me, as he spoke, and the sentence was barely finished before he shouted, "Look at that huge snake!" and sprang forward to snatch up a stone. "Get a stick!" he cried. "Get a stick!" From his manner I took it for granted that the creature was a rattlesnake, and a glance at it, lying motionless among the stones beside the road, did not undeceive me. I turned hurriedly, looking for a stick, but somehow could not find one, and in a moment more was recalled by shouts of "Come and help me! It will get away from us!" It was a question of life and death, I thought, and I ran forward and began throwing stones. "Look out! Look out! You'll bury it!" cried my companion; but just then one of my shots struck the snake squarely in the head. "That's a good one!" exclaimed the other man, and, picking up a dead stick, he thrust it under the disabled creature and tossed it into the road. Then he bent over it, and, with a stone, pounded its head to a jelly. Such a fury as possessed him! He might have been bruising the head of Satan himself, as no doubt he was--in his mind; for my surveyor was also a preacher, as had already transpired.

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

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

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

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

After that it was natural to inquire whether he often saw rattlesnakes hereabouts. (The driver who brought me up the mountain had said that they were not common, but that I "wanted to look out sharp for them in the woods.") My companion had never seen one, he answered, but his wife had once killed one in their dooryard. Then, by way of cooling off, after the fervor of the conflict, he told me about a gentleman and his little boy, who, having come to spend a vacation on the Ridge, started out in the morning for a stroll. They were quickly back again, and the boy, quite out of breath, came running into the garden.

"Oh, Mr. M.," he cried, "we saw a rattlesnake, and papa fired off his pistol!"

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

"Why, we didn't see it, but we heard it."

"What was the noise like?" asked Mr. M., and he took a pencil from his pocket and began tapping on a log.

"That's it!" said the boy, "that's it!"

They had heard a woodpecker drilling for grubs,--or drumming for love,--whereupon the man had fired his pistol, and for them there was no more walking in the woods.

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

Williams Point, which we reached on foot, after driving as near it as the roughness of the unfrequented road would comfortably allow, is not in itself equal to Signal Point, but affords substantially the same magnificent prospect. Near it, in the woods, stood a newly built cabin, looking badly out of place with its glaring unweathered boards; and beside the cabin stood a man and woman in a condition of extreme disgust. The man had come up the mountain to work in some coal-mine, if I understood him correctly; but the tools were not ready, there was no water, his household goods were stranded down in the valley somewhere (the hens were starving to death, the woman added), and, all in all, the pair were in a sorry plight.

Here, as at Signal Point, I made an addition to my local ornithology, and this time too the bird was a hawk. We were standing on the edge of the cliff, when a sparrow hawk, after alighting near us, took wing and hung for some time suspended over the abyss, beating against the breeze, and so holding itself steady,--a graceful piece of work, the better appreciated for being seen from above. Here, also, for the first time in my life, I was addressed as a "you-un." "Where be you-uns from?" asked the woman at the cabin, after the ordinary greetings had been exchanged. I believe, in my innocence, I had always looked upon that word as an invention of story-writers.

Somewhere in this neighborhood we traversed a pine wood, in which my first Walden pine warbler was trilling. Then, for some miles, we drove along the Brow, with the glory of the world--valley, river, and mountain--outspread before us, and the Great Smokies looming in the background, barely visible through the haze. For seven miles, I was told, one could drive along that mountain rim. Surely the city of Chattanooga is happy in its suburbs. Here were many cottages, the greater number as yet unopened; and not far beyond the one under the piazza of which I had weathered the thunderstorm of the day before, the road entered the forest again. Then, as the way grew more and more difficult, we left the horse behind us, and by and by came to a foot-path. This brought us at last to Falling Water Fall, where Little Falling Water--after threading the swamp and passing Mabbitt's Spring, as before described--tumbles over a precipice which my companion, with his surveyor's eye, estimated to be one hundred and fifty feet in height. The slender stream, broken into jewels as it falls, strikes the bottom at some distance from the foot of the cliffs, which here form the arc of a circle, and are not perpendicular, but deeply hollowed. After enjoying the prospect from this point,--holding to a tree and leaning over the edge of the rocks,--we retraced our steps till we came to a steep, zigzag path, which took us to the foot of the precipice. Here, as well as above, were laurel and rhododendron in profusion. One big rhododendron-tree grew on the face of the cliff, thirty feet over our heads, leaning outward, and bearing at least fifty clusters of gorgeous rose-purple flowers; and a smaller one, in a similar position, was equally full. The hanging gardens of Babylon may have been more wonderful, but I was well content.

From the point where we stood the ledge makes eastward for a long distance, almost at right angles, and the cliffs for a mile--or, more likely, for two or three miles--were straight before us, broken everywhere into angles, light gray and reddish-brown intermixed, with the late afternoon sun shining full upon them, and the green forest fringing them above and sweeping away from them below.

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

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

Another surprising circumstance, which I do not remember to have noticed, however, till my attention was somewhat rudely called to it, was the absence of colored people. With the exception of three servants at the hotel, I saw none but whites. Walden's Ridge, although stanchly Union in war-time, and largely Republican now, as I was told, is a white man's country. I had gone to bed one night, and was fast asleep, when I was wakened suddenly by the noise of some one hurrying up the stairs and shouting, "Where's the gun? Where's the gun? Shorty's been shot!" "Shorty" was the colored waiter, and the speaker was a general factotum, an English boy. The colored people--Shorty, his wife, and the cook--had been out on the edge of the woods behind the house, when three men had fired at them, or pretended to do so. It was explained the next morning that this was only an attempt (on the part of some irresponsible young men, as the older residents said) to "run the niggers off the mountain,"--after what I understood to be a somewhat regular custom. "Niggers" did not belong there; their place was down below. If a Chattanooga cottager brought up a colored servant, he was "respectfully requested" to send him back, and save the natives the trouble of attending to the matter. In short, the Ridgites appeared to look upon "niggers" as Northern laborers look upon non-union men--"scabs."

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

Of the feeling of the community I had a slight but ludicrous intimation a day or two after the shooting. I passed a boy whom I had noticed in the road, some days before, playing with a pig, lifting him by the hind legs and pitching him over forwards. "He can turn a somerset good," he had said to me, as I passed. Now, for the sake of being neighborly, I asked, "How's the pig to-day?" He smiled, and made some reply, as if he appreciated the pleasantry; but a more serious-looking playmate took up his parable, and said, "The pig'll be all right, if the folks up at the hotel don't shoot him." His tone and look were intended to be deeply significant. "Oh, I know you," they implied: "you are up at the hotel, where they threaten to shoot white folks."

For my last afternoon--wars and rumors of wars long since forgotten--I went to the place that had pleased me first, the valley of Falling Water Creek. The cross-vine on the dead hemlock had by this time dropped the greater part of its bells, but even yet many were hanging from the uppermost branches. The rhododendron was still at the height of its splendor. All the gardens were nothing to it, I said to myself. Crossing the creek on the log, and the branch on stepping-stones, I went to quench my thirst at the Marshall Spring, which once had a cabin beside it, and frequent visitors, but now was clogged with fallen leaves and seemingly abandoned. It was perhaps more beautiful so. Directly behind it rose a steep bank, and in front stood an oak and a maple, the latter leaning toward it and forming a pointed arch,--a worthy entrance. Mossy stones walled it in, and ferns grew luxuriantly about it. Just over them, an azalea still held two fresh pink flowers, the last till another May. In such a spot it would have been easy to grow sentimental; but there came a rumbling of thunder, the sky darkened, and, with a final hasty look about me, I picked up my umbrella and started homeward.

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

"The calm sense of seen beauty without sight,"

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

FOOTNOTE:

[2] It was _not_ the top of the mountain; so I am now informed, on the best of authority. I followed the map, but misunderstood the man who drew it. It was a map of some other route, and I did not see the top of the mountain, after all.

SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.

Whoever loves the music of English sparrows should live in Chattanooga; there is no place on the planet, it is to be hoped, where they are more numerous and pervasive. Mocking-birds are scarce. To the best of my recollection, I saw none in the city itself, and less than half a dozen in the surrounding country. A young gentleman whom I questioned upon the subject told me that they used to be common, and attributed their present increasing rarity to the persecution of boys, who find a profit in selling the young into captivity. Their place, in the city especially, is taken by catbirds; interesting, imitative, and in their own measure tuneful, but poor substitutes for mocking-birds. In fact, that is a rôle which it is impossible to think of any bird as really filling. The brown thrush, it is true, sings quite in the mocking-bird's manner, and, to my ear, almost or quite as well; but he possesses no gift as a mimic, and furthermore, without being exactly a bird of the forest or the wilderness, is instinctively and irreclaimably a recluse. It would be hard, even among human beings, to find a nature less touched with urbanity. In the mocking-bird the elements are more happily mingled. Not gregarious, intolerant of rivalry, and, as far as creatures of his own kind are concerned, a stickler for elbow-room,--sharing with his brown relative in that respect,--he is at the same time a born citizen and neighbor; as fond of gardens and dooryard trees as the thrasher is of scrublands and barberry bushes. "Man delights me," he might say, "and woman also." He likes to be listened to, it is pretty certain; and possibly he is dimly aware of the artistic value of appreciation, without which no artist ever did his best. Add to this endearing social quality the splendor and freedom of the mocker's vocal performances, multifarious, sensational, incomparable, by turns entrancing and amusing, and it is easy to understand how he has come to hold a place by himself in Southern sentiment and literature. A city without mocking-birds is only half Southern, though black faces be never so thick upon the sidewalks and mules never so common in the streets. If the boys have driven the great mimic away from Chattanooga, it is time the fathers took the boys in hand. Civic pride alone ought to bring this about, to say nothing of the possible effect upon real estate values of the abundant and familiar presence of this world-renowned, town-loving, town-charming songster.

From my window, on the side of Cameron Hill, I heard daily the singing of an orchard oriole--another fine and neighborly bird--and a golden warbler, with sometimes the _fidgety_, _fidgety_ of a Maryland yellow-throat. What could _he_ be fussing about in so unlikely a quarter? An adjoining yard presented the unnatural spectacle--unnatural, but, I am sorry to say, not unprecedented--of a bird-house occupied in partnership by purple martins and English sparrows. They had finished their quarrels, if they had ever had any,--which can hardly be open to doubt, both native and foreigner being constitutionally belligerent,--and frequently sat side by side upon the ridge-pole, like the best of friends. The oftener I saw them there, the more indignant I became at the martins' un-American behavior. Such a disgraceful surrender of the Monroe Doctrine was too much even for a man of peace. I have never called myself a Jingo, but for once it would have done me good to see the lion's tail twisted.

With the exception of a few pairs of rough-wings on Missionary Ridge, the martins seemed to be the only swallows in the country at that time of the year; and though _Progne subis_, in spite of an occasional excess of good nature, is a most noble bird, it was impossible not to feel that by itself it constituted but a meagre representation of an entire family. Swallows are none too numerous in Massachusetts, in these days, and are pretty certainly growing fewer and fewer, what with the prevalence of the box-monopolizing European sparrow, and the passing of the big, old-fashioned, widely ventilated barn; for there is no member of the family, not even the sand martin, whose distribution does not depend in great degree upon human agency. Even yet, however, if a Massachusetts man will make a circuit of a few miles, he will usually meet with tree swallows, barn swallows, cliff swallows, sand martins, and purple martins. In other words, he need not go far to find all the species of eastern North America, with the single exception of the least attractive of the six; that is to say, the rough-wing. As compared with the people of eastern Tennessee, then, we are still pretty well favored. It is worth while to travel now and then, if only to find ourselves better off at home.

It might be easy to suggest plausible reasons for the general absence of swallows from a country like that about Chattanooga; but the extraordinary scarcity of hawks, while many persons--not ornithologists--would account it less of a calamity, is more of a puzzle. From Walden's Ridge I saw a single sparrow hawk and a single red-tail; in addition to which I remember three birds whose identity I could not determine. Five hawks in the course of three weeks spent entirely out of doors, in the neighborhood of mountains covered with old forest! Taken by itself, this unexpected showing might have been ascribed to some queer combination of accidents, or to a failure of observation. In fact, I was inclined so to explain it till I noticed that Mr. Brewster had chronicled a similar state of things in what is substantially the same piece of country. Writing of western North Carolina, he says:[3] "The general scarcity--one may almost say absence--of hawks in this region during the breeding season is simply unaccountable. Small birds and mammals, lizards, snakes, and other animals upon which the various species subsist are everywhere numerous, the country is wild and heavily forested, and, in short, all the necessary conditions of environment seem to be fulfilled." Certainly, so far as my ingenuity goes, the mystery is "unaccountable;" but of course, like every other mystery, it would open quickly enough if we could find the key.

Turkey vultures were moderately numerous,--much less abundant than in Florida,--and twice I saw a single black vulture, recognizable, almost as far as it could be seen (but I do not mean at a first glance, nor without due precaution against foreshortened effects), by its docked tail. Both are invaluable in their place,--useful, graceful, admirable, and disgusting. The vultures, the martins, and the swifts were the only common aerial birds. The swifts, happily, were everywhere,--jovial souls in a sooty dress,--and had already begun nest-building. I saw them continually pulling up against the twigs of a partially dead tree near my window. In them nature has developed the bird idea to its extreme,--a pair of wings, with just body enough for ballast; like a racing-yacht, built for nothing but to carry sail and avoid resistance. Their flight is a good visual music, as Emerson might have said; but I love also their quick, eager notes, like the sounds of children at play. And while it has nothing to do with Tennessee, I am prompted to mention here a bird of this species that I once saw in northern New Hampshire on the 1st of October,--an extraordinarily late date, if my experience counts for anything. With a friend I had made an ascent of Mount Lafayette (one of the days of a man's life), and as we came near the Profile House, on our return to the valley, there passed overhead a single chimney swift. What he could be doing there at that season was more than either of us could divine. It was impossible to feel any great concern about him, however. The afternoon was nearly done, but at the rate he was traveling it seemed as if he might be in Mexico before sunrise. And easily enough he may have been, if Mr. Gätke is right in his contention that birds of very moderate powers of wing are capable of flying all night at the rate of four miles a minute!

The comparative scarcity of crows about Chattanooga, and the amazing dearth of jays in the oak forest of Walden's Ridge, have been touched upon elsewhere. As for the jays, their absence must have been more apparent than real, I am bound to believe. It was their silent time, probably. Still another thing that I found surprising was the small number of woodpeckers. For the first four days I saw not a single representative of the family. It would be next to impossible to be so much out of doors in Massachusetts at any season of the year with a like result. During my three weeks in Tennessee I saw eight flickers, seven hairy woodpeckers, two red-heads, and two or three red-cockaded woodpeckers, besides which I heard one downy and one "logcock." The last-named bird, which is big enough for even the careless to notice, seemed to be well known to the inhabitants of Walden's Ridge, where I heard it. By what they told me, it should be fairly common, but I saw nothing of its "peck-holes." The first of my two red-headed woodpeckers was near the base of Missionary Ridge, wasting his time in exploring pole after pole along the railway. Did he mistake them for so many dead trees still standing on their own roots? Dry and seemingly undecayed, they appeared to me to offer small encouragement to a grub-seeker; but probably the fellow knew his own business best. On questions of economic entomology, I fear I should prove but a lame adviser for the most benighted woodpecker that ever drummed. And yet, being a man, I could not help feeling that this particular red-head was behaving uncommonly like a fool. Was there ever a man who did not take it as a matter of course that he should be wiser than the "lower animals"?

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

At another time, in a tangle of shrubbery, I witnessed a most lively encounter between two humming-birds; a case of fighting or love-making,--two things confusingly alike to an outsider,--in the midst of which one of the contestants suddenly displayed so dazzling a gorget that for an instant I mistook it for a scarlet flower. I did not "wipe my eye," not being a poet, nor even a "rash gazer," but I admired anew the wonderful flashing jewel, now coal-black, now flaming red, with which, perhaps, the male ruby-throat blinds his long-suffering mate to all his shameful treatment of her in her season of watchfulness and motherly anxiety. Does she never remind him, I wonder, that there are some things whose price is far above rubies? I had never seen the humming-bird so much a forest-dweller as here, and gladly confessed that I had never seen him when he looked so romantically at home and in place. The tulip-trees, in particular, might have been made on purpose for him.

As the Chattanooga neighborhood was poorly supplied with hawks, woodpeckers, and swallows, so was it likewise with sparrows, though in a less marked degree. The common species--the only resident species that I met with, but my explorations were nothing like complete--were chippers, field sparrows, and Bachman sparrows; the first interesting for their familiarity, the other two for their musical gifts. In a comparison between eastern Tennessee--as I saw it--and eastern Massachusetts, the Bachman sparrow must be set against the song sparrow, the vesper sparrow, and the swamp sparrow. It is a brilliant and charming songster, one of the very finest; but it would be too costly a bargain to buy its presence with loss of the song sparrow's abounding versatility and high spirits, and the vesper sparrow's unfailing sweetness, serenity, and charm.

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

At the season of my visit,--in the latter half of the vernal migration,--the preponderance of woodland birds, especially of the birds known as wood warblers, was very striking. Of ninety-three species observed, twenty-eight belonged to the warbler family. In this list it was curious to remark the absence of the Nashville and the Tennessee. The circumstance is significant of the comparative worthlessness--except from a historical point of view--of locality names as they are applied to American birds in general. Here were Maryland yellow-throats, Cape May warblers, Canada warblers, Kentucky warblers, prairie warblers, palm warblers, Acadian flycatchers, but not the two birds (the only two, as well as I remember) that bear Tennessee names.[4] The absence of the Nashville was a matter of wonderment to me. Dr. Rives, I have since noticed, records it as only a rare migrant in Virginia. Yet by some route it reaches eastern New England in decidedly handsome numbers. Its congener, the blue golden-wing, surprised me in an opposite direction,--by its commonness, both in the lower country near the river and on Walden's Ridge. This, too, is a rare bird in Virginia; so much so that Dr. Rives has never met with it there. In certain places about Chattanooga it was as common as it is locally in the towns about Boston, where, to satisfy a skeptical friend, I once counted eleven males in song in the course of a morning's walk. That the Chattanooga birds were on their breeding grounds I had at the time no question, although I happened upon no proof of the fact.

In the same way, from the manner in which the oven-birds were scattered over Walden's Ridge in the middle of May, I assumed, rather hastily, that they were at home for the summer. Months afterward, however, happening to notice their southern breeding limits as given by the best of authorities,--"breeding from ... Virginia northward,"--I saw that I might easily have been in error. I wrote, therefore, to a Chattanooga gentleman, who pays attention to birds while disclaiming acquaintance with ornithology, and he replied that if the oven-bird summered in that country he did not know it. The case seemed to be going against me, but I bethought myself of Mr. Brewster's "Ornithological Reconnaissance in Western North Carolina," and there I read,[5] "The open oak woodlands, so prevalent in this region, are in every way adapted to the requirements of the oven-bird, and throughout them it is one of the commonest and most characteristic summer birds." "Open oak woodlands" is exactly descriptive of the Walden's Ridge forest; and eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina being practically one, I resume my assured belief (personal and of no authority) that the birds I saw and heard were, as I first thought, natives of the mountain. Birds which are at home have, as a rule, an air of being at home; a certain manner hard to define, but felt, nevertheless, as a pretty strong kind of evidence--not proof--by a practiced observer.

Several of the more northern species of the warbler family manifested an almost exclusive preference for patches of evergreens. I have elsewhere detailed my experience in a grove of stunted pines on Lookout Mountain. A similar growth is found on Cameron Hill,--in the city of Chattanooga,--one side of which is occupied by dwellings, while the other drops to the river so precipitously as to be almost inaccessible, and is even yet, I was told, an abode of foxes. On the day after my arrival I strolled to the top of the hill toward evening, and in the pines found a few black-polls and yellow-rumps. I was in a listless mood, having already taken a fair day's exercise under an intolerable sun, but I waked up with a start when my glass fell on a bird which at a second glance showed the red cheeks of a Cape May warbler. For a moment I was almost in poor Susan's case,--

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

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

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