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 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 misdirection, 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 different in the shape of the leaves, and
noticeably not pubescent. A reference to the Manual, on my return to
the hotel, showed them to be _V. 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 specimens. 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 gathered my
specimens, of which, happily, there was no lack, and was wandering
about under 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 another 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 something 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 enthusiasm, that whatever the
plant 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 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 symptoms 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
designated 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 supported 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 by the acre, in the woodlands
of southwestern North Carolina), were gathered, as before said, not far
from the foot of Peak Knob. From the moment of my arrival in Pulaski
I had had my eye upon that eminence, the highest of the hills round
about, looking to be, as I was told it was, a thousand 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 catalogues in
unfamiliar places), when my prophetic vision was interrupted by the
approach 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 inquisitive 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 interrogatories I inquired the name of the high mountain
yonder, beyond the valley. “That is Peach Knob,” he replied,--or so
I understood 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 believed, 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 appellation.
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, 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 landscape.
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 bypaths 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 highlanders.
The distance was all a grand confusion of mountains, one crowding
another on the horizon; some nearer, some farther away, with one lofty
and massive peak in the northeast lording it over the rest. Close at
hand in the valley, at my left, lay the city of Pulaski, with its
furnaces,--a mile or two apart, having a stretch of open country
between,--its lazy creek, and its multitudinous 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 mountain 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 graziers, with elbow-room and
breathing-space. The more cities and villages, the more woods,--such
appears to be the law. In Massachusetts there are six or seven times
as many inhabitants to the square mile as there are in Virginia; yet
Massachusetts seen from its hilltops is all a forest, and Virginia a
cleared country.
Rain 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 department store, and
filled the Sunday newspapers 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 bargaining, while
the proprietor and his clerks--two of them smoking cigarettes--bustled
to and fro behind the counters, improving the shining hour. One
strapping young colored man standing near me inquired for suspenders,
and, on having an assortment placed before him, selected without
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
Fashion, another person altogether, and a most ridiculous old body,
who prescribes that masculine humanity shall never consider itself
“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 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 magnificent display
of Virginia lungwort, a flower that I half remembered to have seen at
one time and another in gardens, but here growing in a garden of its
own, and after a manner 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 unexpectedly, 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.
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 consciousness. What was
in his thoughts I know not. He may have been tuning up, simply, making
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 summer days coming,--or out of mere comfortable
vacancy of mind. Catbirds are not among my dearest favorites; a little
too fussy, somewhat too well aware of themselves, I generally think;
more than a little too fragmentary in their effusions, beginning 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.
II
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 glorious
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 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 village[12] 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, commended its charms to me very
shortly after my arrival. So I recollected afterward, but for the time
I somehow allowed the significance 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 unanimity 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-looking 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 veritable pickaninny,--whom
I had passed, some years before, near Tallahassee, and who pleased me
by exclaiming to a companion, 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 susceptible to natural
sights and sounds.
Before one of the last cabins stood three white children, and as they
gazed at me fixedly 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 perceived that if the boys and
girls were growing up in rustic diffidence (not the most ill-mannered
condition in the world, by any means), it was not for lack of careful
maternal 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 bunch of the barren
strawberry, with hepatica, fringed polygala, mitrewort, bloodroot, 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
mystery,--a worm-eating warbler. Thanks to the fire, there was no cover
for it, had it desired any. I had seen a bird of the same species a
few days previously on the opposite 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
District of Columbia, but this was my first hearing of the song. The
queer little creature 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 Virginia 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, perhaps 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 exceptionally meagre and dry affair.
Ordinarily it 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 absolute
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 collecting,--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 gave me, for all that, an exhilarating
sensation of unexpectedness. Crossbills are associated 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 Arlington (across
the Potomac from Washington), 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 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 cemetery woods. Perhaps these ravenous crossbills[13] 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 forests 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 be a law unto themselves. In northern New England
they are said to lay their eggs in late winter or early spring, when
the temperature is liable, or even certain, to run many degrees below
zero. Yet, if the notion 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 quality 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 together.