through a break in the circle and out upon the world. In one direction
were green fields and blossoming 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 mark of inferiority, I suppose,
to be fonder of places than of persons,--as cats are inferior 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 nothing 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
I
With the exception of a tedious delay at East Radford it was a very
enjoyable forenoon’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--brightened 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,--almost as wide, I thought, as the Tennessee
at Chattanooga. Shortly before reaching the Natural Bridge station the
train stopped for water, and on getting off the steps of the car I
heard a Maryland yellow-throat singing just below me at the foot of the
bank, and in a minute more a kingfisher flew across the stream,--two
additional 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 ornithological eye open.
On the way to the Bridge (myself the only passenger) the colored driver
of the 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 increase 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 appearance they
must have been of an age to remember 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
reminders 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 bite taken, I bought a season ticket of admission 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-vitæ 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 disappointed 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 landscape. It was so, I remember, at
Ausable 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 beyond,--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 cañons and “gardens of the gods.” A wooded
mountain 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 imagination and the
affections.
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 lofty precipitous
cliffs, that turn to steep wooded slopes as he proceeds. 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 preoccupation 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 admiration on the instant
was the beauty of the 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 mustard family,--_Draba ramosissima_, as afterward
turned out. It was wonderful how closely it simulated the appearance of
_Saxifraga 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 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 violets in
that respect),--and the common _palmata_. The long-spurred violet
was new to me, and both for that reason and for itself 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 enjoyment I had never seen it there. And the same is to
be said of the large yellow bellwort, 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 even all that attracted
my particular notice, the non-botanical reader would quit me for
a tiresome chronicler. Hepatica and bloodroot had dropped their
last petals; but anemone and rue anemone were still in bloom, with
cranesbill, spring beauty, ragwort, 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. In one place, as
I stooped to examine a boulder covered thickly with the tiny walking
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 magnificence that is one of the most
constant of my Alleghanian admirations. All the upper part of the glen
is pervaded by a dull rumbling 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. Another all-pervasive thing is the wholesome
fragrance of arbor-vitæ. 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 discovered, as was to be expected,
many things that had been overlooked on my way out; and every
successive visit was similarly rewarded. A pleasing sight at the
bridge itself was the continual fluttering of butterflies--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 several 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-vitæ 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, resting now and then upon a jutting shelf, or
perching in the branches of some tree near at hand. Once three of them
sat side by side before one of the openings, which after all may have
admitted to some sizable cavern wherein different pairs were living
together. 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 heard
above the noise of a pretty lively brook. It is heard the better, too,
because of its remarkably disconnected, staccato character. 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 sometimes employed, but “slowly” is perhaps
better, though it is true that the song is cool and, so to speak, very
unpassionate. Dynamically I marked it [Illustration: <>] while the variations 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
cadenzas, 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 _him_), 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 uneasily on a boulder in mid-stream
(a posterior bodily fluctuation, half graceful, half comical,
slanderously spoken of as teetering) and singing a measure or two, now
taking to an overhanging branch, sometimes at a considerable height,
for the same tuneful purpose. One acrobatic fellow, I remember, walked
for some distance along the seemingly perpendicular 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 last all but intolerable, a turbulent Vermont
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,
sermonizing 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 for a burst of his afternoon medley; and at the bridge a phœbe 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 between 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-ladder? At the arch,
likewise, such autographers had been busy ever since Washington’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 letters 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 nothing 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 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 witness of other men’s eyesight. Certainly I know of no ground for
doubting that Washington cut his initials on the cliff; and if he did,
it seems reasonable to believe that tradition would have preserved a
knowledge of the place, and so have made it possible to find them now
in all their inevitable indistinctness after so long an exposure to the
wear of the elements. Neither do I esteem it anything but a natural and
worthy curiosity 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
measure 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 New Orleans while leaning
against the cliff to peer into a crevice in search of a diminutive
fern. This fern was of much interest to me, being nothing less than
the wall-rue spleenwort (_Asplenium Ruta-muraria_), for which I had
looked without success in years past on the limestone cliffs of
northern Vermont, 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 (_Pellæa atropurpurea_), which also
had eluded my search in its New England 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 remarked a profusion of a
strikingly beautiful larger fern (but still “smallish,” as my pencil
says), with showy red stems and a 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, Vermont, and at Owl’s Head, Canada, ten years before; but
either my memory was playing me a trick, or there was here a very
considerable 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 beginning 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.