between me and the invisible stream a chorus of olive-backed thrushes
were singing,--the same simple and hearty strains that, in June and
July, echo all day long through the woods of the Crawford Notch. The
birds were on their way from the far South, and were happy to find
themselves in so homelike a place. Then, suddenly, amid the golden
voices of the thrushes, I caught the wiry notes of a warbler. They
came from the treetops in the valley, and--so I prided myself upon
guessing--belonged to a cerulean warbler, a bird of which I had seen
my first and only specimen a week before, on Lookout Mountain. Down
the steep hillside I scrambled,--New Hampshire clean forgotten,--and
was just bringing my glass into play when the fellow took wing, and
began singing at the very point I had just left. I hastened back; he
flew again, farther up the hill, and again I put myself out of breath
with pursuing him. Again and again he sang, now in this tree, now in
that, but there was no getting sight of him. The trees should have
been shorter, or the bird larger. Straight upward I gazed, till the
muscles of my neck cried for mercy. At last I saw him, flitting amid
the dense foliage, but so far above me, and so exactly between me and
the sun, that I might as well not have seen him at all.
It was a foolish half-hour. The bird, as I afterwards discovered, was
nothing but a blue yellow-back, with an original twist to his song.
In Massachusetts, I should not have listened to it twice, but on new
hunting-grounds a man is bound to look for new game; else what would
be the use of traveling? It was a foolish half-hour, I say; but I
wish some moralist would explain, in a manner not inconsistent with
the dignity of human nature, how it happens that foolish half-hours
are commonly so much more enjoyable at the time, and so much
pleasanter in the retrospect, than many that are more reasonably
employed.
I swallowed my disappointment, and presently forgot it, for at the
first turn in the road I found myself following the course of a brook
or creek, between which and myself was a dense thicket of mountain
laurel and rhododendron, with trees and other shrubs intermingled.
The laurel was already in full bloom, while the rhododendrons held
aloft clusters of gorgeous rose-purple buds, a few of which, the
middle ones of the cluster, were just bursting into flower. Here
was beauty of a new order,--such wealth and splendor of color in
surroundings so romantic. And the place, besides, was alive with
singing birds: hooded warblers, Kentucky warblers, a Canadian
warbler, a black-throated blue, a black-throated green, a blue
yellow-back, scarlet tanagers, wood pewees, wood thrushes, a field
sparrow (on the hillside beyond) a cardinal, a chat, a bunch of
white-throated sparrows, and who could tell what else? It was an
exciting moment. Luckily, a man can look and listen both at once.
Here was a fringe-tree, a noble specimen, hung with creamy-white
plumes; here was a magnolia, with big leaves and big flowers; and
here was a flowering dogwood, not to be put out of countenance in
any company; but especially, here were the rhododendrons! And all
the while, deep in the thickest of the bushes, some unknown bird was
singing a strange, breathless jumble of a song, note tripping over
note,--like an eager churchman with his responses, I kept saying to
myself, with no thought of disrespect to either party. It cost me a
long vigil and much patient coaxing to make the fellow out, and he
proved to be merely a Wilson's blackcap, after all; but he was the
only bird of his kind that I saw in Tennessee.
On this first visit I did not get far beyond the creek, through the
bed of which the road runs, with a single log for foot-passengers.
I had spent at least an hour in going a hundred rods, and it was
already drawing near dinner time. But I returned to the spot that
very afternoon, and half a dozen times afterward. So poor a traveler
am I, so ill fitted to explore a new country. Whenever nothing in
particular offered itself, why, it was always pretty down at Falling
Water Creek. There I saw the rhododendrons come into exuberant
bloom, and there I oftenest see them in memory, though I found them
elsewhere in greater abundance, and in a setting even more romantic.
More romantic, perhaps, but hardly more beautiful. I remember, just
beyond the creek, a bank where sweet bush (_Calycanthus_), wild
ginger (_Asarum_), rhododendron, laurel, and plenty of trailing
arbutus (the last now out of flower) were growing side by side,--a
rare combination of beauty and fragrance. And within a few rods
of the same spot I sat down more than once to take a long look at
a cross-vine covering a dead hemlock. The branches of the tree,
shortening regularly to the top, were draped heavily with gray
lichens, while the vine, keeping mostly near the trunk and climbing
clean to the tip,--fifty feet or more, as I thought,--was hung
throughout with large, orange-red, gold-lined bells. Their numbers
were past guessing. Here and there a spray of them swung lightly from
the end of a branch, as if inviting the breeze to lend them motion
and a voice. The sight was worth going miles to see, and yet I passed
it three times before it caught my eye, so full were the woods of
things to look at. After all, _is_ it a poor traveler who turns again
and again into the same path? Whether is better, to read two good
books once, or one good book twice?
A favorite shorter walk, at odd minutes,--before breakfast and
between showers,--was through the woods for a quarter of a mile to a
small clearing and a cabin. On a Sunday afternoon I ventured to pass
the gate and make a call upon my neighbors. The doors of the house
stood open, but a glance inside showed that there was no one there,
and I walked round it, inspecting the garden,--corn, beans, and
potatoes coming on,--till, just as I was ready to turn back into the
woods, I descried a man and woman on the hillside not far away; the
man leading a mule, and the woman picking strawberries. At sight of
a stranger the woman fell behind, but the man kept on to the house,
greeted me politely, and invited me to be seated under the hemlock,
where two chairs were already placed. After tying the mule he took
the other chair, and we fell into talk about the weather, the crops,
and things in general. When the wife finally appeared, I rose, of
course; but she went on in silence and entered the house, while the
husband said, "Oh, keep your seat." We continued our conversation
till the rain began to fall. Then we picked up our chairs and
followed the woman inside. She sat in the middle of the room (young,
pretty, newly married, and Sunday-dressed), but never once opened her
lips. Her behavior was in strict accordance with local etiquette, I
was afterward assured (as if _all_ etiquette were not local); but
though I admire feminine modesty as much as any man, I cannot say
that I found this particular manifestation of it altogether to my
liking. Silence is golden, no doubt, and gold is more precious than
silver, but in cases of this figurative sort I profess myself a
bimetallist. A _little_ silver, I say; enough for small change, at
any rate; and if we can have a pretty free coinage, why, so much the
better, though as to that, it must be admitted, a good deal depends
upon the "image and superscription." However, my hostess followed her
lights, and reserved her voice--soft and musical let us hope--for
her husband's ear.
They had not lived in the house very long, he told me, and he did
not know how many years the land had been cleared. There was a fair
amount of game in the woods,--turkeys, squirrels, pheasants, and so
on,--and in winter the men did considerable hunting. Formerly there
were a good many deer, but they had been pretty well killed off.
Turkeys still held out. They were gobbling now. His father had been
trying for two or three weeks, off and on, to shoot a certain old
fellow who had several hens with him down in the valley. His father
could call with his mouth better than with any "caller," but so far
the bird had been too sharp for him. The son laughed good-naturedly
when I confessed to an unsportsmanlike sympathy with the gobbler.
The cabin, built of hewn logs, with clay in the chinks, was neatly
furnished, with beds in two corners of the one room, a stone chimney,
two doors directly opposite each other, and no window. The doors,
it is understood, are always to be open, for ventilation and light.
Such is the custom; and custom is nowhere more powerful than in
small rustic communities. If a native, led away by his wife, perhaps,
puts a window into his new cabin, the neighbors say, "Oh, he is
building a glass house, isn't he?" It must be an effeminate woman,
they think, who cannot do her cooking and sewing by the light of
the door. None the less, in a climate where snow is possible in the
middle of May, such a Spartan arrangement must sometimes be found
a bit uncomfortable by persons not to the manner born. A preacher
confided to me that in his pastoral calls he had once or twice made
bold to push to a door directly at his back, when the wind was cold;
but the innovation was ill received, and the inmates of the house,
doubtless without wishing to hurt their minister's feelings,--since
he had meant no harm, to be sure, but was simply unused to the ways
of the world,--speedily found some excuse for rectifying his mistake.
Probably there is no corner of the world where the question of fresh
air and draughts is not available for purposes of moral discipline.
Beside the path to the cabin, on the 13th of May, was a gray-cheeked
thrush, a very gray specimen, sitting motionless in the best of
lights. "Look at me," he seemed to say. "I am no olive-back. My
cheeks are not sallow." On the same day, here and in another place,
I saw white-throated sparrows. Their presence at this late hour was
a great surprise, and suggested the possibility of their breeding
somewhere in the Carolina mountains, though I am not aware that such
an occurrence has ever been recorded. Another recollection of this
path is of a snow-white milkweed (_Asclepias variegata_),--white with
the merest touch of purple to set it off,--for the downright elegance
of which I was not in the least prepared. The queen of all milkweeds,
surely.
After nightfall the air grew loud with the cries of batrachians and
insects, an interesting and novel chorus. On my first evening at the
hotel I was loitering up the road, with frequent auditory pauses,
thinking how full the world is of unseen creatures which find their
day only after the sun goes down, when in a woody spot I heard behind
me a sound of footsteps. A woman was close at my heels, fetching a
pail of water from the spring. I remarked upon the many voices. She
answered pleasantly. It was the big frogs that I heard, she reckoned.
"Do you have whippoorwills here?" I asked.
"Plenty of 'em," she answered, "plenty of 'em."
"Do you hear them right along the road?"
"Yes, sir; oh yes."
We had gone hardly a rod further before we exclaimed in the same
breath, "There is one now!"
I inquired if there was another bird here, something like the
whippoorwill, meaning the chuck-will's-widow. But she said no; she
knew of but one.
"How early does the whippoorwill get here?" said I.
"Pretty early," she answered.
"By the first of April, should you say?"
"Yes, sir, I think about then. I know the timber is just beginning to
put out when they begin to holler."
This mannerly treatment of a stranger was more Christian-like than
the stately silence of my lady of the cabin, it seemed to me. I
liked it better, at all events. I had learned nothing, perhaps; but
unless a man is far gone in philosophy he need not feel bound to
increase in wisdom every time a neighbor speaks to him; and anyhow,
that expression about the "putting out of the timber" had given me
pleasure. Hearing it thus was better than finding it upon a page
of Stevenson, or some other author whose business in life is the
picking of right words. Let us have some silver, I repeat. I am ready
to believe, what I have somewhere read, that men will have to give
account not only for every idle word, but for every idle silence.
The summit of the Ridge, as soon as one leaves its precipitous rocky
edge,--the Brow, so called,--is simply an indefinite expanse of
gently rolling country, thin-soiled, but well watered, and covered
with fine open woods, rambling through which the visitor finds little
to remind him of his elevation above the world. I heard a resident
speak of going to the "top of the mountain," however, and on inquiry
learned that a certain rocky eminence, two miles, more or less, from
Fairmount (the little "settlement" where I was staying), went by
that name, and was supposed to be the highest point of the Ridge.
My informant kindly made me a rough map of the way thither, and one
morning I set out in that direction. It would be shameful to live for
a week on the "summit" of a mountain, and not once go to the "top."
The glory of Walden's Ridge, as compared with Lookout Mountain,--so
the dwellers there say,--is its streams and springs; and my morning
path soon brought me to the usual rocky brook bordered with mountain
laurel, holly, and hemlock. To my New England eyes it was an odd
circumstance, the hemlocks growing always along the creeks in the
valley bottoms. Beyond this point I passed an abandoned cabin,--no
other house in sight,--and by and by a second one, near which, in the
garden (better worth preserving than the house, it appeared), a woman
and two children were at work. Yes, the woman said, I was on the
right path. I had only to keep a straight course, and I should bring
up at the "top of the mountain." A little farther, and my spirits
rose at the sight of a circular, sedgy, woodland pond, such a place
as I had not seen in all this Chattanooga country. It ought to yield
something new for my local ornithological list, which up to this
time included ninety species, and not one of them a water-bird. I did
my best, beating round the edge and "squeaking," but startled nothing
rarer than a hooded warbler and a cardinal grosbeak.
Next I traversed a long stretch of unbroken oak woods, with single
tall pines interspersed; and then all at once the path turned to
the right, and ran obliquely downhill to a clearing in which stood
a house,--not a cabin,--with a garden, orchard trees, and beehives.
This should be the German shoemaker's, I thought, looking at my
map. If so, I was pretty near the top, though otherwise there was
no sign of it; and if I had made any considerable ascent, it had
been as children increase in stature,--and as the good increase in
goodness,--unconsciously. A woman of some years was in the garden,
and at my approach came up to the fence,--a round-faced, motherly
body. Yes, the top of the mountain was just beyond. I could not miss
it.
"You do not live here?" she asked.
No, I explained; I was a stranger on the Ridge,--a stranger from
Boston.
"From Washington?"
"No, from Boston."
"Oh! from Boston!--Massachusetts!--Oh-h-h!"
She would go part way with me, she said, lest I should miss the path.
Perhaps she wished to show some special hospitality to a man from
Massachusetts; or possibly she thought I must be more in danger of
getting bewildered, being so far from home. But I could not think of
troubling her. Was there a spring near by, where I could drink?
"I have water in the house," she answered.
"But isn't there a creek down in the valley ahead?"
Oh yes, there was a creek; but had I anything to drink out of? I
thanked her. Yes, I had a cup. "My husband will be at home by the
time you come back," she said, as I started on, and I promised to
call.
The scene at the brook, halfway between the German's house and the
top, would of itself have paid me for my morning's jaunt. I stood on
a boulder in mid-current, in the shadow of overhanging trees, and
drank it in. Such rhododendrons and laurel, now in the perfection of
their beauty! One rhododendron bush was at least ten feet high, and
loaded with blooms. Another lifted its crown of a dozen rose-purple
clusters amid the dark foliage of a hemlock. A magnolia-tree
stood near; but though it was much taller than the laurel or the
rhododendron, and had much larger flowers, it made little show beside
them. Birds were singing on all hands, and numbers of gay-colored
butterflies flitted about, sipping here and there at a blossom. I
remember especially a fine tiger swallow-tail; the only one I saw
in Tennessee, I believe. I remember, too, how well the rhododendron
became him. Here, as in many other places, the laurel was nearly
white; a happy circumstance, as it and the rhododendron went the
more harmoniously together. Even in this high company, some tufts of
cinnamon fern were not to be overlooked; the fertile cinnamon-brown
fronds were now at their loveliest, and showed as bravely here, I
thought, as in the barest of Massachusetts swamp-lands.
A few rods more, up a moderate slope, and I was at the top of the
mountain,--a wall of out-cropping rocks, falling off abruptly on the
further side, and looking almost like an artificial rampart. Beyond
me, to my surprise, I heard the hum of cicadas,--seventeen-year
locusts,--a sound of which the lower country had for some time been
full, but of which, till this moment, I had heard nothing on the
Ridge.
As for the prospect, it was far reaching, but only in one direction,
and through openings among the trees. Directly before me, some
hundreds of feet below, was a piece of road, with a single cabin
and a barn; and much farther away were other cabins, each with its
private clearing. Elsewhere the foreground was an unbroken forest.
For some time I could not distinguish the Ridge itself from the
outlying world. Mountains and hills crowded the hazy horizon, range
beyond range. Moving along the rocks, I found a vista through which
Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain were visible. Another change, and
a stretch of the Tennessee River came into sight, and, beyond it,
Missionary Ridge with its settlements and its two observatories.
Evidently I was considerably above the level of the Brow; but whether
this was really the top of the mountain--reached, in some mysterious
way, without going uphill--was more than I could say.[2]
Nor did it matter. I was glad to be there. It was a pleasant place
and a pleasant hour, with an oak root for a seat, and never an insect
to trouble me. That, by the way, was true of all those Tennessee
forests,--when I was there, I mean; from what I heard, the ticks
and jiggers must be bad enough later in the season. As men do at
such times,--for human nature is of noble origin, and feels no
surprise at being well treated,--I took my immunity as a matter of
course, and only realized how I had been favored when I got back to
Massachusetts, where, on my first visit to the woods, I was fairly
driven out by swarms of mosquitoes.
The shoemaker was at home when I reached his house on my return, and
at the urgent invitation of himself and his wife I joined them on
the piazza for a bit of neighborly chat. I found him a smallish man,
not German in appearance, but looking, I thought, like Thoreau,
only grown a little older. He had been on Walden's Ridge for fifteen
years. Before that he was in South Carolina, but the yellow fever
came along and made him feel like getting out. Yes, this was a
healthy country. He had nothing to complain of; he was sixty-two
years old and his doctors' bills had never amounted to "five dollar."
"Do _you_ like living here?" I asked his wife.
"No," she answered promptly; "I never did. But then," she added, "we
can't help it. If you own something, you know, you have to stay."
The author of Walden would have appreciated that remark. There was no
shoemaking to be done here, the man said, his nearest neighbor being
half a mile distant through the woods; and there was no clover, so
that his bees did not do very well; and the frost had just killed
all his peach-trees; but when I asked if he never felt homesick for
Germany, the answer came like a pistol shot,--"No."
I inquired about a cave, of which I had heard reports. Yes, it was
a good cave, they said; I could easily find it. But their directions
conveyed no very clear idea to my mind, and by and by the woman
began talking to her husband in German. "She is telling him he ought
to go with me and show me the way," I said to myself; and the next
moment she came back to English. "He will go with you," she said. I
demurred, but he protested that he could do it as well as not. "Take
up a stick; you might see a snake," his wife called after him, as we
left the house. He smiled, but did not follow her advice, though I
fancied he would have done so had she gone along with us. A half-mile
or so through the pathless woods brought us to the cave, which might
hold a hundred persons, I thought. The dribbling "creek" fell over it
in front. Then the man took me to my path, pointed my way homeward,
and, with a handshake (the silver lining of which was not refused,
though I had been troubled with a scruple), bade me good-by. First,
however, he told me that if I found any one in Boston who wanted
to buy a place on Walden's Ridge, he would sell a part of his or
the whole of it. I remember him most kindly, and would gladly do
him a service. If any reader, having a landed investment in view,
should desire my intervention in the premises, I am freely at his
command; only let him bear in mind the terms of the deed: "If you own
something, you know, you have to stay."
II.
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.