More than a fortnight after my interview with the invalid, just described, I was returning to the hotel from an early morning jaunt down the Walhalla road, when I met a man driving a pair of dwarfish steers hitched to a pair of wheels, on the axle-tree of which was fastened a rude, widely ventilated, home-made box, with an odd-shaped, home-made basket hung on one side of it,—the driver, literally, on the box. I greeted him, and he pulled up. “Well, I see you are still here,” he said, after a good-morning. “You have seen me before?” I replied. He was sallow and thin,—the usual mountaineer’s condition,—but wore the pleasantest of smiles. “Yes; I saw you down in the Cove with the sick man.” He was the pilgrim who took the “narrow way,” and was hunting for a cow, though I should not have remembered him. And now, peeping through one of the holes in the box, I saw that he had a calf inside. “A Jersey?” said I. “Part Jersey,” he answered. Mr. S—— (one of the villagers, whom by this time I counted as a friend, a white-haired, youngish veteran of the civil war, on the Union side, a neighbor I had “taken to” from the moment I saw him), Mr. S—— had given the calf to the man’s father-in-law, and he, the son-in-law, had driven up to the village to fetch it home. He lived about six miles out, on a side-road. I inquired about the two or three houses in sight in the valley clearing below us. It was the “Webb settlement,” he said; “so we always call it.” I remarked that all hands seemed to have plenty of children. “Yes, plenty of children,” he responded, with a laugh; and away he drove.
It was only a few minutes before another man appeared, a foot-passenger this time, walking at a smart pace, with an umbrella on his shoulder, and a new pair of boots slung across it. “You travel faster than I do,” said I. “Yes, sir,” he answered, smiling (all men like the name of being active), “I go pretty peert when I go.” He, too, had six miles before him, and believed it would “begin to rain after a bit.” It would have been an imposition upon good nature to detain him. There was a bend in the road just below, and in another minute I heard him spanking round it at a lively trot.
Five minutes more, and a second pedestrian hove in sight. He, likewise, was in haste. “You are all in a hurry to-day,” I said to him. I was in pursuit of acquaintance, and in such places it is the part of wisdom, and of good manners as well, to make the most of chance opportunities. “Yes, sir,” he made answer, slackening his pace; “I want to get my road done. I’ve got till Saturday, and I want to get it done;” and he put on steam again, and was gone. His countenance was familiar, but I could not tell where I had seen him,—one of the fathers of the Webb settlement, perhaps. The mountaineers, all thin, all light-complexioned, and all wearing the same drab homespun, look confusingly alike to a newcomer. Whoever the stranger was, he had evidently undertaken to build some part of the new road, and was returning from the village with supplies. In one hand he carried two heavy drills, and under the other arm a strip of pork, a piece of brown paper wrapped about the middle of it, and the long ends dangling. It did my vacationer’s heart good to see men so cheerfully industrious; but I thought it a reproach to the order of the world that so much hard work should yield so little of comfort. But then, who knows which was the more comfortable,—the idle, criticising tourist or the sweating laborer? For the time being, at all events, the laborer had the air of a person inwardly well off. A mountain man with a “contract” was not likely to be envious even of a boarder at “Mrs. Davis’s,” as the hotel is locally, and very properly, called.
As I went on, passing the height of land and beginning my descent homeward, I met two other foot-passengers,—two women: one old and fat,—the only fat mountaineer of either sex seen in North Carolina,—with a red face and a staff; the other young, slightly built and pale, carrying an old-fashioned shotgun (the ramrod projecting) over her right shoulder. Both wore sunbonnets, and the younger had a braid of hair hanging down her back. With her slender figure, her colorless face, her serious look, and the long musket, she would have made a subject for a painter. This pair I could think of no excuse for accosting, much as I should have enjoyed hearing them talk.[7] Shortly after they had gone, I stopped to speak with a small boy who was climbing the hill, with a mewing kitten hugged tightly to his breast. He was taking it home to his cat, he said. She brought in mice and things, and wanted something to give them to. The little fellow was still young enough to understand the mother instinct.
That was a truly social walk. I had never before found one of the mountain roads half so populous. Once, indeed, I drove all day without seeing a passenger of any sort, until, near the end of the afternoon and within a mile or two of the town, I met a solitary horseman.
The new road, of which I have spoken, and concerning which I heard so much said on all hands, was really not quite that, but rather a new laying out—with loops here and there to avoid the steeper pitches—of the road from Walhalla, over which I had driven on my entrance into the mountains. My friend Mr. S—— had made the surveys for the work, and the whole town was looking forward eagerly to its completion. Toward sunset, on a Sunday afternoon, I had been out of the village in an opposite direction, and was sitting by the wayside in the Stewart woods, full of flowers and music, where I loved often to linger, when three men approached on foot. “How far have you come?” I inquired. “From Franklin,”—about twenty miles distant,—they answered. They were going to work “on the new road up at Stooly” (Satulah Mountain), or so I understood the oldest of the trio, who acted throughout as spokesman. (In my part of the country it is only the professionally idle who walk twenty miles at a stretch.) “Well,” said I, none too politely, being nothing but an outsider, “I hope you’ll make it better than it was when I came up.” He replied, quite good-humoredly, that they were making a good road of it this time. And so they were, comparatively speaking, for I went over the mountain one day on purpose to see it, after I knew who had laid it out, and had begun to feel a personal interest in its success. One of the men carried a hoe, and one a small tin clock. They had no other baggage, I think. When a man works on the road, he needs a hoe to work with, and a timepiece to tell him when to begin and when to leave off. So I thought to myself; but I am bound to add that these workmen seemed to be going to their task as if it were a privilege. It eases labor to feel that one is doing a good job. That makes the difference, so we used to be told, by Carlyle or some one else, between an artist and an artisan; and I see no reason why such encouraging distinctions should not apply to road-menders as well as to menders of philosophy. There is no such thing as drudgery, even for a man with a hoe, so long as quality is the end in view.
Whatever else was to be said of the roads hereabout,—and the question is of paramount importance in such a country, where mails and supplies must be transported thirty miles (a two days’ journey for loaded wagons),—they were almost ideally perfect from a walking naturalist’s point of view; neither sandy nor muddy, the two evils of Southern roads in general, and conducting the traveler at once into wild and shady places. The village is closely built, and no matter in which direction I turned, the houses were quickly behind me, and I was as truly in the woods as if I had made a day’s march from civilization. A straggling town, with miles of outlying farms and pasturelands, through the sunny stretches of which a man must make his way forenoon and afternoon, is a state of things at once so usual and so disheartening that the point may well be among the earliest to be considered in planning a Southern vacation.
In a new country an ornithologist thinks first of all of the birds peculiar to it, if any such there are; and I was no sooner off the hotel piazza for my first ante-breakfast stroll at Highlands, than I was on the watch for Carolina snowbirds and mountain solitary vireos, two varieties (“subspecies” is the more modern word) originally described a few years ago, by Mr. Brewster,[8] from specimens taken at this very place. I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile over the road by which I had driven into the town, after dark, on the evening before, when I was conscious that a bird had flown out from under the overhanging bank just behind me. I turned hastily, and on the instant put my eye upon the nest. My ear, as it happened, had marked the spot precisely. “Here it is,” I thought, and in a fraction of a minute more the anxious mother showed herself,—a snowbird. The nest looked somewhat larger than those I had seen in New Hampshire, but that may have been a fault of memory.[9] It contained young birds and a single egg. I was in great luck, I said to myself; but in truth, as a longer experience showed, the birds were so numerous all about me that it would have been no very difficult undertaking to find a nest or two almost any day.
Birds which had been isolated (separated from the parent stock) long enough to have taken on some constant physical peculiarity—without which they could not be entitled to a distinctive name, though it were only a third one—might be presumed to have acquired at the same time some slight but real idiosyncrasy of voice and language. But if this is true of the Carolina junco, I failed to satisfy myself of the fact. On the first day, indeed, I wrote with perfect confidence: “The song is clearly distinguishable from that of the northern bird,—less musical, more woodeny and chippery;” more like the chipping sparrow’s, I meant to say. If I had come away then, with one bird’s trill to go upon, that would have been my verdict, to be printed, when the time came, without misgiving. But further observation brought further light, or, if the reader will, further obscurity. Some individuals were better singers than others,—so much was to be expected; but taking them together, their music was that of ordinary snowbirds such as I had always listened to. For aught my ears told me, I might have been in Franconia. This is not to assert that the Alleghanian junco has not developed a voice in some measure its own; I believe it has; probability has more authority than personal experience with me in matters of this kind; but the change is as yet too inconsiderable for my senses to appreciate on a short acquaintance, with no opportunity for a direct comparison. In such cases, it is perhaps true that one needs to trust the first lively impression,—which has, undeniably, its own peculiar value,—or to wait the result of absolute familiarity. My stay of three weeks gave me neither one thing nor another; it was long enough to dissipate my first feeling of certainty, but not long enough to yield a revised and settled judgment.
The mountain vireo (Vireo solitarius alticola), like the Carolina snowbird, may properly be called a native of Highlands; and, like the snowbird, it proved to be common. My first sight of it was in the hotel yard, but I found it—single pairs—everywhere. A look at the feathers of the back through an opera-glass showed at once the principal distinction—apart from a superiority in size, not perceptible at a distance—on which its subspecific identity is based; but though to its original describer its song sounded very much finer than the northern bird’s, I could not bring myself to the same conclusion. I should never have remarked in it anything out of the common. Once, to be sure, I heard notes which led me to say, “There! that voice is more like a yellow-throat’s,—fuller and rounder than a typical solitary’s;” but that might have happened anywhere, and at all other times; although I had the point continually in mind, I could only pronounce the song to be exactly what my ear was accustomed to,—sweet and everything that was beautiful, but a solitary vireo’s song, and nothing else. And this, to my thinking, is praise enough. There is no bird-song within my acquaintance that excels the solitary’s in a certain intimate expressiveness, affectionateness, home-felt happiness, and purity. Not that it has all imaginable excellencies,—the unearthly, spiritual quality of the best of our woodland thrush music, for example; but such as it is, an utterance of love and love’s felicity, it leaves nothing to ask for. What a contrast between it and the red-eye’s comparatively meaningless and feelingless music! And yet, so far as mere form is concerned, the two songs may be considered as built upon the same model, if not variations of the same theme. There must be a world-wide difference between the two species, one would say, in the matter of character and temperament.