| PAGE | |
| NORTH CAROLINA. | |
|---|---|
| A Day’s Drive in Three States | [ 3] |
| In Quest of Ravens | [ 34] |
| A Mountain Pond | [ 71] |
| Birds, Flowers, and People | [ 104] |
| VIRGINIA. | |
| A Nook in the Alleghanies | [ 145] |
| At Natural Bridge | [ 208] |
| Index | [ 283] |
NORTH CAROLINA
A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS
A DAY’S DRIVE IN THREE STATES
In a day and a night I had come from early May to middle June; from a world of bare boughs to a forest clad in all the verdure of summer. Such a shine as the big, lusty leaves of the black-jack oaks had put on! I could have raised a shout. In the day when “all the trees of the field shall clap their hands,” may I be somewhere in the black-jack’s neighborhood. Hour after hour we sped along, out of North Carolina into South Carolina: now through miles and miles of forest; now past a lonely cabin, with roses before the door, white honeysuckle covering the fence, and acres of sunny ploughed land on either side. Here a river ran between close green hills, and there the hills parted and disclosed the revolving horizon set with blue mountains. Then, at a little past noon, the porter appeared with his brush. “Seneca is next,” he said. I alighted in lonely state, was escorted to the hotel, did my best with a luncheon,—gleaned bit by bit out of an outlying wilderness of small dishes,—and at the earliest moment took my seat in a “buggy” beside a colored boy who was to drive me to Walhalla, nine miles away. At that point I was to be met, the next morning, by the carriage that should convey me into the mountains.
Seneca is a smallish place, but my colored driver was no countryman. “Boston?” Yes, yes; he had lived there once himself. He had been a Pullman porter. “But you don’t get to learn anything in that way,” he added, a little disdainfully; “just running back and forth.” He had “waited” in Florida, and had been to Jamaica and I forget where else, though he was only twenty-three years old. He liked to go round and see the world. “Married?” No; a man who didn’t live anywhere had no business with a wife and children. Still he was not oblivious to feminine charms, as became evident when we passed a pair of dusky beauties. “Oh, I will look at ’em,” he said, with the tone of a man who had broken his full share of hearts. He was one of the fortunates who are born with their eyes open. I quizzed him about birds. Yes, he had noticed them; he had been hunting a good deal. This and the other were named,—partridges, pheasants, doves, meadow larks, chewinks, chats, night-hawks. Yes, he knew them; if not by the names I called them by, then from my descriptions, to which in most cases he proceeded to add some convincing touches of his own. The chat he did not recognize under that title, but when I tried to hit off some of the bird’s odd characteristics he began to laugh. “Oh yes, sir, I know that fellow.” As for whippoorwills, the whole country was full of them. “You can’t hear your ears for ’em at night,” he declared. “No, sir, you can’t hear your ears.” With all the rest he was a “silverite.” At the end of the drive I handed him a dollar bill, one of Uncle Sam’s handsomest, as it happened, fresh from the bank. He looked at it dubiously, fumbled it a moment, and passed it back. “Say, boss,” he said, “can’t you give me a silver dollar? It might rain.” In a land of thunder-showers and thin clothing, he meant to say, what we need is an insoluble currency. That, as such things go, was a pretty substantial argument for “free silver,” or so it seemed to me; and I spoke of it, accordingly, a week or two afterward, to an advocate of the “white metal.” He was impressed by it just as I had been, and begged me to make use of the argument when I got back to Boston; as I now do, with all cheerfulness, feeling that, whatever a man’s own opinions may be, he is bound to keep an ear open for the best that can be put forward against them. At the same time, I am constrained to add that I have never been quite sure whether my driver’s plea was anything better than a polite subterfuge. It would have been nothing wonderful, surely, if he had questioned the genuineness of a kind of money to which he was so little accustomed. Small bills—“ones and twos,” as we familiarly call them—have but a limited circulation at the South, as all travelers must have noticed. On my present trip, for instance, I bought a railway ticket at a rural station, and proffered the agent a two-dollar bill. He gave it a glance of surprise, looked at me,—“Ah, a Northern man,” so I read his thoughts,—and incontinently slipped the bill into his pocket. A rarity like that was not for the cash drawer and the daily course of business. I might almost as well have given him a two-dollar gold coin; like the pious heroine of a Sunday-school story I was reading the other day, who dropped into the contribution-box a “fifty-dollar gold piece”!
The rain, concerning whose destructive power my colored boy had been so apprehensive, very soon set in, and left me nothing to do but to make the best of an afternoon upon the hotel piazza, with its outlook up and down the village street, and its gossip and politics. As to the latter I played the part of listener, in spite of sundry courteous attempts to draw me out. Tillman and the silver question were discussed with a welcome coolness of spirit, while I looked at an occasional passing horseman (it is the one advantage of poor roads that they keep an entire community in the saddle), or admired the evolutions of the chimney swifts and the martins. Roses and honeysuckles would have made the dooryards beautiful, had that result fallen within the bounds of possibility, and a chinaberry-tree, full of purple blossoms, was not only a thing of beauty in itself, but to me was also a sweet remembrancer of Florida.
My only other recollection of the afternoon seems almost too trivial for record. Yet who knows? What has interested one man may perchance do as much for another. In the midst of the talk, a man with an axe came along, and said to the proprietor of the hotel, “Have you got a grinding-rock here?” “Yes, round behind the house,” was the answer. “Grinding-rock”!—that was a new name for my old back-breaking acquaintance of the haying season, and good as it was new. I adopted it on the instant. With its rasping, gritty sound, it seemed a plain case of onomatopoetic justice. No more “grindstone” for me, if I live a thousand years.
I mentioned the subject some days afterward to a citizen of Highlands. “Oh yes,” he answered, “they always say ‘rock;’ not only ‘grinding-rock,’ but ‘whet-rock.’” Then he added something that pleased me still more. He had just been to the county seat as a member of the grand jury, and among the cases before him and his colleagues was one of alleged assault by “rocking,” that word being used in the legal document, whatever its name, in which the complaint was set forth. This point was of special interest to me, I say. In my boyhood, which, so far as I know, was not exceptionally belligerent, it was an every-day occurrence to “fire rocks” at an enemy, or “rock him;” whereas an editorial brother, himself of New England birth, with whom it is often my privilege to compare notes, affirms that he never heard such expressions, though he has sometimes met with them—and presumably corrected them—in manuscript stories. It was no small satisfaction to find this bit of my own Massachusetts—Old Colony—dialect still surviving, and in common use, in the Carolinas.
Walhalla itself, with an elevation of a thousand feet, and mountains visible not far off, lays some not unnatural claims to a “climate,” and in a small way is a health resort, I believe, in spite of its rather sinister name, both summer and winter. To me, indeed, it seemed a place to stop at rather than to stay in; but, as the reader knows, I saw it only from the main street on a muddy afternoon, and was likely to do it but foul-weather justice. Even its merits as a necessary lodging station were lightly appreciated, till on my return I made my exit from the mountains on the other side of them, and put up for the night in another village, and especially at another hotel. Compared with that, Walhalla was, in deed as in name, a kind of heavenly place. Is it well, or not, that what is worse makes us half contented with what is simply bad? I was more than ready, at any rate, when a Walhalla boy brought me word the next morning, “Your carriage has done come.”[1]