“Now, then, we are crossing into Georgia?” I began again.
“No, sir; this is not the Chattoogy, but one of its prongs.”
Finally, at high noon, we dropped into a hot and breezeless valley, with the Chattooga running through it in the sun. Here was a farm. Mr. —— lived here, and kept a kind of half-way house for travelers. But we would not stop at it, the driver said, if it was all the same to me. There was another house just across the river. He had given the people notice of our coming, on his way down the day before, and the woman would have dinner ready for me. Both houses were very nice places to eat at, he added for my encouragement. So it happened that I breakfasted in South Carolina, dined in Georgia, and supped in North Carolina. The dinner, to which I sat down alone, was bountiful after its kind. If the table did not “groan,” it must have been because it was ignorant of a table’s duty; and if I did not make a feast, let the failure be laid to the idiosyncrasy of a man who once cut short his stay at one of the most inviting places in all Virginia because he was pampered monotonously for five consecutive meals with nothing but fried ham, fried eggs, and soda biscuits. “It is never too late to give up our prejudices,” says Thoreau, in one of his lofty moods. Wisdom uttered in that tone is not to be disputed; but if it is never “too late,” I for one have sometimes found it too early. My bill of fare here in Georgia was by no means confined to the three Southern staples just now enumerated (let so much be said in simple justice), but they held the place of honor, as a matter of course, and for the rest—well, there is a kind of variety that is only another kind of sameness. “An excellent dinner,” said a facetious fellow-traveler of mine on a similar occasion, as, knife and fork in hand, he hovered doubtfully over the table, and, like Emerson’s snowflake, “seemed nowhere to alight,”—“a most excellent dinner; but then, you see, it is nothing but ham and eggs with variations.” If this sounds like grumbling, it is only against a “system,” as we say in these days, not against a person. My generous hostess had spared no pains, and from any point of view had given me far more than my money’s worth; stinting herself only when it came to setting a price upon her bounty. That unavoidable business she approached, in response to the usual overtures on my part, with all manner of delicate indirections, holding back the decisive word till the very last moment, as if her tongue could not bring itself to utter a figure so extortionate. The truth was, she said, she had made nothing by giving dinners the year previous, and so felt obliged to charge five cents more the present season![2]
The noon hour brought a sudden change in the day’s programme. All the forenoon I had been asking questions, presuming upon my double right as a traveler and a Yankee; now I was to take my turn in the witness-box. My landlady’s brother sat on the veranda mending a fishing-tackle, and we had hardly passed the time of day before it became apparent that he possessed one of nature’s best intellectual gifts, an appetite for knowledge. With admirable civility, yet with no waste of time or breath, he went about his work, and long before dinner was announced I had given him my name, my residence (my age, perhaps, but here recollection becomes hazy), my occupation, the object of my present journey and its probable duration, some account of my previous visits South, my notion of New England weather, my impressions of Washington, especially of the height of the Washington monument as compared with other similar structures (a question of peculiar moment to him, for some reason now past recall), and Heaven knows what else; while on a thousand or two of other topics I had confessed ignorance. I had never been to Chautauqua; that was perhaps my examiner’s most serious disappointment. He was at present engaged on a Chautauquan course of reading, as it appeared,—the best course of reading that he had ever seen, he was inclined to think. Here again he had me playing second fiddle, or rather no fiddle at all.
His was a wholesome catholicity of mind, but it pleased me to notice that he too had felt the touch of the modern spirit, and was something of a specialist. Geography, or perhaps I should say climatology, seemed to lie uppermost in his thoughts. Once, I remember, he brought out a ponderous atlas of the world, a book of really astonishing proportions when the size of the house was taken into account, though it may not have been absolutely necessary for him to bring it out of doors in order to open it. On the subject of comparative climatology, be it said without reserve, it did not take him long to come to the end of my resources. It is possible, of course, that his own concern about it was but temporary,—the result of his before-mentioned course of reading. There is no better—nor better understood—rule for conversation than to choose the subject of the book you happen to have had last in hand. Two to one the other man will know less about it than you do. Then you are in clover. But should it turn out that he is at home where you have but recently peeped in at the window, and so is bound to have you at a disadvantage, you have only to be beforehand with him by acknowledging with becoming modesty that you really know nothing about the matter, but happen to have just been looking over with some interest Mr. So-and-So’s recent book. In other words, you may pass for a special student or a discursive reader, honorable characters both of them, according as the way opens.
I am not saying that my noonday acquaintance had practiced any such stratagem. His attitude throughout was that of a learner; nor did he set himself to shine even in that humble capacity, as one may easily do (and there are few safer methods) in this day of multifarious discovery, when the ability to ask intelligent questions has become of itself a badge of scholarship. His inquiries followed one another with perfect naturalness and simplicity; he simply wanted to know. As for the more strictly personal among them, they were only such as the most conventional of us instinctively feel like asking. “As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company,” says Emerson, “one of the first questions which all wish to have answered is, ‘How does that man get his living?’” There was no thought of taking offense. On the contrary, it was a pleasure to be angled for by so true an artist. If any newspaper should be in want of an “interviewer,”—a remote contingency so far as any newspaper that I know anything about is concerned,—I could recommend a likely hand. A candidate for the presidency might balk him, but nobody else. My own conversation with him is still an agreeable memory; a man’s mind is like a well, all the better for being once in a while pumped dry. And yet, while I speak of him in this tone of sincere appreciation, it must be acknowledged that in one respect he did me an ill turn. He robbed me of an illusion. The Yankee is second where I had supposed him an undisputed first.
Though we were at the half-way house, and in fact had made more than half of our day’s journey, the valley of the Chattooga at this point lay so warmly in the sun that the aspect of things remained decidedly southern. Roses and snowballs were in bloom in the dooryard, and as I came out from dinner a blue-gray gnatcatcher, the only one seen on my entire trip, was complaining from a persimmon-tree beside the gate. My attention to it, and to sundry other birds of the smaller sorts,—a blue golden-winged warbler, for example,—was matter of surprise to the men of the house, both of whom were now on the veranda. My seeker after knowledge, indeed, asked me plainly, but not without a word of apology, what object I had in view in such studies; in short,—when I stumbled a bit in my explanation,—whether there was “any money in them.” In that form the question presented less difficulty, and in my turn I asked him and his brother-in-law how often they were accustomed to see ravens thereabout. Their reply was little to the comfort of an enthusiast who had come a thousand miles, more or less, with ravens in his eye. Neither of them had seen one in the last five years. Something had happened to the birds, they could not say what. Formerly it was nothing uncommon to notice one or two flying over. Alas, this was not the first time it had been borne in upon me that, ornithologically, my portion was among the belated.
I have said nothing about it hitherto, but I had not driven five or six hours through strange woods and into the midst of strange hills without an ear open for bird notes. Even the rumbling of the heavy wagon and the uneasy creaking of the harness could not drown such music altogether, and once in a while, as I have said, I spelled myself on foot. At short intervals, too, when we came to some promising spot,—a swampy thicket, perhaps, or a patch of evergreens,—I called a halt to listen; the driver making no objection, and the horses less than none. The voices, to my regret rather than to my surprise, were every one familiar, and the single unexpected thing about it all was the dearth of northern species. The date was May 6, and the woods might properly enough have been alive with homeward-bound migrants; but the only bird that I could positively rank under that head was a Swainson thrush,—a free-hearted singer, whose cheery White Mountain tune I never hear at the South without an inward refreshment. From the evergreens, none too common, and mostly too far from the road, came the voices of a pine warbler and one or two black-throated greens; and once, as we skirted a bushy hillside, I caught the sliding ditty of a prairie warbler. Here, too, I think it was that I heard the distinctive, loquacious call of a summer tanager,—four happy chances, as but for them, and the single gnatcatcher by the half-way house gate, my vacation bird list would have been shorter by five species.
After all, the principal ornithological event of the forenoon was, not the singing of the Swainson thrush, but the discovery of a humming-bird’s nest. This happened on the side of Stumphouse Mountain. I had taken a short cut by myself, and had come out of the woods into the road again some distance ahead of the wagon, when suddenly I heard the buzz and squeak of a hummer, and, glancing upward, put my eye instantly upon the nest, which might have been two thirds done from its appearance, and then upon its owner, whose reiterated squeakings, I have no doubt, expressed her annoyance at my intrusion. In truth, both owners were present, and in that lay the exceptional interest of the story.
Some years ago I had proved, as I thought, that the male ruby-throat habitually takes no part in the hatching and rearing of its young, and, for that matter, is never to be seen about the nest in the five or six weeks during which that most laborious and nerve-trying work is going on. As to why this should be I could only confess ignorance; and subsequent observations, both by myself and by others,[3] while confirming the fact of the male’s absence, had done nothing to bring to light the reason for it. Is the female herself responsible for such a state of things? I should hate to believe, as I have heard it maintained, that female birds in general cherish little or no real affection for their mates, regarding them simply as necessities of the hour; but it is certain that widows among them waste no time in mourning, and it appears to me likely enough, if I am to say what I think, that the lady hummer, a fussy and capable body (we all know the human type), having her nest done and the eggs laid, prefers her mate’s room to his company, and gives him his walking ticket.