My thoughts are recalled by a strong, sharp chip in a voice I do not recognize,—a Kentucky warbler's, as presently turns out. He walks about the ground amid the short, thin grass, seemingly in the most placid of moods; but at every few steps, for some inscrutable reason, he comes out with that quick, peremptory call. And all the while I keep saying to myself, "What a beauty!" But my forenoon is past. I rise to go, and at the motion he takes flight. Near the spring the goldfinches are still in full chorus, and just beyond them in the path is a mourning dove.
That was a good season: hymns without words, "a sermon not made with hands," and the world shut out. Three days afterward, fast as my vacation was running away, I went to the same place again. The olive-backed thrushes were still singing, to my surprise, and the Kentucky warblers were still feeding in the grass. The scarlet tanager sang (it is curious how much oftener I mention him than the comparatively unfamiliar, but here extremely common summer tanager), the cuckoo called, the Acadian flycatcher was building her nest,—on a horizontal limb of a maple,—and a goldfinch warbled as if he could never cease. A veery sang, also (I heard but one other in Tennessee), with a chestnut-sided warbler, two redstarts (one of them in the modest garb of his mother), a Carolina chickadee, a mocking wren, a pine warbler, a prairie warbler, and a catbird. In time, probably, all the birds for a mile around might have been heard or seen beside that scanty rill.
To-day, however, my mood was less Sundayish than before, and in spite of the heat I ventured across an open pasture,—where a Bachman's finch was singing an ingenious set of variations, and a rabbit stamped with a sudden loudness that made me jump,—and then through a piece of wood, till I came to another hollow like the one I had left, but without water, and therefore less thickly shaded. Here was the inevitable thicket of brambles (since I speak so much of chats and indigo-birds, the presence of a sufficiency of blackberry bushes may be taken for granted), and I waited to see what it would bring forth. A field sparrow sang from the hillside,—a sweet and modest tune that went straight to the heart, and had nothing to fear from a comparison with Bachman's finch or any other. What a contrast in this respect between him and his gentle-seeming but belligerent and tuneless cousin whom we call "chippy."[1] Here, likewise, were a pair of complaining Carolina wrens and an Acadian flycatcher. A thrush excited my curiosity, having the look of a gray-cheek, but showing a buff eye-ring; and while I was coaxing him to whistle, and so declare himself,—often a ready means of identification, and preferable on all accounts to shooting the bird,—there came a furious outburst from the depths of the brier patch, with a grand flurry of wings: a large bird and two smaller ones engaged in sudden battle, as well as I could make out. At the close of the mêlée, which ended as abruptly as it had begun, the thicket showed two wrens, a white-throated sparrow, and a female cardinal. The cardinal flew away; the affair was no business of hers, apparently; but in a minute she was back again, scolding. Then, while my back was turned, everything became quiet; and on my stepping up to reconnoitre, there she sat in her nest with four eggs under her. At that moment a chat's loud voice was heard, and, turning quickly, I caught the fellow in the midst of a brilliant display of his clownish tricks, ridiculous, indescribable. At a little distance, it is hard to believe that it can be a bird, that dancing, shapeless thing, balancing itself in the air with dangling legs and prancing, swaying motions. Well, that is the chat's way. What more need be said? Every creature must express himself, and birds no less than other poets are entitled to an occasional "fine frenzy."
My little excursion had brought me nothing new, and, like all my similar ventures on Missionary Ridge, it ended in defeat. The sun was too much for me; to use a word suggested by the place, it carried too many guns. I took a long and comfortable siesta under a magnificent chestnut oak. Then it was near noon, and, with my umbrella spread, I mounted the hill to the railway, and waited for a car.
[LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.]
Lookout Mountain was at first a disappointment. I went home discouraged. The place was spoiled, I thought. About the fine inn were cheap cottages,—as if one had come to a second-class summer resort; while the lower slopes of the mountain, directly under Lookout Point on the side toward the city, were given up to a squalid negro settlement, and, of all things, a patent-medicine factory,—a shameful desecration, it seemed to me. I was half ready to say I would go there no more. The prospect was beautiful,—so much there was no denying; but the air was thick with smoke, and, what counted for ten times more, the eye itself was overclouded. A few northern warblers were chirping in the evergreens along the edge of the summit, between the inn and the Point,—black-polls and bay-breasts, with black-throated greens and Carolina wrens; and near them I saw with pleasure my first Tennessee phœbes. In the street car, on the way back to Chattanooga, I had for my fellow-passengers a group of Confederate veterans from different parts of the South, one of whom, a man with an empty sleeve, was showing his comrades an interesting war-time relic,—a bit of stone bearing his own initials. He had cut them in the rock while on duty at the Point thirty years before, I heard him say, and now, remembering the spot, and finding them still there, he had chipped them off to carry home. These are all the memories I retain of my first visit to a famous and romantic place that I had long desired to see.
My second visit was little more remunerative, and came to an untimely and inglorious conclusion. Not far from the inn I noticed what seemed to be the beginning of an old mountain road. It would bring me to St. Elmo, a passing cottager told me; and I somehow had it fast in my mind that St. Elmo was a particularly wild and attractive woodland retreat somewhere in the valley,—a place where a pleasure-seeking naturalist would find himself happy for at least an hour or two, if the mountain side should insufficiently detain him. The road itself looked uncommonly inviting, rough and deserted, with wild crags above and old forest below; and without a second thought I took it, idling downward as slowly as possible, minding the birds and plants, or sitting for a while, as one shady stone after another offered coolness and a seat, to enjoy the silence and the prospect. Be as lazy as I could, however, the road soon gave signs of coming to an end; for Lookout Mountain, although it covers much territory and presents a mountainous front, is of a very modest elevation. And at the end of the way there was no sylvan retreat, but a village; yes, the same dusty little suburb that I had passed, and looked away from, on my way up. That was St. Elmo!—and, with my luncheon still in my pocket, I boarded the first car for the city. One consolation remained: I had lived a pleasant hour, and the mountain road had made three additions to my local ornithology,—a magnolia warbler, a Blackburnian warbler, and a hairy woodpecker.