So Durgan's observation was stimulated.
First, there were the events of the weather—what Bertha called the "scene-shifting."
To-day the veil of blue air would be so thin that, in a radius of many miles, the depth of each gorge, the molding of each peak, was so clear that the covering forest would be revealed like a carpet of fern, each tree a distinct frond when the eye focussed upon it. The rocky precipices would declare each cave and crevice in sharply outlined shadow, and emerald forms far off would look so near that house and fence and wandering paths were seen. At such an hour the Cherokee ridges would stand like the great blue-crested waves of ocean, and the "Great Smokies" be like clouds, turquoise-tinted, on the northern horizon.
The next day the azure mists that lay always on the Georgian plain would have crept, embracing the very spurs of Deer, hiding the modeling of even the adjacent mountains as with a luminous gauze. Then only a screen of mountainous outline could be seen, standing flat against emptiness, of uniform tint, colored like a blue-jay's wing.
Again there was nothing but vapor to be seen, here towering black, here moving fringed with glory and lit within. May showers winged their silver way among the mist-clouds and cleft a passing chasm for the sun.
Or again, following or preceding thunder, there would be an almost terrible clearness of the sun, and big cloud-shadows would flap from range to range like huge black bats with sharply outlined wings.
Secondly, apart from the weather, came startling events in the sphere of what Bertha called "the crops." The term did not relate chiefly to her cultivated land, but to all the successive forms of vegetation upon Deer.
The joy of the opening leaf rose nearer the mountain-top. Already, about Deer Cove, the trees held out a delicate fretwork of tiny leaves between earth and sky, and the under thickets were tipped at every point with silver-green. All along the village street a double row of marsh maples stood, their roots drinking at the millstream. The marsh maple differs from its patient sisters, who are glorified by autumn, and, like Passion in the house of the Interpreter, insists upon having its good things early. These now dressed themselves gorgeously in leaflets of crimson and pink. For a day or two this bright display, seen from afar through the branches that surrounded Durgan's mine, looked like a garden of tulips. Then his landscape narrowed; his own trees opened their leaves. There were days of warm, quick rain. Suddenly the gray forest was glorious with green; serried ranks of azure stars stood out in every bank of moss, and the gray earth was pied with dandelion, heart's-ease, and violet.
Said Durgan, as the sisters rode by, "Summer passed me in the night, dripping and bedraggled. She was going on to you with leaps and bounds."
"'Dripping,' but not 'bedraggled,'" corrected Bertha, shaking the mist out of her riding-gloves.