Part 17

See especially an article by Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1896.

All things go by comparison. “I always lived in the country till I came here,” said my driver to me one day.

The great “war governor” and senator of North Carolina was born among the mountains of the State; and from what I heard, he seems to have left his name

“to be found, like a wild flower, All over his dear country,”

as truly as Wallace ever did in Scotland.

The case is recorded in The Auk, vol. vi. page 68.

On a different road, and on a Sunday morning, I met a young colored woman,--an unusual sight, colored people being personæ non gratæ in the mountains. We bade each other good-morning, as Christians should. My notebook, I see, records her as dressed in her best clothes,--a blue gown, I think,--with a handsome light-colored silk parasol in one hand, and a tin pail in the other.

The Auk, vol. iii. pp. 108 and 111.

My first impression was correct. Mr. Brewster, as I now notice, says of the nest that it is “larger and composed of coarser material” than that of Junco hyemalis.

“At Highlands I saw a single male,--an unusually brilliant one,--which I was told was the only bird of the kind in the vicinity.”

According to a publication of the State Board of Agriculture, North Carolina contains forty-three peaks more than 6000 feet high, eighty-two others more than 5000 feet high, and an “innumerable” multitude the altitude of which is between 4000 and 5000 feet.

Pulaski, or Pulaski City (the place goes by both names,--the second a reminiscence of its “booming” days, I should suppose), is so intermediate in size and appearance that I find myself speaking of it by turns as village, town, and city, with no thought of inconsistency or special inappropriateness.

Mr. H. W. Henshaw once told me about a flock that appeared in winter in the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, so exhausted that they could be picked off the trees like apples.

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