Part 8

The cabin, built of hewn logs, with clay in the chinks, was neatly furnished, with beds in two corners of the one room, a stone chimney, two doors directly opposite each other, and no window. The doors, it is understood, are always to be open, for ventilation and light. Such is the custom; and custom is nowhere more powerful than in small rustic communities. If a native, led away by his wife, perhaps, puts a window into his new cabin, the neighbors say, "Oh, he is building a glass house, isn't he?" It must be an effeminate woman, they think, who cannot do her cooking and sewing by the light of the door. None the less, in a climate where snow is possible in the middle of May, such a Spartan arrangement must sometimes be found a bit uncomfortable by persons not to the manner born. A preacher confided to me that in his pastoral calls he had once or twice made bold to push to a door directly at his back, when the wind was cold; but the innovation was ill received, and the inmates of the house, doubtless without wishing to hurt their minister's feelings,--since he had meant no harm, to be sure, but was simply unused to the ways of the world,--speedily found some excuse for rectifying his mistake. Probably there is no corner of the world where the question of fresh air and draughts is not available for purposes of moral discipline.

Beside the path to the cabin, on the 13th of May, was a gray-cheeked thrush, a very gray specimen, sitting motionless in the best of lights. "Look at me," he seemed to say. "I am no olive-back. My cheeks are not sallow." On the same day, here and in another place, I saw white-throated sparrows. Their presence at this late hour was a great surprise, and suggested the possibility of their breeding somewhere in the Carolina mountains, though I am not aware that such an occurrence has ever been recorded. Another recollection of this path is of a snow-white milkweed (Asclepias variegata),--white with the merest touch of purple to set it off,--for the downright elegance of which I was not in the least prepared. The queen of all milkweeds, surely.

After nightfall the air grew loud with the cries of batrachians and insects, an interesting and novel chorus. On my first evening at the hotel I was loitering up the road, with frequent auditory pauses, thinking how full the world is of unseen creatures which find their day only after the sun goes down, when in a woody spot I heard behind me a sound of footsteps. A woman was close at my heels, fetching a pail of water from the spring. I remarked upon the many voices. She answered pleasantly. It was the big frogs that I heard, she reckoned.

"Do you have whippoorwills here?" I asked.

"Plenty of 'em," she answered, "plenty of 'em."

"Do you hear them right along the road?"

"Yes, sir; oh yes."

We had gone hardly a rod further before we exclaimed in the same breath, "There is one now!"

I inquired if there was another bird here, something like the whippoorwill, meaning the chuck-will's-widow. But she said no; she knew of but one.

"How early does the whippoorwill get here?" said I.

"Pretty early," she answered.

"By the first of April, should you say?"

"Yes, sir, I think about then. I know the timber is just beginning to put out when they begin to holler."

This mannerly treatment of a stranger was more Christian-like than the stately silence of my lady of the cabin, it seemed to me. I liked it better, at all events. I had learned nothing, perhaps; but unless a man is far gone in philosophy he need not feel bound to increase in wisdom every time a neighbor speaks to him; and anyhow, that expression about the "putting out of the timber" had given me pleasure. Hearing it thus was better than finding it upon a page of Stevenson, or some other author whose business in life is the picking of right words. Let us have some silver, I repeat. I am ready to believe, what I have somewhere read, that men will have to give account not only for every idle word, but for every idle silence.

The summit of the Ridge, as soon as one leaves its precipitous rocky edge,--the Brow, so called,--is simply an indefinite expanse of gently rolling country, thin-soiled, but well watered, and covered with fine open woods, rambling through which the visitor finds little to remind him of his elevation above the world. I heard a resident speak of going to the "top of the mountain," however, and on inquiry learned that a certain rocky eminence, two miles, more or less, from Fairmount (the little "settlement" where I was staying), went by that name, and was supposed to be the highest point of the Ridge. My informant kindly made me a rough map of the way thither, and one morning I set out in that direction. It would be shameful to live for a week on the "summit" of a mountain, and not once go to the "top."

The glory of Walden's Ridge, as compared with Lookout Mountain,--so the dwellers there say,--is its streams and springs; and my morning path soon brought me to the usual rocky brook bordered with mountain laurel, holly, and hemlock. To my New England eyes it was an odd circumstance, the hemlocks growing always along the creeks in the valley bottoms. Beyond this point I passed an abandoned cabin,--no other house in sight,--and by and by a second one, near which, in the garden (better worth preserving than the house, it appeared), a woman and two children were at work. Yes, the woman said, I was on the right path. I had only to keep a straight course, and I should bring up at the "top of the mountain." A little farther, and my spirits rose at the sight of a circular, sedgy, woodland pond, such a place as I had not seen in all this Chattanooga country. It ought to yield something new for my local ornithological list, which up to this time included ninety species, and not one of them a water-bird. I did my best, beating round the edge and "squeaking," but startled nothing rarer than a hooded warbler and a cardinal grosbeak.

Next I traversed a long stretch of unbroken oak woods, with single tall pines interspersed; and then all at once the path turned to the right, and ran obliquely downhill to a clearing in which stood a house,--not a cabin,--with a garden, orchard trees, and beehives. This should be the German shoemaker's, I thought, looking at my map. If so, I was pretty near the top, though otherwise there was no sign of it; and if I had made any considerable ascent, it had been as children increase in stature,--and as the good increase in goodness,--unconsciously. A woman of some years was in the garden, and at my approach came up to the fence,--a round-faced, motherly body. Yes, the top of the mountain was just beyond. I could not miss it.

"You do not live here?" she asked.

No, I explained; I was a stranger on the Ridge,--a stranger from Boston.

"From Washington?"

"No, from Boston."

"Oh! from Boston!--Massachusetts!--Oh-h-h!"

She would go part way with me, she said, lest I should miss the path. Perhaps she wished to show some special hospitality to a man from Massachusetts; or possibly she thought I must be more in danger of getting bewildered, being so far from home. But I could not think of troubling her. Was there a spring near by, where I could drink?

"I have water in the house," she answered.

"But isn't there a creek down in the valley ahead?"

Oh yes, there was a creek; but had I anything to drink out of? I thanked her. Yes, I had a cup. "My husband will be at home by the time you come back," she said, as I started on, and I promised to call.

The scene at the brook, halfway between the German's house and the top, would of itself have paid me for my morning's jaunt. I stood on a boulder in mid-current, in the shadow of overhanging trees, and drank it in. Such rhododendrons and laurel, now in the perfection of their beauty! One rhododendron bush was at least ten feet high, and loaded with blooms. Another lifted its crown of a dozen rose-purple clusters amid the dark foliage of a hemlock. A magnolia-tree stood near; but though it was much taller than the laurel or the rhododendron, and had much larger flowers, it made little show beside them. Birds were singing on all hands, and numbers of gay-colored butterflies flitted about, sipping here and there at a blossom. I remember especially a fine tiger swallow-tail; the only one I saw in Tennessee, I believe. I remember, too, how well the rhododendron became him. Here, as in many other places, the laurel was nearly white; a happy circumstance, as it and the rhododendron went the more harmoniously together. Even in this high company, some tufts of cinnamon fern were not to be overlooked; the fertile cinnamon-brown fronds were now at their loveliest, and showed as bravely here, I thought, as in the barest of Massachusetts swamp-lands.

A few rods more, up a moderate slope, and I was at the top of the mountain,--a wall of out-cropping rocks, falling off abruptly on the further side, and looking almost like an artificial rampart. Beyond me, to my surprise, I heard the hum of cicadas,--seventeen-year locusts,--a sound of which the lower country had for some time been full, but of which, till this moment, I had heard nothing on the Ridge.