OBSERVATIONS OF NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE IN THE BLUE RIDGE BY BRADFORD TORREY BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1898 BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1898 A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS...

In a day and a night I had come from early May to middle June; from a world of bare boughs to a forest clad in all the verdure of summer. Such a shine as the big, lusty leaves of the black-jack oaks had put on! I could have raised a shout. In the day when “all the trees of the field shall clap their hands,” may I be somewhere in the black-jack’s neighborhood. Hour after hour we sped along, out of North Carolina into South Carolina: now through miles and miles of forest; now past a lonely cabin,

“Every pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer.”— Keats. While M. Sylvestre Bonnard, Member of the Institute, was in Sicily prosecuting his memorable search for the Alexandrian manuscript of the Golden Legend, he fell in unexpectedly with his old acquaintances, M. and Mme. Trépof, collectors of match-boxes. Their specialty, as may be supposed, was not exactly to M. Bonnard’s liking. Being a scholar and an antiquary, he would rather have seen their affections bestowed up

Stewart’s Pond , on the Hamburg road a mile or so from the village of Highlands, served me, a visiting bird-gazer, more than one good turn: selfishly considered, it was something to be thankful for; but I never passed it, for all that, without feeling that it was a defacement of the landscape. The Cullasajah River is here only four or five miles from its source, near the summit of Whiteside Mountain; and already a land-owner, taking advantage of a level space and what passes among men as a legal

“ I’d rather do anything than to pack,” said a North Carolina mountain man. His tone bespoke a fullness of experience; as if a farm-bred Yankee were to say, “I’d rather do anything than to pick stones in cold weather.” He had found me talking with a third man by the wayside on a sultry forenoon. The third man carried a bag of corn on his back, and was on his way from Horse Cove to Highlands (valleys are coves in that part of the South), up the long steep mountain side down which, with frequent s

I left Boston at nine o’clock on the morning of April 23, and reached Pulaski, in southwestern Virginia, at ten o’clock the next forenoon, exactly on schedule time,—or within five minutes of it, to give the railroad no more than its due. It was a journey to meet the spring,—which for a Massachusetts man is always a month tardy,—and as such it was speedily rewarded. Even in Connecticut there were vernal signs, a dash of greenness here and there in the meadows, and generous sproutings of skunk cab

With the exception of a tedious delay at East Radford it was a very enjoyable forenoon’s ride from Pulaski to Natural Bridge, through a country everywhere interesting, and for much of the distance gloriously wild and beautiful. Splendid hillside patches of mingled Judas-tree and flowering dogwood—one of a bright peach-bloom color, the other royal masses of pure white—brightened parts of the way south of Roanoke. There, also, hovering over a grassy field, were the first bobolinks of the season. F