a million." So soon does novelty wear off. The magnolia and the Blackburnian were in high feather, and made a gorgeous pair as chance brought them side by side in the same tree. They sang with much freedom; but the Cape Mays kept silence, to my deep regret, notwithstanding the philosophical remarks just now volunteered about the advantages derivable from a bird's gradual disclosure of himself. Such pieces of wisdom, I have noticed, when by chance they do not fall into the second or third person, are commonly applied to the past rather than the present; a man's past being, in effect, not himself, but another. In morals, as in archery, the target should be set at a fair distance. The Cape May's song is next to nothing,—suggestive of the black-poll's, I am told,—but I would gladly have bought a ticket to hear it.

The place might have been made on purpose for the use to which it was now put. The pinery, surrounded by hard-wood forest, was like an island; and the warblers, for the most part, had no thought of leaving it. Had they been feeding in the hard wood,—miles of tall trees,—I should have lost them in short order. At the same time, the absence of undergrowth enabled me to move about with all quietness, so that none of them took the least alarm. Not a black-throated green was seen or heard, though yesterday they had been in force both among the pines and along the cliffs. A flock of myrtle warblers were surprisingly late, it seemed to me; but it was my last sight of them.

The reader will perceive that I was not exploring Lookout Mountain, and am in no position to set forth its beauties. It is eighty odd miles long, we are told, and in some places more than a dozen miles wide. I visited nothing but the northern point, the Tennessee end, the larger part of the mountain being in Georgia; and even while there I looked twice at the birds, and once at the mountain itself.

At noon, I lay for a long time upon a flat boulder under the tall oaks of the western bluff, looking down upon the lower woods, now in tender new leaf and most exquisitely colored. There are few fairer sights than a wooded mountain side seen from above; only one must not be too far above, and the forest should be mainly deciduous. The very thought brings before my eyes the long, green slopes of Mount Mansfield as they show from the road near the summit,—beauty inexpressible and never to be forgotten; and miles of autumn color on the sides of Kinsman, Cannon, and Lafayette, as I have enjoyed it by the hour, stretched in the September sunshine on the rocks of Bald Mountain. Perhaps the earth itself will never be fully enjoyed till we are somewhere above it. The Lookout woods, as I now saw them, were less magnificent in sweep, but hardly less beautiful. And below them was the valley bottom,—Lookout Valley, once the field of armies, now the abode of peaceful industry: acres of brown earth, newly sown, with no trace of greenness except the hedgerows along the brooks and on the banks of Lookout Creek. And beyond the valley was Raccoon Mountain, wooded throughout; and behind that, far away, the Cumberland range, blue with distance.

A phœbe came and perched at my elbow, dropping a curtsey with old-fashioned politeness by way of "How are you, sir?" and a little afterward was calling earnestly from below. This is one of the characteristic birds of the mountain, and marks well the difference in latitude which even a slight elevation produces. I found it nowhere in the valley country, but it was common on Lookout and on Walden's Ridge. Then, behind me on the summit, another northern bird, the scarlet tanager, struck up a labored, rasping, breathless tune, hearty, but broken and forced. I say labored and breathless; but, happily, the singer was unaware of his infirmity (or can it be I was wrong?), and continued without interruption for at least half an hour. If he was uncomfortably short-breathed, he was very agreeably long-winded. Oven-birds sang at intervals throughout the day, and once I heard again the black-billed cuckoo. Yes, Hooker was right: Lookout Mountain is Northern, not Southern. But then, as if to show that it is not exactly Yankee land, in spite of oven-bird and black-bill, and notwithstanding all that Hooker and his men may have done, a cardinal took a long turn at whistling, and a Carolina wren came to his support with a cheery, cheery. A far-away crow was cawing somewhere down the valley, no very common sound hereabout; a red-eye, our great American missionary, was exhorting, of course; a black-poll, on his way to British America, whispered something, it was impossible to say what; and a squirrel barked. I lay so still that a black-and-white creeper took me for a part of the boulder, and alighted on the nearest tree-trunk. He goes round a bole just as he sings, in corkscrew fashion. Now and then I caught some of the louder phrases of a distant brown thrush, and once, when every one else fell silent, a catbird burst out spasmodically with a few halting, disjointed eccentricities, highly characteristic of a bird who can sing like a master when he will, but who seems oftener to enjoy talking to himself. Lizards rustled into sight with startling suddenness; and one big fellow disappeared so instantaneously—in "less than no time," as the Yankee phrase is—that I thought "quick as a lizard" might well enough become an adage. Here and there I remarked a chestnut-tree, the burs of last year still hanging; and chestnut oaks were among the largest and handsomest trees of the wood, as they were among the commonest. The temperature was perfect,—so says my penciled note. Let the confession not be overlooked, after all my railing at the fierce Tennessee sun. It made all the pleasure of the hour, too, that there were no troublesome insects. I had been in that country for ten days, the mercury had been much of the time above 90°, and I had not seen ten mosquitoes.

I left my boulder at last, though it would have been good to remain there till night, and wandered along the bluffs to the Point. Here it was apparent at once that the wind had shifted. For the first time I caught sight of lofty mountains in the northeast; the Great Smokies, I was told, and could well believe it. I sat down straightway and looked at them, and had I known how things would turn, I would have looked at them longer; for in all my three weeks' sojourn in Chattanooga, that was the only half-day in which the atmosphere was even approximately clear. It was unfortunate, but I consoled myself with the charm of the foreground,—a charm at once softened and heightened, with something of the magic of distance, by the very conditions that veiled the horizon and drew it closer about us.

It is truly a beautiful world that we see from Lookout Point: the city and its suburbs; the river with its broad meanderings, and, directly at our feet, its great Moccasin Bend; the near mountains,—Raccoon and Sand mountains beyond Lookout Valley, and Walden's Ridge across the river; and everywhere in the distance hills and high mountains, range beyond range, culminating in the Cumberland Mountains in one direction, and the Great Smokies in another. And as we look at the fair picture we think of what was done here,—of historic persons and historic deeds. At the foot of the cliffs on which we stand is White House plateau, the battlefield of Lookout Mountain. Chattanooga itself is spread out before us, with Orchard Knob, Cameron Hill, and the national cemetery. Yonder stretches the long line of Missionary Ridge, and farther south, recognizable by at least one of the government towers, is the battlefield of Chickamauga. Here, if anywhere, we may