r a
branching canyon of coves, cut like the Grand Canyon out of an apparent
plain, but, unlike that epic of naked magnificence, timbered with
great, upstanding hardwoods from floor to rim, a soft, silent, hazy
green hole where the forest floor has sunk a thousand feet, to rise
again in the smoky distance and melt into the blue. There is no sign
of human habitation, though in those coves, where the forest mould is
rich to clear and cultivate and the springs are never dry, the
cove-ites dwell, stock of the highlanders who are almost a race apart
in the fastnesses of our southern Appalachians. They have no roads,
only dim trails or footpaths. The protecting forest hides their little
clearings. Only a hawk sails on silent wings over the leafy depths,
and perhaps the faintest thread of smoke winds up and is lost in the
haze of the air, a haze which seems faintly tinged with the
all-pervading green.

But I wander as aimlessly as the enchanted visitor to Sewanee, and am
by way of forgetting that it was Spring I set out to recapture with my
pen--as if one could recapture the vanished Aprils! It _was_ April,
to be sure, early April, very cold in the Berkshires, with great,
dirty drifts of snow still lingering on the northern sides of walls
and hedges, and ice on the pools of a morning. Down here on the
Cumberland plateau the trees were still bare, too, and the mornings
chill, though you could easily find a blade of grass "big enough to
blow," and the brown thrashers sang in the dooryards. But there came a
day when the sun rose misty and hot, and I wandered out through the
woods, by a dim, sandy cart track, missing the solemn evergreen note
of our northern forests but happy in the fragrance of life reviving
under last year's leaves--that peculiar odor of the woods in Spring.
The little brown brook at Thumping Dick was softly vocal, and it, too,
smelled of leaves. After a time I reached a point which jutted out
directly over the tops of the trees growing on the debris pile below.
These trees were as tall as masts, and as straight, though they were
hardwoods, and from my rocky perch I looked through their upper
tracery of budding twigs, as through a veil of faint green and red,
out on the brown and green plains of Tennessee shining in the sun, or
left and right across the canyons of the coves to the stately
procession of receding headlands. Then I cast about for a way down
into one of the coves, and presently came upon a footpath.