What was more agreeable, I met here a little procession of liappy-looking black children returning to the town loaded with big branches of flowering apple-trees a sight which for some reason put me in mind of a child, a tiny thing,- a veritable pickaninny, - whom I had passed, some years before, near Tallahassee, and who pleased me by exclaiming to a companion, as a dove cooed in the distance, “Listen dat mournin’ dove ! ” I wondered whether such children, living nearer to nature than some of us, might not be peculiarly susceptible to natural sights and sounds.īefore one of the last cabins stood three white children, and as they gazed at me fixedly I wished them “ Goodmorning ” but they stared and answered nothing. In my time, at all events, a solitary foot-passenger seemed to be regarded as nothing short of a phenomenon. The traveler has first to pass half a dozen or more of cabins, where, if he is a stranger, he will probably find himself watched out of sight with flattering unanimity by the curious inmates. It has its beginning, at least, in a gap similar in all respects to the one, some half a mile to the northward, into which I had so many times followed a footpath, as already fully set forth. The mountain road, as the townspeople call it, runs over the long ridge which fills the horizon east of Pulaski, and down into the valley on the other side. As things were, I spent but a single forenoon upon it, and went only as far as the “ height of land.” So I recollected afterward, but for the time I somehow allowed the significance of his words to escape me, else I should, no doubt, have traveled the road again and again. It takes its departure from the village 1 within a quarter of a mile of the hotel, and the friendly manager of the house, who seemed himself to have some idea of such pleasures as I was in quest of, commended its charms to me very shortly after my arrival. The measure of my indolence may be estimated from the fact that the one really picturesque road in the neighborhood was left undiscovered till nearly the last day of my sojourn. In short, it was a place where, even to the walking naturalist aforesaid, it was easy to go slowly, and to spend a due share of every day in sitting still, which latter occupation, so it be engaged in neither upon a piazza nor on a lawn, is one of the best uses of those fullest parts of a busy man’s life, his so-called vacations. The town itself is small and compact, so that it was no great jaunt, even in sunny weather, to get away from it in any direction, - an unusual piece of good fortune, highly appreciated by a walking naturalist in our Southern country, - and such woods as especially invited exploration lay close at hand. There was nothing there to induce excessive activity: no glorious mountain summit whose daily beckoning must sooner or later be heeded no long forest roads of the kind that will not let a man’s imagination alone till he has seen the end of them. MY spring campaign in Virginia was planned in the spirit of the old war-time bulletin, “All quiet on the Potomac ” happiness was to be its end, and idleness its means and so far, at least, as my stay at Pulaski was concerned, this peaceful design was well carried out.
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