The driver returned at last, and with him came a mountain farmer,--another good neighbor, I was glad to see,--leading a mule, which was quickly put into Doc’s harness. But what to do with Doc? “Leave him,” said I. “Lead him at the tail of the wagon,” said the farmer; and the latter advice prevailed. And very good advice it seemed till we came to the first steepish piece of road. Then the horse began to hold back. “Look at him!” exclaimed the driver in despairing tones; and all our tribulations were begun over again. From this point there was only one way of getting on, and that at a snail’s pace and with continual interruptions. The passenger took the reins, and the driver walked behind with his whip, and so, using as much kindness as might be, forced the unwilling horse to follow. Even that cruel resource threatened before long to fail us; for it began to look as if the unsteady creature would drop in his tracks. There it was, as I now suspect, that he played his best card. “You must leave him at the next house, if there is another,” I said. “Yes, there is another,” the driver answered, “and only one.” We came to it presently,--a cabin far below us in a deep, wood-encircled valley, out of which rose pleasant evening sounds of a banjo and singing. The driver lifted his voice, and a woman appeared upon the piazza. The man of the house was not at home, she said; but the driver took down the Virginia fence, and with much patient coaxing and pulling got the horse down the long, steep slope and into a shed. Then, leaving word for him to be fed and cared for, he climbed back to the road, and, freed at last from our incumbrance, we quickened our pace. By this time it was growing dark. Bird songs had ceased, and flowers had long been invisible. But indeed, for the greater part of the afternoon, we had been so taken up with working our passage that I had found small opportunity for natural history comment. I recall a lovely rose-acacia shrub, an endless display of pink azalea,--set off here and there with the flat snowy clusters of the dogwood,--thickets fringed with drooping, white, sickly sweet Leucothoë racemes (which at the time I mistook for some kind of Andromeda), the shouts of two pileated woodpeckers,--always rememberable,--a hooded warbler’s song out of a rhododendron thicket, and the sight of two or three rough-winged swallows. These last are worth mentioning, because in connection with them there came out the astonishing fact that the driver did not know what I meant by swallows. Apparently he had never heard the word,--which may help readers to understand what a scarcity of these airy birds there is in all that Alleghanian country. I should almost as soon have expected to find a man who had never heard of sparrows!