The wagon carried us by a roundabout course to the base of this rocky knob, and there the majority of the party remained, while two ladies and myself clambered up a steep pitch to the summit, to take the prospect and to feel that we had been there,--and perhaps to see a raven; for Whiteside had from the beginning been held up to me as one of that bird’s particular resorts. “Wait till you go to Whiteside,” I had been told again and again. What had looked like a pyramidal rock turned out to be the end of a long ridge, over which we marched in Indian file for a mile or more, picking flowers (the nodding _Trillium stylosum_, especially, of which each new specimen seemed pinker and prettier than the last) and admiring the landscape,--a boundless woodland panorama, with clearings and houses in Whiteside valley, and innumerable hazy mountains rising one beyond another in every direction. The world of new leafage below us, now darkened by cloud shadows, now shining in the sun, was beautiful far beyond any skill of mine to picture it. We were still walking and quietly enjoying--my fellow tourists being, fortunately, of the non-exclamatory type--when the silence was broken by loud screams. “Ravens!” I thought,--for when the mind is full it is liable to spill over at any sudden jar,--and, dropping my umbrella, I sprang to the edge of the cliff. The bird was only a hawk, soaring and screaming, too far away to be made out; a duck-hawk, perhaps, but certainly not a raven. “How you frightened me!” said one of the ladies. “I thought you were going to throw yourself over the precipice.” My hobby-horse amused her,--as it did me also,--but she was herself too sound an enthusiast to be really unsympathetic. A New Jersey grandmother, she made nothing of a thirteen-mile tramp, a thorough drenching, and a pedestrian’s blister, when rare flowers were in question, and the next morning would be off again before breakfast, scouring the country for new trophies. Like Mme. Trépof, she would have gone to Sweden in search of a match-box, had the notion taken her. As for ravens, she had already seen one, only a few days before my arrival. It flew directly over the hotel, and she recognized it at once, not as a raven, to be sure, but as “the blackest crow she had ever seen.” A man who happened to be doing some carpenter’s work about the house heard her exclamation, and told her what it was, and by good luck he was to-day our driver. It was wonderful how much encouragement I received in my amusing pursuit. If only there were fewer stories and more ravens! I was ready to say.