Anthropology and ornithology were very agreeably mingled for me on the Hamburg road,--though it seems impossible for me to stay there, the reader may say,--where passers-by were frequent enough to keep me from feeling lonesome, and yet not so numerous as to disturb the quiet of the place or interfere unduly with my natural historical researches. The human interview to which I look back with most pleasure was with a pair of elderly people who appeared one morning in an open buggy. They were driving from the town, seated side by side in the shadow of a big umbrella, and as they overtook me, on the bridge, the man said “Good-morning,” of course, and then, to my surprise, pulled up his horse and inquired particularly after my health. He hoped I was recovering from my indisposition, though I am not sure that he used that rather superfine word. I gave him a favorable account of myself,--wondering all the while how he knew I had been ill,--whereupon he expressed the greatest satisfaction, and his good wife smiled in sympathy. Then, after a word or two about the beauty of the morning, and while I was still trying to guess who the couple could be, the man gathered up the reins with the remark, “I’m going after some _Ilex monticola_ for Charley.” “Yes, I know where it is,” he added, in response to a question. Then I knew him. I had been at his house a few evenings before to see his son, who had come home from Biltmore to collect certain rare local plants--the mountain holly being one of them--for the Vanderbilt herbarium. The mystery was cleared, but it may be imagined how taken aback I was when this venerable rustic stranger threw a Latin name at me. In truth, however, botany and Latin names might almost be said to be in the air at Highlands. A villager met me in the street, one day, and almost before I knew it, we were discussing the specific identity of the small yellow lady’s-slippers,--whether there were two species, or, as my new acquaintance believed, only one, in the woods round about. At another time, having called at a very pretty unpainted cottage,--all the prettier for the natural color of the weathered shingles,--I remarked to the lady of the house upon the beauty of _Azalea Vaseyi_, which I had noticed in several dooryards, and which was said to have been transplanted from the woods. I did not understand why it was, I told her, but I couldn’t find it described in my Chapman’s Flora. “Oh, it is there, I am sure it is,” she answered; and going into the next room she brought out a copy of the manual, turned to the page, and showed me the name. It was in the supplement, where in my haste I had overlooked it. I wondered how often, in a New England country village, a stranger could happen into a house, painted or unpainted, and by any chance find the mistress of it prepared to set him right on a question of local botany.