Like Mrs. Thaxter, I stayed with my bird till I was tired with watching such preternatural activity; and the next day I returned to the place, hoping to tire myself again in the same delightful manner. But the phalarope was no longer there. Up and down the road I went, scanning the edges of the pond, but the bird had flown. I wished her safely over the mountains, and a mate to her heart’s liking at the end of the journey. BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE “I’d rather do anything than to pack,” said a North Carolina mountain man. His tone bespoke a fullness of experience; as if a farm-bred Yankee were to say, “I’d rather do anything than to pick stones in cold weather.” He had found me talking with a third man by the wayside on a sultry forenoon. The third man carried a bag of corn on his back, and was on his way from Horse Cove to Highlands (valleys are coves in that part of the South), up the long steep mountain side down which, with frequent stops for admiration of the world below, I had been lazily traveling. He was sick, he told me; and as his appearance corroborated his words, I had been trying to persuade him to leave his load where it was, trust its safety to Providence, and go home. Just then it happened that mountaineer number two came along and delivered himself as above quoted. _He_ was going to Highlands, also. He had been “putting in a week” trying to buy a cow to replace one that had mired herself and broken her neck. “I would rather have paid down twenty-five dollars in gold,” he declared. (The air was full of political silver talk; but gold is the standard, after all, when men come to business.) He knew the invalid, it appeared, for presently he turned into a trail, a short cut through the woods, which till now had escaped my notice, and remarked, “Well, John, I guess I’ll take the narrow way;” and off he went up the slope, while the other man and I continued our dialogue,--I still playing the part of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Christian still unconvinced, but not indisposed to parley. He wished to know where I had come from; and when I told him, he said, “Massachusetts! Well, I reckon it’s right hot down there now.” He held the common belief of the mountain people that the rest of the earth’s surface is mostly uninhabitable in summer-time. One morning, I remember, I said something to an idler on the village sidewalk about the cool night we had just passed. I meant my little speech as a kind of local compliment, but he took me up at once. It was “pretty hot,” he thought,--about as hot a night as he ever knew. He didn’t see how folks _lived_ down in Charleston; and I partly agreed with him. He had been “borned right here,” and had never been farther away than to Seneca; and from his manner of expressing himself I inferred that he hoped never to find himself so far from home again. This was in the midst of a “heated term,” when the mercury, at four o’clock in the afternoon, registered 74° on the hotel piazza.