In such a place, so limited in the range of its physical conditions,--a village surrounded by forest,--the birds, however numerous they might be, counted as individuals, were sure to be of comparatively few species. Omitting such as were certainly, or almost certainly, migrants or strays,--the blackpoll, the myrtle-bird, the barn swallow, the kingbird, the solitary sandpiper, and the phalarope,--and such as were found only at a lower level, in Horse Cove and elsewhere; omitting, too, all birds of prey,--few, and for the most part but imperfectly identified; restricting myself to birds fully made out and believed to be summering in the immediate neighborhood of Highlands; omitting the raven, of course,--I counted but fifty-nine species. All things considered, I was not inconsolable at finding my ornithological activities in some measure abridged. I had the more time, though still much too little, for other pursuits. It would have been good to spend the whole of it upon the plants, or in admiring the beauties of the country itself. As it was, I plucked a blossom here and there, stored up a few of the more striking of them in the memory, and enjoyed many an hour in gazing upon the new wild world, where, no matter how far I climbed, there was nothing to be seen on all sides but a sea of hills, wave rising beyond wave to the horizon’s rim. The horizon was never far off. I was twice on Satulah and twice on Whiteside, from which latter point, by all accounts, I should have had one of the most extensive and beautiful prospects to be obtained in North Carolina; but I had fallen upon one of those “spells of weather,” common in mountainous places, which make a visitor feel as if nothing were so rare as a transparent atmosphere. For ordinary lowland purposes the days were no doubt favorable enough: a pleasing, wholesome alternation of rain and shine, wind and calm, with no lack of thunder and lightning, and once, at least, a lively hailstorm. “Weather like this I have never seen elsewhere. Such air!” So I wrote in my enthusiasm, thinking of physical comfort,--a man who wished to walk and sit still by turns, and be neither sunstruck nor chilled; but withal, there was never an hour of clear distance till the morning I came away, when mountain ascents were no longer to be thought of. The world was all in a cover of mist, and the outlying hills, one beyond another, with the haze settling into the valleys between them, were, as I say, like the billows of the sea. Nothing could have been more beautiful, perhaps; but a curtain is a curtain, and I longed to see it rise. A change of wind, a puff from the northwest, and creation would indeed have “widened in man’s view.” That was not to be, and all those lofty North Carolina peaks--of which, to a New Englander, there seem to be so many[11]--were seen by me only from railway trains and from the hotel veranda at Asheville, on my journey homeward. On Satulah and Whiteside