Before one of the last cabins stood three white children, and as they gazed at me fixedly I wished them “Good-morning;” but they stared and answered nothing. Then, when I had passed, a woman’s sharp voice called from within, “Why don’t you speak when anybody speaks to you? I’d have some manners, if I was you.” And I perceived that if the boys and girls were growing up in rustic diffidence (not the most ill-mannered condition in the world, by any means), it was not for lack of careful maternal instruction. This gap, like its fellow, had its own brook, which after a time the road left on one side and began climbing the mountain by a steeper and more direct course than the water had followed. Here were more of the rare hastate-leaved violets, and another bunch of the barren strawberry, with hepatica, fringed polygala, mitrewort, bloodroot, and a pretty show of a remarkably large and handsome chickweed, of which I had seen much also in other places,--_Stellaria pubera_, or “great chickweed,” as I made it out. I was admiring these lowly beauties as I idled along (there was little else to admire just then, the wood being scrubby and the ground lately burned over), when I came to a standstill at the sound of a strange song from the bushy hillside a few paces behind me. The bird, whatever it was, had let me go by,--as birds so often do,--and then had broken out into music. I turned back at once, and made short work of the mystery,--a worm-eating warbler. Thanks to the fire, there was no cover for it, had it desired any. I had seen a bird of the same species a few days previously on the opposite side of the town,--looking like a red-eyed vireo rigged out with a fanciful striped head-dress,--and sixteen years before I had fallen in with a few specimens in the District of Columbia, but this was my first hearing of the song. The queer little creature was picking about the ground, feeding, but every minute or two mounted some low perch,--a few inches seemed to satisfy its ambition,--and delivered itself of a simple, short trill, similar to the pine warbler’s for length and form, but in a guttural voice decidedly unlike the pine warbler’s clear, musical whistle. It was not a very pleasing song, in itself considered, but I was very much pleased to hear it; for let the worldly-minded say what they will, a new bird-song is an event. With a single exception, it was the only new one, I believe, of my Virginia trip.