Suddenly, with an infinitely light, elastic effect that permeated all its vast area, the cloud began to uplift; the great grassy bald of the mountain towering above them showed its vast green dome as it were between precipitous white cliffs of still higher cloud mountains. An eagle's wing caught the sunlight as he soared above, beyond rifle range, and as he felt the rising wind his keen, exultant cry floated down to them. A tempered white glister suffused all the clouds about them; the sun was out, and as the illumined masses parted, the blue mountains afar off now glimmered with a dusky section of the quiet valley below, and again were veiled with the gleaming gauze. Between its shining folds a glittering green avenue opened out down the woods, as the surveyor, bending first to take sight, then holding his Jacob's staff stiffly before him, set out from the Big Hollow Boulder with a fair start and a long, elastic step; the two chain-bearers in file alertly followed, alternately bowing down and rising again, while the chain writhed through the grass between them like some living sinuous thing, ever and again drawn out tense and straight, and the echoes rang with the strophe and antistrophe of their sudden short cry, "Stick!" "Stuck!" "Stick!" "Stuck!" It might seem that all the oreads of the Great Smoky were set to flight by this invasion of their sylvan haunts, so many a flitting white robe fluttered elusive among the dense shadows of the trees, gone ere you could look again; so often a glistening white arm was upflung in the deepest green jungle of the laurel. They sprang up by every shadowy cliff and lurking chasm, by every hidden spring and trickling stream, and fled with tattered white scarfs streaming in the wind behind them. All the way the rout continued as Science came down the slope, led by a compass rather than the sun or the shadow, and with her votaries to mete out the freedom of the wilds, and the grace of the contour of the slopes, and the beauty of herbage and flowering growth, and the largess of the gracious earth, and to reduce all to an arbitrary scale, and judge it by the rod or perch or pole.