I gazed upon the farms of Lookout Valley and the mountains beyond. A scarlet tanager called,--my second one here,--wood thrush voices rang through the mountain side forest, a single thrasher was doing his bravest from the tip of a pine (our "brown mocking-bird" is anything but a skulker when the lyrical mood is on him), while wood pewees, red-eyed vireos, yellow-throated vireos, black-and-white creepers, and I do not remember what else, joined in the chorus. Just after noon an oven-bird gave out his famous aerial warble. To an aspiring soul even a mountain top is but a perch, a place from which to take wing. All these birds, it will be noticed, were such as I might have seen in Massachusetts; and indeed, the general appearance of things about me was pleasantly homelike. Here was much of the pretty striped wintergreen, a special favorite of mine, with bird-foot violets, the common white saxifrage (dear to memory as the "Mayflower" of my childhood), the common wild geranium (cranesbill, which we were told was "good for canker"), and maple-leaved viburnum. One of the loveliest flowers was the pink oxalis, and one of the commonest was a pink phlox; but I was most pleased, perhaps, with the white stonecrop (_Sedum ternatum_), patches of which matted the ground, and just now were in full bloom. The familiar look of this plant was a puzzle to me. I cannot remember to have seen it often in gardens, and I am confident that I never found it before in a wild state except once, fifteen years ago, at the Great Falls of the Potomac. Yet here on Lookout Mountain it seemed almost as much an old friend as the saxifrage or the cranesbill.