The rain slackened after a while, though it was long in ceasing altogether, and I went to the nearest railway station (Sunset Station, I believe) and waited half an hour for a train to the Point, chatting meanwhile with the young man in charge of the relic-counter. Then, at the Point, I waited again--this time to enjoy the prospect and see how the weather would turn--till a train passed on "the broad gauge" below. Just beyond Fort Cloud it ran into a fine old forest, and a sudden notion took me to go straight down through the woods and spend the rest of the day rambling in that direction. The weather had still a dubious aspect, but, with motive enough, some things can be trusted to Providence, and, the steepness of the descent accelerating my pace, I was soon on the sleepers, after which it was but a little way into the woods. Once there, I quickly forgot everything else at the sound of a new song. But _was_ it new? It bore some resemblance to the ascending scale of the blue yellow-back, and might be the freak of some individual of that species. I stood still, and in another minute the singer came near and sang under my eye; the very bird I had been hoping for,--a cerulean warbler in full dress; as Dr. Coues says, "a perfect little beauty." He continued in sight, feeding in rather low branches,--an exception to his usual habit, I have since found,--and sang many times over. His complaisance was a piece of high good fortune, for I saw no second specimen. The strain opens with two pairs of notes on the same pitch, and concludes with an upward run much like the blue yellow-back's, or perhaps midway between that and the prairie warbler's. So I heard it, I mean to say. But everything depends upon the ear. Audubon speaks of it as "extremely sweet and mellow" (the last a surprising word), while Mr. Ridgway is quoted as saying that the bird possesses "only the most feeble notes." The woods of themselves were well worth a visit: extremely open, with broad barren spaces; the trees tall, largely oak,--chestnut oak, especially,--but with chestnut, hickory, tupelo, and other trees intermingled. Here, as afterward on Walden's Ridge, I was struck with the almost total absence of mosses, and the dry, stony character of the soil,--a novel and not altogether pleasing feature in the eyes of a man accustomed to the mountain forests of New England, where mosses cover every boulder, stump, and fallen log, while the feet sink into sphagnum as into the softest of carpets.