In the open field several Bachman finches were singing, while the woods were noisier, but less musical, with Maryland yellow-throats, black-poll warblers, tufted titmice, and two sorts of vireos. Sprinkled over the ground were the lovely spring beauty and the violet wood sorrel, with pentstemon, houstonia, and a cheerful pink phlox. Here I soon heard a second nuthatch, and fell into a kind of fever about its notes, which were clearer, less nasal, than those of our New England birds, it seemed to me, and differently phrased. Such peculiarities might indicate a local race, I said to myself, with that predisposition to surprise which is one of the chief compensations of life away from home. As I went on, a wood pewee and a field sparrow began singing,--two birds whose voices might have been tuned on purpose for such a place. Of the petulant, snappish cry of an Acadian flycatcher not quite the same could be said. One of the "unreconstructed," I was tempted to call him. The Kelly house, on the way to which through the woods my Yankee eyes were delighted with the sight of loose patches of rue anemones, was duly marked with a tablet, and proved to be a cabin of the most primitive type, standing in the usual bit of fenced land (the smallness of the houseyards, as contrasted with the miles of open country round about, is a noticeable feature of Southern landscapes), with a corn-house near by, and a tumble-down barn across the way. For some time I sat beside the road, under an oak; then, seeing two women, older and younger, inside the house, I asked leave to enter, the doors being open, and was made welcome with apparent heartiness. The elderly woman soon confided to me that she was seventy-six years old,--a marvelous figure she seemed to consider it; and when I tried to say something about her comparative youthfulness, and the much greater age of some ladies of my acquaintance (no names being mentioned, of course), she would only repeat that she was awful old, and shouldn't live much longer. She meant to improve the time, however,--and the unusual fortune of a visitor,--and fairly ran over with talk. She didn't belong about here. Oh no; she came from "'way up in Tennessee, a hundred and sixty miles!" "'Pears like I'm a long way from home," she said,--"a hundred and sixty miles!" Again I sought to comfort her. That wasn't so very far. What did she think of me, who had come all the way from Massachusetts? She threw up her hands, and ejaculated, "Oh, Lor'!" with a fervor to which a regiment of exclamation points would scarcely do justice. Yet she had but a vague idea of where Massachusetts was, I fancy; for pretty soon she asked, "Where did you say you was from? Pennsylvany?" And when I said, "Oh no, Massachusetts, twice as far as that," she could only repeat, "Oh, Lor'!" Her grandson was at work in the park, and she had come down to live with him and his wife. But she shouldn't live long.