By a circuitous course the wood road brought me to a larger cabin, in a larger clearing. Here a pleasant-spoken, neighborly woman, with a child in her arms, called off her dog, and pointed out a path beyond a pair of bars. That path, she said, would carry me to the river,--to the water's edge. And so it did, down a pleasant wooded hillside, which an unwonted profusion of bushes and ferns made exceptionally attractive. At the end of the path a lordly elm and a lordlier buttonwood, both of them loaded with lusty vines (besides clusters of mistletoe, I believe), gave me shelter from the sun while I sat and gazed at the strong eager current of the Tennessee hurrying onward without a ripple. As my foot touched the beach a duck--I could not tell of what kind--sprang out of the water and went dashing off. She had learned her lesson. In the duck's primer one of the first questions is: "What is a man?" and the answer follows: "Man is a gun-bearing animal." In the treetops a golden warbler and a redstart were singing. Then I heard a puffing of steam, and by and by a tug came round a turn, pushing laboriously up stream a loaded barge. It was the Ocoee of Chattanooga, and the two or three mariners on board seemed to find the sight of a stranger in that unlooked-for place a welcome break in the monotony of their inland voyage. On the bushy, ferny slope, as I returned, two Kentucky warblers were singing in opposite directions. So I called them, at all events. But they were too far away to be gone after, as my mood then was, and soon I began to wonder whether I might not be mistaken. Possibly they were Carolina wrens, whose _cherry_ is not altogether unlike the Kentucky's _klurwee_. The question will perhaps seem unreasonable to readers long familiar with the two birds; but let them put themselves in a stranger's place, remembering that this was only his third or fourth hearing of the Kentucky's music. As the doubt grew on me (and nothing grows faster than doubt) I sat down and listened. Yes, they were Kentuckies; but anon the uncertainty came back, and I kept my seat. Then a sound of humming-bird wings interrupted my cogitations, and in another moment the bird was before me, sipping at a scarlet catchfly,--battlefield pink. I caught the flash of his throat. It was as red as the flower--beyond which there is nothing to be said. Then he vanished (rather than went away), as humming-birds do; but in ten minutes he was there again. I was glad to see him. Birds of his kind were rare about Chattanooga, though afterwards, in the forests of Walden's Ridge, they became as common as I ever saw them anywhere. The two invisible Kentuckies wore out my patience, but as I came to the bars another sang near me. Him, by good luck, I saw in the act, and for the time, at least, my doubts were quieted.