As for my experience with the family in Tennessee, I was glad, of course, to scrape acquaintance--or to renew it, as the case might be--with the more southern species, the Kentucky, the hooded, the cerulean, the blue-wing, and the yellow-throat: that was partly why I was here; but perhaps I enjoyed quite as keenly the sight of our own New England birds moving homeward; tarrying here and there for a day, but not to be tempted by all the allurements of this fine country; still pushing on, northward, and still northward, as if for them there were no place in the world but the woods where they were born. Of the southern species just named, the Kentucky was the most abundant, with the hooded not far behind. The prairie warbler seemed about as common here as in its favored Massachusetts haunts; but unless my ear was at fault its song went somewhat less trippingly: it sounded labored,--too much like the scarlet tanager's in the way of effort and jerkiness. Unlike the golden warbler, the prairie was found not only in the lower country, but--in less numbers--on Walden's Ridge. The two warblers that I listed every day, no matter where I went, were the chat and the black-and-white creeper. When all is said, the Kentucky, with its beauty and its song, is the star of the family, as far as eastern Tennessee is concerned. I can hear it now, while Falling Water goes babbling past in the shade of laurel and rhododendron. As for the chat, it was omnipresent: in the valley, along the river, on Missionary Ridge, on Lookout Mountain, on Walden's Ridge, in the national cemetery, at Chickamauga,--everywhere, in short, except within the city itself. In this regard it exceeded the white-eyed vireo, and even the indigo-bird, I think. Black-polls were seen daily up to May 13, after which they were missing altogether. The last Cape May and the last yellow-rump were noted on the 8th, the last redstart and the last palm warbler on the 11th, the last chestnut-side, magnolia, and Canadian warbler on the 12th. On the 12th, also, I saw my only Wilson's blackcap. In my last outing, on the 18th, on Walden's Ridge, I came upon two Blackburnians in widely separate places. At the time, I assumed them to be migrants, in spite of the date. One of them was near the hotel, on ground over which I had passed almost daily. Why they should be so behindhand was more than I could tell; but only the day before I had seen a thrush which was either a gray-cheek or an olive-back, and of course a bird of passage. "The flight of warblers did not pass entirely until May 19," says Mr. Jeffries, writing of what he saw in western North Carolina.[6]