The manager, an invaluable guest from New York, a doctor, who had served on the Sanitary Commission through the war, and I, formed the party. The manager drove the light buggy, which held one of us also, and the handbags 3 while the other rode by the side, where the road allowed, or before or behind, as the fancy seized him. We were bound for a solitary guest-house in the forest, some seventeen miles away, in the neighbourhood of a cave and waterfall which even here have a reputation, and are sometimes visited. We allowed three and a half hours for the journey, and it took all the time. About five miles an hour on wheels is all you can reckon on, for the country roads, sandy tracts about ten feet broad, are just left to take care of themselves, and wherever there is a sufficient declivity to give the rain a chance of washing all the surface off them, are just a heap of boulders of different sizes. But, after all, five miles an hour is as fast as you care to go, for the play of the sunlight amongst the varied foliage, and the new flora and fauna, keep you constantly interested and amused. I never regretted so much my ignorance of botany, for I counted some fourteen sorts of flowers in bloom, of which golden-rod and Michaelmas-daisy were the only ones I was quite sure I knew,--and by the way, the daisy of Parnassus, of which I found a single flower growing by a spring. The rest were like home flowers, but yet not identical with them--at least, I think not--and the doubt whether one had ever seen them before or not was provoking. The birds--few in number--were all strangers to me; buzzards, of which we saw five at one time, quite within shot, and several kinds of hawk and woodpecker, were the most common; but at one point, quite a number of what looked like very big swifts, but without the dash in their flight of our bird, and with wings more like curlews’, were skimming over the tree-tops..1 only heard one note, and that rather sweet, a cat-bird’s, the doctor thought; but he was almost as much a stranger in these woods as I. Happily, however, he was an old acquaintance of that delightful insect, the “tumble-bug,” to which he introduced me on a sandy bit of road. The gentleman in question took no notice of me, but went on rolling his lump of accumulated dirt three times his own size backwards with his hind legs, as if his life depended on it. Presently his lump came right up against a stone and stopped dead. It was a “caution” to see that bug strain to push it farther, but it wouldn’t budge, all he could do. Then he stopped for a moment or two, and evidently made up his small mind that something must be wrong behind, for no bug could have pushed harder than he. So he quitted hold with his hind legs, and turned round to take a good look at the situation, in order, I suppose, to see what must be done next. At any rate, he presently caught hold again on a different side, and so steered successfully past the obstacle. There