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        Books by Mr. Torrey.

    BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.
    A RAMBLER'S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.
    THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
    A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.
    SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE. 16mo, $1.25.

        HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
         BOSTON AND NEW YORK.




        SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE

                     BY

               BRADFORD TORREY


    We travelled in the print of olden wars;
        Yet all the land was green.

                           ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

               [Illustration]

            BOSTON AND NEW YORK
       HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
       The Riverside Press, Cambridge
                    1896




              Copyright, 1896,
             BY BRADFORD TORREY.

            _All rights reserved._


_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.




CONTENTS.


                                               PAGE

    AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE                  1

    LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN                             28

    CHICKAMAUGA                                  57

    ORCHARD KNOB AND THE NATIONAL CEMETERY       89

    AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVER                   102

    A MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS                113

    A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE                    124

    SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES                   183

    A LIST OF BIRDS                             213

    INDEX                                       221




SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.




AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.


I reached Chattanooga on the evening of April 26th, in the midst of
a rattling thunder-shower,--which, to look back upon it, seems to
have been prophetic,--and the next morning, after an early breakfast,
took an electric car for Missionary Ridge. Among my fellow-passengers
were four Louisiana veterans fresh from their annual reunion at
Birmingham, where, doubtless, their hearts had been kindled by much
fervent oratory, as well as by much private talk of those bygone days
when they did everything but die for the cause they loved. As the
car mounted the Ridge, one of them called his companions' attention
to a place down the valley where "the Rebels and the Yankees" (his
own words) used to meet to play cards. "A regular gambling-hole,"
he called it. Their boys brought back lots of coffee. In another
direction was a spot where the Rebels once "had a regular picnic,"
killing some extraordinary number of Yankees in some incredibly
brief time. I interrupted the conversation, and at the same time
made myself known as a stranger and a Northerner, by inquiring after
the whereabouts of Orchard Knob, General Grant's headquarters; and
the same man, who seemed to be the spokesman of the party, after
pointing out the place, a savin-sprinkled knoll between us and the
city, kindly invited me to go with him and his comrades up to the
tower,--on the site of General Bragg's headquarters,--where he would
show me the whole battlefield and tell me about the fight.

We left the car together for that purpose, and walked up the <DW72> to
the foot of the observatory,--an open structure of iron, erected by
the national government; but just then my ear caught somewhere beyond
us the song of a Bachman's finch,--a song I had heard a year before
in the pine woods of Florida, and, in my ignorance, was unprepared
for here. I must see the bird and make sure of its identity. It led
me a little chase, and when I had seen it I must look also at a
summer tanager, a chat, and so on, one thing leading to another; and
by the time I returned to the observatory the veterans had come down
and were under some apple-trees, from one of which the spokesman was
cutting a big walking-stick. He had stood under those trees--which
were now in bloom--thirty years before, he said, with General Bragg
himself.

I was sorry to have missed his story of the battle, and ashamed to
have seemed ungrateful and rude, but I forget what apology I offered.
At this distance it is hard to see how I could have got out of the
affair with much dignity. I might have heard all about the battle
from a man who was there, and instead I went off to listen to a
sparrow singing in a bush. I thought, to be sure, that the men would
be longer upon the observatory, and that I should still be in season.
Probably that was my excuse, if I made one; and in all likelihood
the veteran was too completely taken up with his own concerns to
think twice about the vagaries of a stray Yankee, who seemed to be
an odd stick, to say nothing worse of him. Well, the loss, such
as it was, was mine, not his; and I have lost too much time in the
way of business to fret over a little lost (or saved) in the way of
pleasure. As for any apparent lack of patriotic feeling, I suppose
that the noblest patriot in the world, if he chanced to be also an
ornithologist, would notice a bird even amid the smoke of battle; and
why should not I do as much on a field from which the battle smoke
had vanished thirty years before?

So I reason now; at the time I had no leisure for such sophistries.
Every moment brought some fresh distraction. The long hill--woodland,
brambly pasture, and shrubby dooryard--was a nest of singing birds;
and when at last I climbed the tower, I came down again almost as
suddenly as my Louisiana friends had done. The landscape,--the city
and its suburbs, the river, the mountains,--all this would be here
to-morrow; just now there were other things to look at. Here in the
grass, almost under my nose, were a pair of Bewick wrens, hopping
and walking by turns, as song sparrows may sometimes be found doing;
conscious through and through of my presence, yet affecting to
ignore it; carrying themselves with an indescribable and pretty
demureness, as if a nest were something never dreamed of by birds
of their kind; the female, nevertheless, having at that moment her
beak bristling with straws, while the male, a proud young husband,
hovered officiously about her with a continual sweetly possessive
manner and an occasional burst of song. Till yesterday Bewick's wren
had been nothing but a name to me. Then, somewhere after crossing the
state line, the train stopped at a station, and suddenly through the
open window came a song. "That's a Bewick wren," I said to myself,
as I stepped across the aisle to look out; and there he stood, on
the fence beside the track, his long tail striking the eye on the
instant. He sang again, and once again, before the train started.
Tennessee was beginning well with a visiting bird-gazer.

There must be some wrennish quality about the Bewick's song, it would
seem: else how did I recognize it so promptly? And yet, so far as I
am able to give an account of my own impressions, it had in my ears
no resemblance to any wren song I had ever heard. I think it never
suggested to me any music except the song sparrow's. The truth is, I
suppose, that we _feel_ resemblances and relationships of which the
mind takes no cognizance.

I wandered at a venture down the further <DW72>, turning this way and
that as a song invited me. Here were Southerners and Northerners
fraternally commingled: summer tanagers, Carolina wrens, blue-gray
gnatcatchers, cardinal grosbeaks, chats, Bachman finches, field
sparrows, chippers, white-throated sparrows, chewinks, indigo
buntings, black-poll warblers, myrtle-birds, prairie warblers, a
Maryland yellow-throat, a bay-breasted warbler, a black-and-white
creeper, a redstart, brown thrushes, catbirds, a single mocking-bird,
wood thrushes, red-eyed vireos, white-eyed vireos, wood pewees, a
quail, and, in the air, purple martins and turkey buzzards. On the
Ridge, as well as near the foot on our way up, a mocking-bird and a
wood thrush sang within hearing of each other. Comparison as between
birds so dissimilar is useless and out of place; but how shall a man
avoid it? The mocking-bird is a great vocalist,--yes, and a great
singer; but to my Northern ears the wood thrush carried the day with
his _voice_.

Having climbed the Ridge again,--though climbing might be thought
rather too laborious a word for so gradual a <DW72>,--and started
down on the side toward the city, I came to a patch of blackberry
vines, in the midst of which sat a thrasher on her nest, all a
mother's anxiety in her staring yellow eyes. Close by her stood
an olive-backed thrush. There, too, was my first hooded warbler,
a female. She escaped me the next instant, though I made an eager
chase, not knowing yet how common birds of her sort were to prove in
that Chattanooga country.

In my delight at finding Missionary Ridge so happy a hunting-ground
for an opera-glass naturalist, I went thither again the very
next morning. This time some Virginia veterans were in the car
(they all wore badges), and when we had left it, and were about
separating,--after a bit of talk about the battle, of course,--one
of them, with almost painful scrupulosity, insisted upon assuring me
that if the thing were all to be done over again, he should do just
as before. One of his comrades, seeing me a Northerner, interrupted
him more than once in a vain attempt to smooth matters over. They had
buried the hatchet, he said; let bygones be bygones. But the first
man was not to be cajoled with a phrase. He spoke without passion,
with no raising of the voice, quite simply and amicably: he too
accepted the result; the thing never _would_ be done over again; only
let his position be understood,--he had nothing to take back. It was
impossible not to respect such conscientiousness. For my own part, at
any rate, I felt no prompting to argue against it, being sufficiently
"opinionated" to appreciate a difficulty which some obstinate people
experience in altering their convictions as circumstances change,
or accepting the failure of a cause as proof of its injustice. If
a man is not _too_ obstinate, to be sure, time and the course of
events may bring him new light; but that is another matter. Once,
when the men were talking among themselves, I overheard one say, as
he pointed down the hill, "The Rebels were there, and the Union men
yonder." That careless recurrence of the word "Rebel" came to me as a
surprise.

The principal excitement of the morning was a glimpse of a Kentucky
warbler, a bird most peculiarly desired. I had finished my jaunt,
and was standing beside the bramble patch not far from the railway,
where I had seen the hooded warbler the day before, when the splendid
creature flashed into sight, saw me, uttered a volley of quick, clear
notes, and vanished up the hillside. I ran after him, but might as
well have remained where I was. "He _is_ a beauty!" I find written
in my notebook. And so he is, clothed in lustrous olive and the
most gorgeous of yellows with trimmings of black, all in the best
of taste, with nothing patchy, nothing fantastic or even fanciful.
I was again impressed with the abundance of chats, indigo-birds,
and white-eyed vireos. Bachman sparrows were numerous, also, in
appropriate localities,--dry and bushy,--and I noted a bluebird, a
yellow-throated vireo, and, shouting from a dead treetop, a great
crested flycatcher.

My most vivid recollection of this second visit, however, is of the
power of the sun, an old enemy of mine, by whom, in my ignorance
of spring weather in Tennessee, I allowed myself to be taken at a
cruel noonday disadvantage. Even now, in the deep frigidity of a
Massachusetts winter, I cannot think of Missionary Ridge without
seeing again those long stretches of burning sunshine, wherein the
least spot of shade was like a palm in the desert. In every such
shelter I used to stand awhile, bareheaded; then, marking the next
similar haven, so many rods ahead, I would hoist my umbrella and
push forward, cringing at every step as if I were crossing a field
under fire. Possibly I exaggerate, but, if I do, it is very little;
and though it be an abuse of an exquisite poem, I say over to myself
again and again a couplet of Miss Guiney's:--

    "Weather on a sunny ridge,
    Showery weather, far from here."

In truth, early as the season was, the excessive heat, combined with
a trying dog-day humidity, sadly circumscribed all my Tennessee
rambles. As for my umbrella, my obligations to it were such that
nothing but a dread of plagiarism has restrained me from entitling
this sketch "An Umbrella on Missionary Ridge." Nature never intended
me for a tropical explorer. Often I did nothing more than seek a
shady retreat and stay there, letting the birds come to me, if they
would.

Improved after this indolent fashion, one of the hottest of my
forenoons became also one of the most enjoyable. I left the car
midway up the Ridge,--at the angle of the Y,--and, passing my
thrasher's blackberry tangle and descending a wooded <DW72>, found
myself unexpectedly in a pleasant place, half wood, half grassy
field, through which ran a tiny streamlet, the first one I had seen
in this dry and thirsty land. Near the streamlet, on the edge of the
wood, quite by itself, stood a cabin of most forlorn appearance, with
a garden patch under the window,--if there _was_ a window, as to
which I do not remember, and the chances seem against it,--the whole
closely and meanly surrounded by a fence. In the door stood an aged
white woman, looking every whit as old and forlorn as the cabin, with
a tall mastiff on one side of her and a black cat on the other.

"Your dog and cat are good friends," I remarked, feeling it polite to
speak even to a stranger in so lonesome a spot.

"Yes," she answered gruffly, "they're good friends, only once in a
while he wants to kill her."

She said nothing more, and her manner did not encourage further
attempts at neighborly intercourse; but as I passed the cabin now and
then during the forenoon, the birds leading me about, I heard her
muttering often and at considerable length to her hens and ducks.
Evidently she enjoyed conversation as well as most people, only
she liked to pick her own company. She was "Aunt Tilly," I learned
afterwards, and had lived there by herself for many years; one of the
characters of the city, a fortune-teller, whose professional services
were in frequent request.

In this favored nook, especially along the watercourse, were many
birds, some