IN QUEST OF RAVENS 67 



their taste. Now, however, as we drove 

 past, and just as I was bidding the place 

 good-by, a water thrush struck up his sim- 

 ple, lazily emphatic tune. " Here I am, 

 stranger," he might have been saying. Had 

 he been there all the time ? I did not know. 

 One's investigations are never complete, even 

 in the most limited area. 



We had not gone many miles farther be- 

 fore we took what was for me a new road, 

 which turned out presently to be like all the 

 others : a road running mostly through the 

 forest, uphill and downhill by turns, with 

 here and there, at long distances, a solitary 

 cabin, unpainted, perhaps unwindowed, yet 

 pretty certainly with a patch of sweet-william 

 and other old-fashioned flowers in the '* front 

 yard." The rudest one of all, in the very 

 lonesomest of clearings, had before the door 

 a magnificent eglantine bush that would 

 have made the fortune of any Northern gar- 

 dener. The mountain side might be all 

 aflame with azalea and laurel, but the wo- 

 man's heart must have a bit of garden, some- 

 thing planted and tended, to make the cabin 

 more like a home. 



For some hours we had been traveling 



