To California 
were meeting me at every step. But these 
Cumberland Mountains were timbered with 
oak, and were not unlike Wisconsin hills piled 
upon each other, and the strange plants were 
like those that were not strange. The sky was 
changed only a little, and the winds not by a 
single detectible note. Therefore, neither was 
Tennessee a strange land. 
But soon came changes thick and fast. After 
passing the mountainous corner of North Car- 
olina and a little way into Georgia, I beheld 
from one of the last ridge-summits of the Alle- 
ghanies that vast, smooth, sandy slope that 
reaches from the mountains to the sea. It is 
wooded with dark, branchy pines which were 
all strangers to me. Here the grasses, which 
are an earth-covering at the North, grow wide 
apart in tall clumps and tufts like saplings. 
My known flower companions were leaving me 
now, not one by one as in Kentucky and Ten- 
nessee, but in whole tribes and genera, and com- 
panies of shining strangers came trooping upon 
me in countless ranks. The sky, too, was 
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