172 



AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



whim, or for premeditated fame, they have left their 

 names recorded. I have seen the date 1853 upon 

 a beech, yet plain after fifty years. I recall also 

 one other tree — this, too, a beech — with weather- 

 worn initials upon it and the date 1864, the letters 

 being not quite legible and the figures just barely 

 discernible as such; and two other trees, with the years 

 1866 and 1867 upon them, still distinguishable, though 

 the bark, was cracked and spread apart, and the letter- 

 ing consequently badly checkered. Mr. John Bur- 

 roughs, in his essay on "Nature in England," in "Fresh 

 Fields," speaks of the soft stones of the bridges and 

 churches in England as being all carved up with 

 initials, some of them over a century old. On Look- 

 out Mountain an old mountaineer with whom I went 

 deer hunting told me of a place a few miles from the 

 road where the trees were literally lined and tattooed 

 with bullets and initials put there by soldiers in the 

 Civil War. They had camped on that spot for a 

 time, and had left their names on many of the trees, 

 and had used the trunks as a backstop in target practice; 

 and, of course, one can frequently see evidences of the 

 soldiers' presence in the old splintered stumps on other 

 parts of the mountain, in which cannon-balls sometimes 

 found their final lodgment. 



But decidedly the most interesting script that I have 

 yet seen anywhere in any woods is the writing of an 

 English schoolmaster of this village, who lived for a 

 time at the homestead, and whose wood-carving on 

 the trees is therefore known to have been cut there long 

 "befo' de wah." There were two fine large beeches 

 in this woods which he chose as his favorites, to be the 

 recording recipients of his feelings. Upon one of 



