40 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
soft haze, seem far away and unreal. The air is 
saturated with odors distilled from the earth and the 
tree- tops; fragrance streams as it were from the 
pores of things, and the aroma of the budding for- 
est ascends like incense from the earth. 
Although the early spring is so ethereal in its 
beauty, shortly after the blossoming of the peach 
trees a remarkable change takes place in the general 
coloring of the landscape. The first delicacy and 
tenderness are for a time replaced by emerald green 
and other greens so strongly tinted with yellow as to 
need all the weight of the darker pines and the more 
sombre of the hardwood trees to tone down the 
vividness of the coloring. Pictures made at this time 
are laughed at and called impossible by those who 
have not been here to see how much gayer the real- 
ity is than any brush could paint. Yet above all 
this riot, the forest, serene and enchanting, smiles 
like a sedate mother at the gay spirits of her children. 
In course of time these brilliant hues tone down 
and blend together. 
As the season advances, the earth puts forth 
blossoms more and more freely. Those banks of snow 
that fill whole ravines, those white ghosts that glim- 
mer in the woods, are the white-flowering dogwood 
trees in bloom. Those rifts of rosy red along the ra- 
vines and on the slopes are the close-set blossoms 
of the Judas-tree or red-bud that open at just this 
moment as though to heighten the effect of the snowy 
dogwood. The pines wake up with the other growths. 
They are always green, it is true, but they have 
