28o THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
clouds, your spirit is stunned by depths of black 
thunder abysses and exalted by the softly shining 
tints of the morning sky. 
And in the open you acquire a new sense. You 
learn to smell. The most sensitive and poetical of 
all our senses, in the cities becomes deadened from 
disuse. But one day, in the sweet, clean air of the 
mountains, one makes the charming discovery that 
one can smell! Perhaps, going along a lonely road, 
there comes a sudden waft of delicious fragrance — 
ah, strawberries! — where are they? There is no one 
to tell, but the fragrance is wafted to you again, a 
little more certainly, and so you go in the direction 
indicated; again it comes, but fainter; you turn and 
try again, and soon you are sure and go straight to 
the knoll beyond the fence where the ground is red 
with the ripe fruit. Sitting down and tasting a berry 
here and there, you detect a flavor that exists only 
for him who has smelled his way to the feast. With 
the tuning-up of the senses come pleasures unguessed 
in the grosser uses of these divine faculties. One 
sometimes hears music in the fall of water over a 
cliff, in the sweep of the wind through forest trees, 
in the mingling crashes of a thunderstorm, or smells 
harmonies in the flowers, or tastes rhythmic cadences 
in a wild berry. 
And then at the spring of icy water you quench 
your thirst with something of the same elation you 
felt in the flavor of the strawberries, for did you not 
trace your way to this spring by reasoning out where 
it ought to be, and then finding the path that led 
