292 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
the most considerate and sympathetic comrade. 
Your comrade you need for the halt at the end of 
the day. But you should also often walk alone. 
And whether alone or companioned, you must never 
walk right on. You must linger along and listen 
attentively, and sniff the air for news, and you must 
look, not only at the clouds and the blue of the sky, 
at the distant landscape and the colors on the near 
slopes, but you must look at the ground. For there 
also you will get things to remember when the doors 
are shut on the wander-life. You will be able to 
recall, for instance, that brown slope where in the 
early summer you suddenly became aware of a round 
bright eye shining out near the ground close to a log. 
As you continue to look, a striped and speckled form 
becomes outlined among the fallen leaves, the sticks 
and the stones. Ah, yes! — a ruffed grouse, but why 
so still? Why did it not escape at your approach? 
You look attentively at the ground close about you 
— nothing — yes, — there so close to your foot 
that another step would have crushed out its little 
life is a round brown puffball with a stripe down its 
back, and close to it another, and another and an- 
other, until you have detached five new birdlings 
from the protective coloring of the ground. There 
are more, you know, but do your best you cannot 
find them. So you pick up the two nearest you, one 
after the other, and lay them in the palm of your 
hand. They show no sign of life excepting the shin- 
ing wide-open eyes. They are just hatched, yet here 
they are, the accomplished young frauds, exercising 
