BLOWING ROCK 357 
reach, you lie back and watch the clouds sailing Hke 
white swans across the sky. Then you take out the 
bread you have brought, the most deHcious bread 
ever baked, for it has in some magical way acquired 
a flavor of blossoming laurel, and rippling brooks, 
and blue sky, and the joy of muscles in motion, of 
deep-drawn breath, of the lassitude of delicious 
exercise, with a lingering flavor of the spicy berries 
whose fragrance is in the air about you. Such bread 
as this is never eaten within the walls of a house. 
And then you rest on the warm hillside fanned by 
the cool breeze, for no matter how hot the summer 
sun, there is always a cool breeze in the high world 
at the back of the Grandfather. Before starting on, 
you must taste again of the exquisite feast spread 
for you and the birds, whose wings you hear as they 
come and go, fearless and ungrudging, for there is 
enough for all. 
Farther along on the mountain stands an old 
weather-boarded house whence you see Boone in the 
distance lying so sweetly among its mountains. A 
path here leads you down to a deserted cabin in a 
lovely hollow. That well-worn path at the doorstep 
leads to the spring only a few steps away, such a 
spring as one is always looking for and always finding 
at the back of the Grandfather. Its water is icy cold 
and it is walled about with moss-covered, fern-grown 
stones. This cabin in the lovely hollow, with its ice- 
cold spring, the surrounding fruit trees, the signs 
of flowers once cultivated, gives you a strange im- 
pulse to stop here, like a bird that has found its nest, 
