THE GRANDFATHER MOUNTAIN 365 
And your blackberry pudding, to be perfect, must 
be eaten in a tent, or sitting on a rock by a brookside, 
or in a shakedown bower under a big tree. Our 
dining-room is a bower roofed with evergreen boughs. 
Out through the open front, through the overhang- 
ing ends of the evergreen boughs, we see the top of 
the Grandfather Mountain and the clouds that come 
and go over it. 
The country people bring us food, apples, butter, 
eggs, and milk. The butter comes out of a tall 
earthenware churn whose dasher is moved up and 
down by a mountain friend whom we see sitting in 
the doorway of her house busily churning, with a 
background of the black interior in which are faintly 
outlined the kitchen utensils. Under the slopes of 
the Grandfather we go down the valley to pictur- 
esque houses shaded by fruit trees. 
Sometimes we spend the day on the Grandfather 
Mountain and such days cannot come too often. 
Sometimes we walk over the gap under Hanging 
Rock, or we cross over to Banner Elk, or go down to 
Linville, and wherever we walk the air stimulates like 
wine and the wayside is abloom with summer flowers, 
among them goldenrods and asters for memories of 
life in the North, and the hillsides are solid masses of 
white bloom, or they are yellow or pink with flowers, 
— but the slopes along the northern bank of the 
Watauga River are distinct in your mind from every- 
thing else. In the late summer they may be a mere 
tangle of flowers and plumy grasses, but did you not 
come along here once and discover them carpeted 
