Near Cumberland The Finest Of Mountain Scenery Is Spread Out Before You.

Here you see many beds of tilted strata, vast rocks standing on their heads as it were.

How vast and immeasurable the forces to bring to these hills their present contour! How wonderful still those forces at work crumbling these rocks, forming new soil for myriads of new plants to gladden the place with their beauty. Beauty lingers all around; there is much knowledge never learned from books and you receive from many sources, invitations to pursue and enjoy it. How one gazes at those glorious hills clad in their many green hues or distant purple outlines lest their beauty be lost! You will need neither notebook nor camera to aid you in the future to recall their loveliness, for those haunting distances, mysterious illuminations and filmy veils will make delicate yet indelible etchings on your memory while those blue barriers, thrusting their graceful and smoothly-flowing outlines into a clear sky, will remain as long as memories of beautiful things last.

>From scene to scene we drifted along, enchanted, now gazing at a broader, more wondrous view from some lofty ridge, now looking upward in mute admiration and wonder from some charming valley, now seeing again and again the wondrous beauty of the trees, flowers and ferns, now gazing far out over some point to streams and woods and softly lighted fields or vast orchards whose straight rows disappear over the edge of some distant hill to reappear upon another. "In the midst of such manifold scenery where all is so marvelously beautiful, he would be a laggard indeed" who was not touched by its import.

Here, along the roadside where the woods started to climb those high rocky hills, grew innumerable ferns and wild flowers. Great Osmundas, the most beautiful fern of all this region, were like palms, so graceful and airy did their broad fronds appear. Here, too, the giant brake with its single umbrella-like frond appeared clad in its bright green robes; then where the shade became more dense the lovely maiden-hair with its fragile, graceful wave-edged leaflets swayed on its delicate dark brown stems, and the ostrich fern stood in vase-like clusters along the mountain side or spread their lovely fronds along some river bank, while the dainty bladder bulblet draped ravines, gorges and steep banks of streams with long feathery fronds whose points overlapped the delicate light green of which formed a vast composite picture in sunlight and shadow. Here we first discovered the lizard's-tail, a tall plant crowned with a terminal spike whose point bent gracefully over, no doubt giving it its name. The stout stalks of elecampane with their large leaves and yellowish brown flowers were seen, and numerous small plants peeped from among their rich setting of vines and mosses. If the ferns are numerous, charming the eye with delicate and graceful beauty, the birds are more so, delighting the ear with their rich and varied melodies.

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