IT comes slowly, which is its unique charm. In the North the spring holds back, then comes with a rush, tumbles its treasures in a heap at your feet, and is gone. Here the spirit of the South prevails, and the spring gradually unfolds for three months, rising in a strong, slow tide that finally breaks over the land in a tremendous flood of color and fragrance and song.

As early as February the alders wake up and shake out their tassels. Small, dark-purple violets peep out from the dead leaves of the woods. The delicious fragrance that comes and goes you quickly trace to the clumps of brown-capped, purple little flowers of the Carolina pine-sap that are pushing up everywhere in the woods. The tops of the maple trees kindle to fire, and the colors of the leafless twigs everywhere begin to brighten.

As March draws near, that illusive spring feeling gets into the air, and that odor of spring that so powerfully exhales from nothing in particular. The peeping of frogs is heard, and up the wind come the voices of the people unconsciously singing the universal hymn of spring.

The trees are suddenly alive with birds. They, too, have felt that monition of spring in the air, and are on their way from the Far South to the Far North. Flocks of robins and bluebirds appear as by magic, then, along with other flocks that have spent the winter with us, they vanish, off, no doubt, to build their nests in more northern climes.

The chickadee, the titmouse, the nuthatch, the junco, the pine warbler, and many another lovely guest that has fed from our porch railing all winter, now share with flocks of migrants that remain with us a few days at a time. Birds on all sides are ecstatically singing. What marvelous outpourings come from that most joyful of songsters, the Carolina wren! Suddenly a new note is heard in the chorus that has broken out everywhere, the veery has discovered the coming of spring. A flock of song sparrows alighting in a budding tree-top all begin to sing at once, until it seems as though the tree had suddenly blossomed out in a bouquet of song. New life thrills the cardinal bird, who pours forth love-notes as he flashes, a streak of fire, through the air. Finches, tanagers, creepers, chats, woodpeckers, - birds, red, yellow, blue, and green, show like flowers among the trees, some to pass on, some to remain with us through the summer.

The peach trees have burst into bloom, and on the ground in the woods you find clusters of pink. tipped buds and a few white blossoms peeping out from the evergreen leaves of the arbutus that carpets the woods in places. This is the beginning of a procession of flowers that might bewilder one in a more hasty climate, but here there is also opulence in the matter of time. There is no hurry. The "pretties," as the children here call all flowers, will linger day after day, week after week. Anemones, trilliums, ginger, eyebrights, violets, adder's-tongue, bloodroot, hepaticas, all one's old friends have suddenly appeared as well as many a lovely stranger. All one's old friends would still be here if one came from the South instead of the North, for these mountains are a centre for the flora of the different sections of the country.

There are certain flowers whose coming marks an era in spring itself, not because of their size or brilliancy, but because of some inherent quality that charms. Such a flower is the Iris verna. One thinks of the irises as inhabiting wet places, but not so this one, which grows everywhere in the dry woods, so charming a thing that having seen it one ever after associates it with the beauty of these forest floors. You watch as eagerly for the first iris as for the first arbutus. It is only three or four inches high, its color a clear amethyst blue, and besides being so lovely to look at, it is perfumed like a hothouse violet; that is to say, the variety with a touch of orange-yellow near the centre is so perfumed. There is one with a white centre, more delicate in color and contour than the other, a dream of beauty as one looks across gardens of it on some mountain-side, but it has no fragrance.

With the Iris verna appears the bird's-foot violet, also in the dry woods and pale violet-blue in color. Poised on a long stem with its lovely face held up to the sky, this large calm violet lends peculiar charm to the woods among the grays and delicate young greens of the forest floor.

While the irises and violets are yet in bloom the heavy buds of the pink azaleas slowly expand, the scales open, and airy flowers emerge in bright clusters that light up shady corners in the woods and brim the forest with their faint, refreshing fragrance. Like all the rest they linger long. There is no hurry.

About the time that the pink azaleas begin to open, the earliest of the rhododendrons - those that tapestry the damp walls of the ravines with patterns of twisted limbs and thick evergreen leaves - become embroidered with clusters of blush-rose and cream-white blossoms.

But there are other signs of spring than the coming of birds and flowers. As the season advances, the dark tracery of the trees becomes intermingled with many colors as young leaves bud out of the stiff twigs and rival the flowers in beauty. As you now look off at the mountains, new colors appear among the dark pine trees. Pale green creeps daintily up the ravines proclaiming the awakening of the tuliptrees. Budding hardwood trees everywhere mingle delicate shades of pink and yellow and silver-white, soft greens, and bronze-reds, with the dark green of the pines. The forest is transformed, it gives the impression of one wreathed in smiles. The tide of life is rising strongly though yet slowly.

The mountains, most of the time enveloped in a soft haze, seem far away and unreal. The air is saturated with odors distilled from the earth and the tree-tops; fragrance streams as it were from the pores of things, and the aroma of the budding forest ascends like incense from the earth.

Although the early spring is so ethereal in its beauty, shortly after the blossoming of the peach trees a remarkable change takes place in the general coloring of the landscape. The first delicacy and tenderness are for a time replaced by emerald green and other greens so strongly tinted with yellow as to need all the weight of the darker pines and the more sombre of the hardwood trees to tone down the vividness of the coloring. Pictures made at this time are laughed at and called impossible by those who have not been here to see how much gayer the reality is than any brush could paint. Yet above all this riot, the forest, serene and enchanting, smiles like a sedate mother at the gay spirits of her children. In course of time these brilliant hues tone down and blend together.

As the season advances, the earth puts forth blossoms more and more freely. Those banks of snow that fill whole ravines, those white ghosts that glimmer in the woods, are the white- -flowering dogwood trees in bloom. Those rifts of rosy red along the ravines and on the slopes are the close-set blossoms of the Judastree or red-bud that open at just this moment as though to heighten the effect of the snowy dogwood. The pines wake up with the other growths.

They are always green, it is true, but they have something in reserve for spring, every plume becoming tipped with fresh color as the petalless flowers, and later the groups of young needles, push out to the light. With the severe forms of the pines thus wreathed in garlands of spring, the transformation of the woods is complete.

Throughout this enticing season it is impossible to stay indoors. Household cares by some divine alchemy are transmuted into unimportant details of the real life. Urgent business, it is discovered, can just as well wait until to-morrow. There is no hurry. The real duty of the moment is to walk abroad, or drive, or ride a gentle horse through the mazes of the awakening world. Wherever one goes flowers greet the eye, violets, pinks, saxifrages, columbines - flowers familiar and flowers new. Gay butterflies are dancing about them like flowers with wings, and bright birds are singing everywhere.

You climb the mountains to look for orchids and lilies and other rare blossoms. And many a time you traverse the lovely Pacolet Valley at the foot of Tryon Mountain, not only to see the flowers, but because of the delicate beauty that crowns it as a whole. For with its gentle, inclosing mountains, with the wonderful light filling it to the brim, with the exquisite colors that in the early morning and towards night, and at certain times even at midday, seem to convert the solid substance of the earth into an enchanting dream fabric, it is one of those creations of nature that have given us our poetic fancies of super-earthly beauty. And it was here, in the valley

at Lynn, that Sidney Lanier, who sang with in, spired soul of the dawn he so loved, of the trees, the marshes, the sky; - it was here in the beautiful valley that America's most tuneful poet "waited for the dawn " through that last night of pain on earth.

As you go about in the season of flowers, you can trace the water-courses by the white foam of the silverbell tree standing close-ranked, every twig and branch fringed with delicate white bells. And when you approach a ford or a stream you may see the earth hidden under the dainty little shrub yellow-root with its charming foliage and its lacework of small purplebrown flowers, a plant whose decorative value is well known to the landscape gardener, who masses it along his roadways and under his trees, but which perhaps he may not always know is a monotypic genus, its only species being found along the eastern side of the New World; according to the botanies, though the wiseacres will shake their heads at this, and point a prophetic finger across the globe to the Celestial Empire that to-day is so fast giving up its many hoarded secrets.

That waft of refreshing fragrance comes from the fringe-bush whose loose clusters of lacy white flowers you see on the opposite bank. What is more significant than this dainty and exquisite thing growing securely on the wild mountain-side? And how came it here when all other members of its family live in that remote Chinese Empire so mysteriously connected with us through the life of the plants? What was the bond that united us in past geologic ages? And what tore those tender flowers asunder, separating them by continents and vast seas?

When blossom the blackberry bushes that crowd into every cleared spot and border the paths and the roads, it is worth while going out just to see them, though it would be impossible to go out without seeing them, for the hedgerows everywhere are white like banks of snow. At their bloomingtime in April or early May comes a cold storm called the " blackberry blossom storm," as a similar spell of bad weather in the North when the apple trees are out is called the "appleblossom storm."

About Traumfest the blackberry has a rival in the Japanese honeysuckle, that, having escaped from the gardens, densely covers banks and open places. Red clay evidently suits it. It buries a stone wall or a fence in a year or two, blossoms tremendously, and loads the air with its delicious perfume. But out in the woods you will find a wild honeysuckle as lovely and as fragrant as its Japanese cousin and with blossoms greatly resembling it, reminding us of that mysterious relationship between the plants of the East and the West; only it is less importunate than its imported relative, it does not smother the earth, but twines about the bushes in a modest manner, and its beautiful white flowers have richer tones of yellow and are sometimes flushed with pink. The red trumpet honeysuckle, loved by every child, also twines about the bushes on the mountain-side in company with other beautiful and fragrant members of the same family.

The heavy curtains of leucothoe that hang over the water-courses have become embroidered with long white flower spikes. And walking at higher levels you will come across the little umbrella-leaf with its uplifted head of white flowers. You might not notice it among the wealth of more striking blossoms all about you, but you will never pass it unheeding when you remember that there is only one other known species of its family, and that that one opens its flowers in far-away Japan.

If interested in these curious relationships, you will find on these mountains many a modest flower whose genealogy is inextricably intertwined with the flowers of the Orient. In this mysterious sisterhood is the wistaria that so often adorns our homes and which is most closely connected in our thoughts with Japan, which we imagine ever wreathed in wistaria blossoms, as we see them twining about the screens and the drawings that come from that far land to us. It is the Japanese wistaria we cultivate and with which we are familiar, though we ourselves have one member of this very ornamental family. You will come upon our wistaria sometime in your wanderings in the lower mountains, where it will be seen climbing the trees and covering them with its mantle of leaves and its myriads of close bunches of purple-blue flowers, a charming thing whose day among the petted darlings of the garden doubtless yet will come.

Of course, growing everywhere over the mountains, though more abundantly and of larger size in the higher mountains, is the highly prized galax, whose silky round leaves, green in summer, and rich wine-red in winter and spring, have taken the fancy of the city florist, sometimes to the discomfiture of the collector, who gets large orders for wine-red leaves in the summer from haughty florists who cannot be induced to believe that red galax leaves, like

red currants, have their season. One can have no idea what a really charming thing the galax is until one sees it thickly carpeting the woods. And what one never discovers, from seeing it in the stiff circles with which it surrounds the city nosegay, is that in the early summer it sends up all over the forest floor dainty white flower spikes. It, too, has its mystery and its romance, for who can doubt, learning that it is classed as a monotypic genus of eastern North America, that it has its kinsfolk across the earth, beckoning us to recognize the relationship between the races we look upon as our antipodes?

Huckleberries soon begin to blossom, but prettier than the flowers are the little bright red leaves that add so much to the color of the forest floor in early spring. And there is the sparkleberry, whose palegreen, neat-looking bushes are all a-dangle with little snow-white bells crowded as close as can be on their slender, swinging stems, precursors of the palegreen berries that make a great show because there are so many of them. The people sometimes make jelly of these berries, amazing jelly as bitter as gall.

Important and beautiful as are all these flowers and budding leaves, the woods do not quite belong to you until you have found something in them to chew. Then they are yours in an intimate and peculiar manner. This desire to taste is doubtless a survival of the child in us that we never quite outgrow. When we go into the woods we in a sense revert to a more primitive state, and the sight of sassafras excites the gustatory nerve. Sassafras is abundant. It blossoms like a burst of sunshine along the edges of the yet leafless woods, each of its bare branches terminating in a pretty amber ball of delicately fragrant and fringe-like flowers. There is . nothing prettier than sassafras with the sun behind its blossoming twigs. One recalls a sassafras grove on a mountain slope that seemed to have been purposely planted, the trees were so regular in size and position, but the poor soul who owned it said it was a potato-field, and that the harder he tried to root out the sassafras the better it grew. We who do not depend upon sassafras-land for our potatoes love the aromatic plant whose roots, stems, leaves, and flowers yield a pleasant fragrance as well as a pleasant flavor to those who have not outgrown their youthful habit of browsing in the woods; and whose history has also its finer flavor of romance, since the sassafras exists as a single species in the eastern part of the New World, while one other species has been found in China.

With the sassafras one often finds its near relative the spice-bush, whose botanical name is Benzoin, because of its fragrance, and whose pungent, camphorflavored bark is also pleasant to the taste. There are seven known species of the spice-bush, two in the eastern United States, the others in Asia. Another shrub that belongs to us and eastern Asia and that tempts one to nibble is what the people here call "sweet bubbies." It appears in old-fashioned Northern gardens under the name of sweet-scented or flowering or strawberry shrub, but every child who has warmed the stiff, maroon-colored flowers in his hand - and what child has not? - will tell you instantly that "sweet bubbies" is the preferable and proper name. The mountain children warm the sweet bubbies in their hands, but they do not have to go to a favored corner of some garden to find one. They can pick a bushel of them along the roadside within. a stone's throw of the house. Like the sassafras, the sweet bubby is spicy to the core; leaf, root, and branch possessing an agreeable flavor.

"Horse sugar," the only North American member of its family, which otherwise lives in South America, Asia, and Australasia, is another early blossoming

shrub whose flower clusters of little close-set balls of yellow fringe are fragrant and whose bark is aromatic. Its sweetish leaves, which the people say horses like to eat, have given it its popular name, but the botany, scorning frivolity, christens it Symplocos tinctoyia.

Of course sap that has exuded from the pine tree, when it hardens to just the right consistency, affords never-failing solace to children of all ages who belong to the woods. Then there are the tips of the pine twigs that leave such a clean and pleasant flavor in the mouth. We wanderers of the earth enjoy the forest with all our senses, and with its fragrance, its colors, its sounds, and its sweet juices we seem also to imbibe something of its freshness and its greatness.

THE early flowers are only the prelude in the floral drama that reaches its climax when the mountain laurel, the flame-colored azaleas, and the rhododendrons come upon the scene. Their appearance converts the earth into a spectacle difficult to imagine, and although the outburst is so prodigious, there is no hurry, it is sustained, hanging suspended as it were in almost equal intensity for a month or more. It takes place in the lower mountains in May, in the higher ones, in June and July.

One gets the first hint of what is coming when, driving up a certain mountain near Traumfest, one sees the snowy drifts of the dogwood through a veil of bright red-bud in the misty ravines; that mountain from whose side one looks down to where beyond the hills the lowlands spread, reaching like a summer sea to the far horizon, the lowlands that wherever visible give an illusion of the sea that is sometimes wonderfully real, distance lending a misty blue to the level landscape out of which roll lines of hills like breakers white-crested with smoke or mist or "deadenings." A log cabin shaded by a large weeping willow rests in a hollow on the mountain. Fig trees and rose-bushes grow about it, and a spring of cold water gushes out of the ground. From the back door a winding path leads across a tiny "branch," across a hillside and across a hollow. Here while the dogwood is yet in bloom, one gets a glimpse of the flames that are presently to set the mountains ablaze. This first sight of flame-colored azaleas can never be forgotten. You come suddenly upon great clusters of flowers that blaze forth in a splendor that quickens the pulse. It seems incredible that anything could come to such perfection of beauty in the rude environment of the mountainside where so many plants struggle together for life. Even the celebrated azaleas of Ghent, the pride of the hothouse, pale before the marvelous beauty of these wild growths.

All flowers are imprisoned sunshine in a figurative sense, but of no others does that seem so literally true as of these. They appeal to the imagination as delicate flames incarnate. Each bush has its own colors. Before you stands one whose blossoms are the color of flames, beyond it is a bush clad in crimson bloom, and there behind the bright-green leaves of young trees one sees a blaze of scarlet. Orange-yellow shading to pale flame glows on the edge of the hollow; a regal bush blossoming with the gold of ripe lemons stands a little apart; as you look up the near hillside, your eye is caught by wonderful bronze tints, by shades of pink, and elusive pale-rose tints. In this arras of exquisitely blended colors, soft shadows lying on the petals yet more mingle their hues together.

You feel as if something important had happened as you turn away from this your first view of the flame-colored azaleas in their native soil. You have a sense of possession and gratitude to the generosity that thus presents to you, not a laboriously cultivated plant in a pot, or even a great bed in a country garden, but a mountain-side of incomparable flowers as free as the air.

The road up Rocky Spur at the time of the carnival of flowers is a succession of pictures where blossoming bushes are grouped at every turn. Over the slopes above you and the slopes below, between the straight tree-trunks and the leafy boughs, wherever the eyes rest, glow these flames of the azaleas. When you reach the central ridge, the high knife-edge top of the mountain where you can look off both sides, you see not only the landscape of mountain and valley immersed in the soft light, those far blue spaces and that near mingling of green foliage, but you have at your feet rolling down the southern slope of the mountain such a wave of bloom that suddenly seen makes you catch your breath. This is the end of the road, and leaving the carriage you go down the mountain-side into the sunny chambers of the forest luminous with blossoms that in close and embrace you. Above your head hang clouds of gold, at your knee press billows of flame, all about you are great globe-like clusters of these incomparable flowers.

You look towards the mountains that lie to the south, height upon height, the near ones green above with intense blue shadows towards their bases, the more distant ones a sweet, mystical blue, and you know that on all those slopes far and near are blazing the same fires that illumine the earth about you. Being thus close to the flowers, you cannot help noticing the exquisite texture of the petals, their great size, the symmetry of each flower and of the large clusters, as well as the ornamental shape of the bushes with the young leaves piercing through the bloom here and there in green points. It is the texture of the flowers and their width - some of them are almost round - that gives them that charmingly expansive, one might say luscious, effect. The petals are so delicate that the light seems almost to shine through them. These wild azaleas of the Southern mountains lack the somewhat dense effect of the well-known cultivated plants, and when transplanted to parks and gardens they lose something of their sumptuousness, their wonderful clearness and richness of coloring, and to an extent their exquisite texture. They lose their aspect of dainty wildness and become as it were citified.

To see the perfect fire of the azaleas you must come to their mountains. They may be found from southern New York to Georgia, but only in the high parts of the Southern mountains do they attain perfection. Although the azaleas are so widespread as a family, why is it that this species with fire in its veins lives only here and in the Far East? The Himalaya Mountains, like the mountains of Carolina, have their slopes adorned with these tremendously glowing flowers that gave to the gardens of Europe their choicest azaleas long before these of the New World were known.

To find these azaleas one must ascend the mountains, for they do not grow as low down even as Traumfest. When they are in bloom, we visit the Warriors for certain hollows, we go up Tryon Mountain because of certain slopes, we frequent the wild heights of Hogback and Rocky Spur. We warm our senses for a month in the fire of the flowers, and then if we like we can go higher up - and enjoy it all over again. In the higher mountains the azaleas are more abundant than here, though they are no more beautiful, for that would be impossible. When those noble heights beyond the Blue Ridge wreathe themselves in flowers, one finds whole mountainsides aglow, for where the trees have been cut off, fiery azaleas oftentimes cover the wounded earth. The open spaces are resplendent beyond words, one sees acres of flower-flames ablaze on the slopes. These closecrowding bushes in the cleared places are low, laying a stunning carpet of color over the mountainside, but in the woods they grow tall, and you see them on all sides glowing in the shadows and burning- in the sunlight. The outbreak of color is almost overwhelming, and one is grateful for those intervening spaces where are no flowers. From a world of exciting colors one passes into the cool and peaceful green of the forest, presently to turn a curve in the road and find the slopes again on all sides in furious bloom.

Thus for a season the earth is transfigured, the mountains on all sides are burning with flames that do not destroy. The spectacle is on a grand scale; one can wander over thousands of square miles encompassed by flowers; beyond the limits of North Carolina these unconsuming flames have spread over hundreds of miles of the ridges and spurs of the Southern Appalachians, so that one seems to get lost even in thinking of it. The people call these azaleas "yellow honeysuckles," and get tired of them. The azaleas flaming throughout the forest are like great music, great poetry, great pictures; they strike too high a note for the lives of the people. Such fervor wearies their unaccustomed nerves, and they turn for consolation to a calmer expression of the great renewal.

For the flame-colored azaleas, marvelous as they are, form but a part of the flood of bloom that rolls over the mountains. About the time they appear, the fair and restful Kalmia latifolia, or mountain laurel, begins to open. The mountains here are green with kalmia or laurel, as one prefers to call it as the hills of the North are green with grass. When the forest is burned over, the mountain laurel rushes in and competes with young pine trees for the soil. It grows in impenetrable jungles in the ravines and along the water-courses. Where grown in the open and safe from fire, it attains great size, there being laurel trees about Highlands and elsewhere as large as ordinary apple trees. Generally, however, it appears as bushes from three to fifteen feet high that, annually covering themselves with bloom, light up the mountains from end to end. Standing waist-high on a level of low-growing laurel, the bushes concealed by the heavy billowing masses of bloom, you seem to be afloat on a sea of flowers.

The laurel freely covers the lower as well as the higher mountains. It wraps Traumfest as in a mantle. Who does not know the" laurel path "that winds through an otherwise impenetrable thicket? Over this path in the blossoming season you wade, as it were, through a flowery labyrinth that opens to let you pass and closes behind you as you follow the winding way. Masses of bloom lightly touch your cheek, or graze your shoulder, tall bushes loaded with blossoms close over your head - you pass under an arch composed of flowers. You look through an opening in the bushes that surround you, and the slope below you is covered with a carpet of rosy-white bloom. In Traumfest some of us go out to see the laurel as the people of Japan go out to see the cherry blossoms. You climb Melrose to be buried in laurel bloom. You ascend heights that you may look down upon the earth hidden under flowers. Again you drive along the upper edge of a ravine that runs for miles bank full of laurel blossoms.

The air is pervaded by the bitter-sweet smell of the flowers. The ground is white where the cups have begun to fall - or perhaps it is red, for there are bushes that bloom year after year as red as a rose, and others that clothe themselves in a garment of delicate pink. There are also those whose bloom is as white as snow, the crisp and upright cups scarcely pricked with the red dot that marks the anther pockets so conspicuous in some of the laurel.

Nothing is more charming than a laurel cup with the anthers on its recurved filaments still hidden in the little pink pits that indent the inside of the corolla in a circle. These curved and captured stamens, pretty traps to force invading insects to bear away pollen on their wings, at the slightest touch spring back and curl up at the centre of the flower dusting the intruder, and you, passing among the laurel, are sure to be dusted with little pellets of pollen bombarding you on all sides. And the cups themselves! Scalloped on the edges, shaped and decorated like tiny afternoon-tea cups, who does not know and love them! There is something familiar and homelike about laurel, and it is easy to under stand why the people prefer it to the azaleas. Like the New Englander they call it "calico-bush," a comfortable name suggesting Sunday starch and fresh young girls. And here, as in New England, the laurel is also known as "ivy," the name laurel being here bestowed upon the lordly rhododendron.

The mountain-laurel and the flame-colored azaleas, though both so abundant, do not interfere with each other. There is room on the vast surface of the mountains for both. And while a zone of flowering azaleas belts the mountains, just below it or interrupting it or claiming intruding ravines is the tremendous calm sea of the blossoming laurel.

As though the marvelous outbreak of the azaleas and laurel were not enough to express the joy of life animating the earth, the rhododendrons open their regal buds. No one would think of calling the rhododendron a "calico-bush"! It belongs by every line of its stately foliage and more stately blossoms to the aristocracy of plant life. Its thick, glossy, evergreen leaves, much larger than those of the laurel and darker in color, its tall growth and crooked stems make it a noticeable and very decorative presence even when not in bloom. At the elevation of Traumfest the greater rhododendrons do not grow, only those smaller, early blossoming ones whose more delicate forms and exquisite pale-pink or white blossoms grace many a ravine and roadside bank. But on the higher mountains the slopes and ravines are often impassable because of the dense growths of rhododendrons, the king of which is the Rhododendron maximum, that sometimes becomes a tree forty feet high, though more often it is a large shrub.

Smaller than this, seldom reaching a height of twenty feet, and very abundant on many of the mountains, is the Rhododendron Catawbiense, or mountain rose-bay, blooming earlier than the other, its large clusters of lilac or purple or sometimes rosered flowers making one of the most showy spectacles of the carnival season, particularly as it chooses open places and the summits of the mountains to display its colors. How many mountain scenes one recalls made glorious by this splendid shrub, and perhaps nowhere does it give more pleasure to the eye than where it stands in groups on the long and beautiful slopes of the Grandfather Mountain, those southern slopes sweeping down and down into the foothills of the John's River Valley. One of the finest roads in the mountains crosses this southern front of the Grandfather, winding through the forest and over the open places, keeping for many miles an elevation of about four thousand feet. It is in every sense a high place. The air is clean and cool and fragrant; in the distant spaces lie fair valleys and noble mountains, while close about you the mountain rose-bay enchantingly colors the earth. The effect of these masses of bloom on the grassy slopes against the blue sky is lovely.

The color of these flowers varies a good deal, all the way from rich purple-red to a clear, sweet rosecolor. Some people condemn the flowers as " magenta," seeing only that among all the colors they assume. But there are occasions when even this despised color can ravish the senses. Up near the top of the Grandfather Mountain, for instance, one should see the purple rose-bay against the bluegra.y rocks in the quivering blue atmosphere of a summer day to find out how glorious a thing a magenta flower in its right setting can be.

As the mountain rose-bay passes, the great waxlike flowers of the Rhododendron maximum come forth out of the heavy bud clusters. The Rhododendron maximum generally grows in ravines or along damp slopes, where it makes jungles of tropical luxuriance. Its large flowers, which are usually white or a delicate peachy pink, grow in clusters like the flowers of the other rhododendrons, and though the Rhododendron maximum does not bloom so profusely as the laurel, the sight of the high wall of a ravine tapestried with its large dark-green leaves, in which the great flower clusters gleam out, is something to remember. The regal Rhododendron maximum is not so exciting as the flaming azalea, not so home-like as the laurel, nor so theatrical as the mountain rose-bay, but it possesses a degree of dignity and elegance belonging to it alone and that distinguishes it among all the forest growths.

There are several species of the rhododendron found in different parts of the mountains, among them the charming little Rhododendron Vaseyii that, unlike the other rhododendrons, sheds its leaves in the fall. It was said at one time to be extinct, but this is not true, as any one knows who, early in the season, has seen the cliffs on the north side of the Grandfather Mountain brightly colored with its rosy bloom.

The azaleas, laurels, and rhododendrons, although so abundant in the Southern mountains, are by no means confined to them, some species being found throughout the whole Appalachian system from Canada to Georgia. One recalls certain New England pastures that are mantled in laurel, while the Rhododendron maximum occurs locally as far north as New Hampshire. The red-blooming mountain rose-bay begins its course in Virginia, making a wonderful show in the Cumberland Mountains, as all will recall with pleasure who have passed through the Cumberland Gap in its blooming season. And the flame-colored azaleas, as has been said, light their fires as far north as Southern New York, though they do not burn with the brilliancy and variety of color anywhere else as here where they so wonderfully set the slopes of the mountains ablaze.

To the mountaineer all things are admissible that serve his ends, and one is horrified upon first coming to find him burning rhododendron and laurel wood because, he says, they make a hot fire good for cooking. Think of cutting down for such a purpose a rhododendron or a laurel tree with a trunk thick enough to be split into four sticks of wood! Familiarity with the country, however, modifies this horror. When there is rhododendron enough to get lost in, one can afford to burn a little now and then.

With the passing of the azaleas, the laurel, and the rhododendrons, the fervor of the blooming season here subsides, and it is then that one being in Traumfest often goes down to a certain stream over which a bridge unites two cornfields. At either end of this bridge on the edge of the water grow large azalea bushes different from the others. These now begin to put forth, not pink nor flame-colored azaleas, but snowy white blossoms with a strong and spicy fragrance that carries one back to certain New England swamps where one learned to love and watch for these fragrant things. These are the last of the azaleas down below and the only white ones. But there is a species of white azalea up on Toxaway Mountain and elsewhere, closely resembling this of the brookside, though it grows on the dry slopes, yielding the same delicious fragrance. It may be said in passing that sweet-fern, dear to the heart of every one familiar with New England pastures, also grows on Toxaway, Pisgah, and other of the high mountains. What a turn it gives one to see it here unexpectedly and to smell its incomparable odor, an odor that more than any other revives slumbering memories.

But these fragrant white azaleas are like the epilogue at the end of the play. When the gleaming petals of the Rhododendron maximum fall away, the curtain has dropped on the Carnival of the Flowers, and spring moves on into summer and fruitage.

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