The Story of Old Fort Loudon

The winter wore gradually away. While the snows were still on the ground, and the eastern mountain domes were glittering white against a pale blue sky, all adown the nearer slopes the dense forests showed a clear garnet hue, that betokened the swelling of congregated masses of myriads of budding boughs. Even the aspect of more distant ranges bespoke a change, in the dull soft blue which replaced the hard lapis-lazuli tint that the chill, sharp weather had known. For the cold had now a reviviscent tang -- not the bleak, benumbing, icy deadness of the winter's thrall. And while the flames still flared on the hearth, and the thumping of the batten and the creak of the treadle resounded most of the day from the little shed-room where Odalie worked at her loom, and the musical whir of her spinning-wheel enlivened all the fire-lit evenings as she sat in the chimney corner, the thaws came on, and brought the mountain snows down the Tennessee River with a great rushing turbulence, and it lifted a wild, imperious, chanting voice into the primeval stillness. A delicate vernal haze began to pervade the air, and a sweet placidity, as if all nature were in a dream, not dead, -- an expectant moment, the crisis of development. Now and again Odalie and Fifine would come to the door, summoned by a loud crackling sound, as of a terrible potency, and watch wincingly the pervasive flare of the great elastic yellow and vermilion flames springing into the air from the bonfires of the piles of cane as the cleared land was transformed from the cane-brake into fields. And soon the ploughs were running.

Oh, it was spring in this loveliest of regions, in this climate of garnered delights! As the silvery sycamore trees, leaning over the glittering reaches of the slate-blue river, put forth the first green leaves, of the daintiest vernal hue, Odalie loved to gaze through them from the door of the cabin, perchance to note an eagle wing its splendid flight above the long, rippling white flashes of the current; or a canoe, as swift, as light, cleave the denser medium of the water; or in the stillness of the noon a deer lead down a fawn to drink. She was wont to hear the mocking-bird pour forth his thrilling ecstasy of song, the wild bee drone, and in the distance the muffled booming thunder of the herds of buffalo. Who so quick to see the moon, this vernal moon, -- surely not some old dead world of lost history, and burnt-out hopes, and destroyed utilities, but fair of face, virginal and fresh as the spring itself, -- come down the river in the sweet dusk, slowly, softly, pace by pace, ethereally refulgent, throwing sparse shadows of the newly leaved sycamore boughs far up the slope, across the threshold that she loved, with the delicate traceries of this similitude of the roof-tree.