April 23 — I slept in a little mountain barn last night. It rained nearly all night and a greater part of to-day. We renewed our march this morning toward Moorefield. Early in the day we passed Howard’s Lick, or more properly the Hardy White Sulphur spring, which is situated four miles from Lost River and at the eastern base of Branch Mountain. It is a beautiful spring, boxed with white marble slabs, and the water is as clear as the purest virgin crystal, and very sulphury. The surrounding mountain scenery is wild, grand, and magnificent; spurs of the Branch Mountain and long wooded ridges thickly clad with laurel and ferns rise around the spring and its neighborhood in every direction which bounds the view of the beholder. On one side not more than fifteen or twenty feet from the spring a steep bank rises almost perpendicularly, covered with mossy rocks and mountain fern, all darkly shaded by overhanging spruce and pine, foot-noted by the ever present shiny green of mountain laurel. About a hundred yards from the spring is an old hotel, weatherstained, gray with age, and embowered with giant oaks that have swayed their spreading branches in a thousand mountain storms, and no doubt often looked down on the stealthy Indian hunter as he silently kindled his camp-fire to prepare his frugal evening meal beneath their own sheltering canopy that caught the evening dew; and at early dawn heard the sharp twang of the bow-string as it sped the deadly arrow to the heart of unsuspecting game. A dark heavy fog hung on Branch Mountain all day, at some places so dense that we could not see fifty yards, and the fog looked like wool packed among the trees and shrubbery. After we had been some four or five hours in the damp, dense, cloud-like fog that hung around and hugged the rugged steeps, the rain ceased and the clouds partially broke away. We suddenly descended below the fog line on the western slope of the mountain, and the beautiful Moorefield Valley lay before us in all its smiling splendor, with its wheat fields, pasture lands, and grass fields all arrayed in different hues of living green. Gentle spring had already trailed her bright emerald robe along the grassy hillside and scattered the fragrant children of the sunshine along its balmy track. The South Branch and South Fork meandered with sweeping bends through the rain-cleaned landscape like bands of silver woven in a divers green carpet. Moorefield, almost in the center of the picture, looked in the evening glow like a bright jewel with an emerald setting. All of which was a delicious feast for eyes that have been befogged for four or five hours in the gloom of a wet, dripping mountain.
We forded the South Fork three times this evening; it is swollen considerably from the recent rains. The fords are deep and rough and the current so rapid that at one ford it swept some of us down stream. We marched till an hour after dark, then camped on South Fork, a mile and a half above Moorefield.
