Chapter III: Part 3

Near the outlet of the lake, in a shaded hollow, lies a deep snowbank, and not far away the ground is matted with trailing arbutus, still in plentiful bloom. One of the most attractive things here is the few-flowered shadbush (_Amelanchier oligocarpa_). The common _A. Canadensis_ grows near by; and it is astonishing how unlike the two species look, although the difference (the visible difference, I mean) is mostly in the arrangement of the flowers,--clustered in one case, separately disposed in the other. To-day the “average observer” would look twice before suspecting any close relationship between them; a week or two hence he would look a dozen times before remarking any distinction. With them, as with the red cherry, it is the blossom that makes the bush.

So much for my first May morning on the Notch road and by the lake: a few particulars caught in passing, to be taken for what they are,--

“Samples and sorts, not for themselves alone, but for their
atmosphere.”

In the afternoon I went over into the Landaff Valley, having in mind a restful, level-country stroll, with a view especially to the probable presence of Tennessee warblers in that quarter. One or two had been singing constantly near the hotel for two days (ever since my arrival, that is), and Sunday I had heard another beside the Bethlehem road. Whether they were migrants only, or had settled in Franconia for the season, they ought, it seemed to me, to be found also in the big Landaff larch swamp, where we had seen them so often in June, ten or twelve years ago. As I had heard the song but once since that time, I was naturally disposed to make the most of the present opportunity.

I turned in at the old hay barn,--one of my favorite resorts, where I have seen many a pretty bunch of autumnal transients,--and sure enough, a Tennessee’s voice was one of the first to greet me. _This_ fellow sang as a Tennessee ought to sing, I said to myself. By which I meant that his song was clearly made up of three parts, just as I had kept it in memory; whereas the birds near the hotel, as well as the one on the Bethlehem road, divided theirs but once. No great matter, somebody will say; but a self-respecting man likes to have his recollections justified, even about trifles, particularly when he has confided them to print.[7]

The swamp had begun well with its old eulogist; but better things were in store. I passed an hour or more in the woods, for the most part sitting still (which is pretty good after-dinner ornithology), and had just taken the road again when a bevy of talkative chickadees came straggling down the rim of the swamp, flitting from one tree to another,--a morsel here and a morsel there,--after their usual manner while on the march. Now, then, for a few migratory warblers, which always may be looked for in such company.

True to the word, my glass was hardly in play before a bay-breast showed himself, in magnificent plumage; then came a Blackburnian, also in high feather, handsomer even than the bay-breast, but less of a rarity; and then, all in a flash, I caught a glimpse of some bright-colored, black-and-yellow bird that, almost certainly, from an indefinable something half seen about the head, could not be a magnolia. “That should be a Cape May!” I said aloud to myself. Even as I spoke, however, he was out of sight. Down the road I went, trying to keep abreast of the flock, which moved much too rapidly for my comfort. Again I saw what might have been the Cape May, but again there was nothing like certainty. And again I lost him. With the trees so thick, and the birds so small and so active, it was impossible to do better. I had missed my chance, I thought; but just then something stirred among the leaves of a fir tree close by me, on the very edge of the swamp, and the next moment a bird stepped upon the outermost twig, as near me as he could get, and stood there fully displayed: a splendid Cape May, in superb color, my first New England specimen. “Look at me,” he said; “this is for your benefit.” And I looked with both eyes. Who would not be an ornithologist, with sights like this to reward him?

The procession moved on, by the air line, impossible for me to follow. The Cape May, of course, had departed with the rest. So I assumed,--without warrant, as will presently appear. But I had no quarrel with Fate. For a plodding, wingless creature, long accustomed to his disabilities, I was being handsomely used. The soul is always seeking new things, says a celebrated French philosopher, and is always pleased when it is shown more than it had hoped for. This is preëminently true of rare warblers. Now I would cross the bridge, walk once more under the arch of willows,--happy that I _could_ walk, being a man only,--and back to the village again by the upper road. For a half mile on that road the prospect is such that no mortal need desire a better one.

First, however, I must train my glass upon a certain dark object out in the meadow, to see whether it was a stump (it was motionless enough for one, but I didn’t remember it there) or a woodchuck. It turned out to be a woodchuck, erect upon his haunches, his fore paws lifted in an attitude of devotion. The sight was common just now in all Franconia grass land, no matter in what direction my jaunts took me. And always the attitude was the same, as if now were the ground-hog’s Lent. “Watch and pray” is his motto; and he thrives upon it like a monk. Though the legislature sets a price on his head, he keeps in better flesh than the average legislator. Well done, say I. May his shadow never grow less! I like him, as I like the crow. Health and long life to both of them,--wildings that will not be put down nor driven into the outer wilderness, be the hand of civilization never so hostile. They were here before man came, and will be here, it is most likely, after he is gone; unless, as the old planet’s fires go out, man himself becomes a hibernator. I have heard a hunted woodchuck, at bay in a stone wall, gnashing his teeth against a dog; and I have seen a mother woodchuck with a litter of young ones playing about her as she lay at full length sunning herself, the very picture of maternal satisfaction: and my belief is that woodchucks have as honest a right as most of us to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As I walked under the willows,--empty to-day, though I remembered more than one happy occasion when, in better company, I had found them alive with wings,--I paused to look through the branches at a large hawk and a few glossy-backed barn swallows quartering over the meadow. Then, all at once, there fell on my ears a shower of bobolink notes, and the birds, twenty or more together, dropped into the short grass before me. Every one of them was a male.

A strange custom it is, this Quakerish separation of the sexes. It must be the females’ work, I imagine. Modesty and bashfulness are feminine traits,--modesty, bashfulness, and maidenly discretion. The wise virgin shunneth even the appearance of evil. Let the males flock by themselves, and travel in advance. And the males practice obedience, not for virtue’s sake, I guess, but of necessity; encouraged, no doubt, by an unquestioning belief that the wise virgins will come trooping after, and be found scattered conveniently over the meadows, each by herself, when the marriage bell strikes. That blissful hour was now close at hand, and my twenty gay bachelors knew it. Every bird of them had on his wedding garment. No wonder they sang.

It took me a long time to make that half mile on the upper road, with the narrow, freshly green valley outspread just below, the river running through it, and beyond a royal horizonful of mountains; some near and green, some farther away and blue, and some--the highest--still with the snow on them: Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, Lafayette, Garfield, the Twins, Washington, Clay, Jefferson, and Adams; all perfectly clear, the sky covered with high clouds. A sober day it was, sober and still, though the bobolinks seemed not so to regard it. While I looked at the landscape, seating myself now and then to enjoy it quietly, I kept an ear open for the shout of a pileated woodpecker, a wildly musical sound often to be heard on this hillside; but to-day there was nothing nearer to it than a crested flycatcher’s scream, out of the big sugar orchard.

On my way down the hill toward the red bridge, I met a man riding in some kind of rude contrivance, not to be called a wagon or a cart, between two pairs of wheels. He lay flat on his back, as in a hammock, and, to judge by his tools and the mortar on his clothing, must have been a mason returning from his work. He was “taking it easy,” at all events. We saluted each other, and he stopped his horse and sat up. “You used to be round here, didn’t you?” he asked. Yes, I said, I had been here a good deal, off and on. He thought he remembered me. He had noticed me getting out of Mr. Prime’s carriage at the corner. “Let’s see,” he said: “you used to be looking after the birds a good deal, didn’t you?” I pleaded guilty, and he seemed glad. “You are well?” he added, and drove on. Neither of us had said anything in particular, but there are few events of the road more to my taste than such chance bits of neighborly intercourse. The man’s tone and manner gave me the feeling of real friendliness. If I had fallen among thieves, I confide that he would have been neither a priest nor a Levite. May his trowel find plenty of work and fair wages.

This was on May 22. The next three days were occupied with all-day excursions to Mount Agassiz, to Streeter Pond, and to Lonesome Lake path. With so many hands beckoning to me, the Cape May warbler was well-nigh forgotten. On the morning of the 26th, however, the weather being dubious, I betook myself again to the Landaff swamp, entering it, as usual, by the wood-road at the barn. Many birds were there: a tanager (uncommon hereabout), olive-sided flycatchers, alder flycatchers (first seen on the 23d, and already abundant), a yellow-bellied flycatcher (the recluse of the family), magnolia warblers, Canada warblers, parula warblers (three beautiful species), a Tennessee warbler, a Swainson thrush (whistling), a veery (snarling), and many more. The Swainson thrush, by the way, although present, in small numbers apparently, from May 22, was not heard to sing a note until June 1,--ten days of silence! Yet it sings freely on its migration, even as far south as Georgia. Close at hand was a grouse, who performed again and again in what seemed to me a highly original manner. First he delivered three or four quick beats. Then he rested for a second or two, after which he proceeded to drum in the ordinary way, beginning with deliberation, and gradually accelerating the beats, till the ear could no longer follow them, and they became a whir. That prelude of four quick, decisive strokes was a novelty to my ears, so far as I could remember.

I had taken my fill of this pleasant chorus, and was on my way back to the road, when suddenly I heard something that was better than “pleasant,”--a peculiarly faint and listless four-syllabled warbler song, which might be described as a monotonous _zee-zee-zee-zee_. The singer was not a blackpoll: of that I felt certain on the instant. What could it be, then, but a Cape May? That was a shrewd guess (I had heard the Cape May once, in Virginia, some years before); for presently the fellow moved into sight, and I had a feast of admiring him, as he flitted about among the fir trees, feeding and singing. If he was the one I had seen in the same wood on the 22d, he was making a long stay. Still I did not venture to think of him as anything but a migrant. The Tennessee had sung incessantly for five days in the Gale River larches near the hotel, as already mentioned, and then had taken flight.

The next morning, nevertheless, there was nothing for it--few as my days were growing--but I must visit the place again, on the chance of finding the Cape May still there. And he _was_ there; sitting, for part of the time, at the very tip (on the terminal bud, to speak exactly) of a pointed fir. There, as elsewhere, he sang persistently, sometimes with three _zees_, sometimes with four, but always in an unhurried monotone. It was the simplest and most primitive kind of music, to say the best of it,--many an insect would perhaps have done as well; but somehow, with the author of it before me, I pronounced it good. A Tennessee was close by, and (what I particularly enjoyed) a tanager sat in the sun on the topmost spray of a tall white pine, blazing and singing. “This is the sixth day of the Cape May here, yet I cannot think he means to summer.” So my pencil finished the day’s entry.

Whatever his intentions, I could not afford to spend my whole vacation in learning them, and it was not until the afternoon of the 31st that I went again in search of him. Then he gave me an exciting chase; for, thank Fortune, a chase may be exciting though the bird is not a “game bird,” and the man is not a gunner. At first, to be sure, the question seemed in a fair way to be quickly settled. I was hardly in the swamp before I heard the expected _zee-zee_. The bird was still here! But after half a dozen repetitions of the strain he fell silent; and he had not shown himself. For a full hour I paced up and down the path, within a space of forty rods, fighting mosquitoes and awake to every sound. If the bird was here, I meant to make sure of him. This was the tenth day since I had first seen him, and to find him still present would make it practically certain that he was here for the season. As for what I had already heard,--well, the notes were the Cape May’s, fast enough; but if that were all, I should go away and straightway begin to question whether my ears had not deceived me. In matters of this kind, an ornithologist walks by sight.

Once, from farther up the path, I heard a voice that might be the one I was listening for; but as I hastened toward it, it developed into the homely, twisting song of a black-and-white creeper. Heard at a sufficient distance, this too familiar ditty loses every other one of its notes, and is easily mistaken for something else,--especially if something else happens to be on a man’s mind,--as I had found to my chagrin on more than one occasion. Eye and ear both are never more liable to momentary deception than when they are most tensely alert.

Meanwhile, nothing had been heard of the Tennessee, and it became evident that he had moved on. The customary water thrush was singing at short intervals; gayly dressed warblers darted in and out of the low evergreens, almost brushing my elbows, much to their surprise; and an olive-sided flycatcher kept up a persistent _pip-pip_. Something was troubling his equanimity; I had no idea what. It had been one of my special enjoyments, on this vacation trip, to renew my acquaintance with him and his humbler relative, the alder flycatcher,--the latter a commonplace body, whose emphatic _quay-quéer_ had now become one of the commonest of sounds. The olive-side, by the bye, for all his apparent wildness, did not disdain to visit the shade trees about the hotel; and once a catbird, not far off, amused me by whistling a most exact reproduction of his breezy _quit, quee-quée-o_. If the voice had come from a treetop instead of from the depths of a low thicket, the illusion would have been complete. It is the weakness of imitators, always and everywhere, to forget one thing or another.

Still the bird I was waiting for made no sign, and finally I left the swamp and started up the road. Possibly he had gone in that direction, where I first saw him. No, he was not there, and, giving over the hunt, I turned back toward the village. Then, as I came opposite the barn again, I heard the notes in the old place, and hastened up the path. This time I was lucky, for there the bird sat on the outermost spray of a fir-tree branch. It was his most characteristic attitude. I can see him there now.

As I quitted the swamp for good, a man in a buggy was coming down the road. I put on my coat, and as he overtook me I said, “I was putting on my coat because I felt sure you would invite me to ride.” He smiled, and bade me get in; and though he had been going only to the post office, he insisted upon carrying me to the hotel, a mile beyond. Better still, we had a pleasant, humanizing talk of a kind to be serviceable to a narrow specialist, such as I seemed just now in danger of becoming. The use of tobacco was one of our topics, I remember, and the mutual duties of husbands and wives another. My host had seen a good deal of the world, it appeared, and withal was no little of a philosopher. I hope it will not sound egotistical if I say that he gave every sign of finding me a capable listener.

Once more only I saw the Cape May. His claim to be accounted a summer resident of Franconia was by this time moderately well established; but on my last spare afternoon (June 3) I could not do less than pay him a farewell visit. After looking for him in vain for twenty years (I speak as a New Englander), it seemed the part of prudence to cultivate his acquaintance while I could. At the entrance to the swamp, therefore, I put on my gloves, tied a handkerchief about my neck, and broke a stem of meadow-sweet for use as a mosquito switch. The season was advancing, and field ornithology was becoming more and more a battle. I walked up the path for the usual distance (passing a few lady’s-slippers, one of them pure white) without hearing the voice for which I was listening. On the return, however, I caught it, or something like it. Then, as I went in pursuit (a slow process, for caution’s sake), the song turned, or seemed to turn, into something different,--louder, longer, and faster. Is that the same bird, I thought, or another? Whatever it was, it eluded my eye, and after a little the voice ceased. I retreated to the path, where I could look about me more readily and use my switch to better advantage, and anon the faint, lazy _zee-zee-zee_ was heard again. _This_ was the Cape May, at all events. I was sure of it. Still I wanted a look. Carefully I edged toward the sound, bending aside the branches, and all at once a bird flew into the spruce over my head. Then began again the quicker, four-syllabled _zip-zip_, I craned my neck and fanned away mosquitoes, all the while keeping my glass in position. A twig stirred. Still the bird sang unseen,--the same hurried phrase, not quite monotonous, since the pitch rose a little on the last couplet. That was a suspicious circumstance, and by this time I should not have been mightily astonished if a Blackburnian had disclosed himself. Another twig stirred. Still I could see nothing; and still I fought mosquitoes (a plague on them!) and kept my eye steady. Then the fellow did again what he had done so often,--stepped out upon a flat, horizontal branch, pretty well up, and posed there, singing and preening his feathers. I could see his yellow breast streaked with jet, his black crown, his reddish cheeks, with the yellow patch behind the rufous, and finally the big white blotch on the wing. We have lovelier birds, no doubt (the Cape May’s colors are a trifle “splashy” for a nice taste,--for my own taste, I mean to say), but few, if any, whose costume is more strikingly original.

I stayed by him till my patience failed, the mosquitoes helping to wear it out; and all the while he reiterated that comparatively lively _zip-zip_, so very different from the listless _zee-zee_, which I had seen him use on previous occasions, and had heard him use to-day. He was singing now, I said to myself, more like the bird at Natural Bridge, the only other one I had ever heard. It was pleasant to find that even this tenth-rate performer, one of the poorest of a poor family, had more than one tune in his music box.

My spring vacation was planned to be botanical rather than ornithological; but we are not the masters of our own fate, though we sometimes try to think so, and my sketch is turning out a bird piece, after all. The truth is, I was in the birds’ country, and it was the birds’ hour. They waked me every morning,--veeries, bobolinks, vireos, sparrows, and what not;[8] and as the day began, so it continued. I hope I was not blind to other things. I remember at this moment how rejoiced I was at coming all unexpectedly upon a little bunch of yellow lady’s-slippers,--nine blossoms, I believe; rare enough and pretty enough to excite the dullest man’s enthusiasm. But the fact remains, if comparisons are to be insisted upon, that a creature like the Cape May warbler has all the beauty of a flower, with the added charm of voice and motion and elusiveness. The lady’s-slippers would wait for me,--unless somebody else picked them,--but the warbler could be trusted to lead me a chase, and give me, as the saying is, a run for my money. In other words, he was more interesting, and goes better into a story.

My delight in him was the greater for a consideration yet to be specified. Twelve or thirteen years ago, when a party of us were in Franconia in June, we undertook a list of the birds of the township,--a list which the scientific ornithologist of the company afterward printed.[9] Now, returning to the place by myself, it became a point of honor with me to improve our work by the addition of at least a name or two. And the first candidate was the Cape May.

The second was of a widely different sort; one of my most familiar friends, though more surprising as a bird of the White Mountains than even the Cape May. I speak of the wood thrush, the most southern member of the noble group of singers to which it belongs,--the _Hylocichlæ_, so called. It is to be regretted that we have no collective English name for them, especially as their vocal quality--by which I mean something not quite the same as musical ability--is such as to set them beyond comparison above all other birds of North America, if not of the world.

My first knowledge of this piece of good fortune was on the 29th of May. I stood on the Notch railway, intent upon a mourning warbler, noting how fond of red-cherry trees he and his fellows seemingly were, when I was startled out of measure by a wood thrush’s voice from the dense maple woods above me. There was no time to look for him; and happily there was no need. He was one of the consummate artists of his race (among the members of which there is great unevenness in this regard), possessing all those unmistakable peculiarities which at once distinguish the wood thrush’s song from the hermit’s, with which alone a careless listener might confound it: the sudden drop to a deep contralto (the most glorious bit of vocalism to be heard in our woods), and the tinkle or spray of bell-like tones at the other extreme of the gamut. As with the Cape May, so with him, the question was, Will he stay?

Two days later I came down the track again. A hermit was in tune, and presently a wood thrush joined him. “His tone is fuller and louder than the hermit’s,” says my pencil,--flattered, no doubt, at finding itself in a position to speak a word of momentary positiveness touching a question of superiority long in dispute, and likely to remain in dispute while birds sing and men listen to them. A quarter of a mile farther, and I came to the sugar grove. Here a second bird was singing, just where I had heard him two days before. Him I sat down to enjoy; and at that moment, probably because he had seen me (and had seen me stop), he broke out with a volley of those quick, staccato, inimitably emphatic, whip-snapping calls,--_pip-pip_,--which are more characteristic of the species than even the song itself. So there were two male wood thrushes, and presumably two pairs, in this mountainside forest!

On the 1st of June I heard the song there again, though I was forced to wait for it; and three days afterward the story was the same. I ought to have looked for nests, but time failed me. To the best of my knowledge, the bird has never been reported before from the White Mountain region, though it is well known to breed in some parts of Canada, where I have myself seen it.

Here, then, were two notable accessions to our local catalogue. The only others (a few undoubted migrants--Wilson’s black-cap warbler, the white-crowned sparrow, and the solitary sandpiper--being omitted) were a single meadow lark and a single yellow-throated vireo. The lark seemed to be unknown to Franconia people, and my specimen may have been only a straggler. He sang again and again on May 22, but I heard nothing from him afterward, though I passed the place often. The vireo was singing in a sugar grove on the 3d of June,--a date on which, accidents apart, he should certainly have been at home for the summer.

Because I have had so much to say about the Cape May warbler and the wood thrush, it is not to be assumed that I mean to set them in the first place, nor even that I had in them the highest pleasure. They surprised me, and surprise is always more talkative than simple appreciation; but the birds that ministered most to my enjoyment were the hermit and the veery. The veery is not an every-day singer with me at home, and the hermit, for some years past, has made himself almost a stranger. I hardly know which of the two put me under the greater obligation. The veery sang almost continually, and a good veery is a singer almost out of competition. His voice lacks the ring of the wood thrush’s and the hermit’s; it never dominates the choir; but with the coppice to itself and the listener close by, it has sometimes a quality irresistible; I do not hesitate to characterize it as angelic. Of this kind was the voice of a bird that used to sing under my Franconia window at half past three o’clock, in the silence of the morning.

The surpassing glory of the veery’s song, as all lovers of American bird music may be presumed by this time to know, lies in its harmonic, double-stopping effect,--an effect, or quality, as beautiful as it is peculiar. One day, while I stood listening to it under the best of conditions, admiring the wonderful arpeggio (I know no less technical word for it), my pencil suddenly grew poetic. “The veery’s fingers are quick on the harp-strings,” it wrote. His is perfect Sunday music,--and the hermit’s no less so. And in the same class I should put the simple chants of the field sparrow and the vesper. The so-called “preaching” of the red-eyed vireo is utter worldliness in the comparison.

Happy Franconia! This year, if never before, it had all five of our New England Hylocichlæ singing in its woods: the veery and the hermit everywhere in the lower country, the wood thrush in the maple forest before mentioned, the olive-back throughout the Notch and its neighborhood, and the gray-cheek on Lafayette; a quintette hard to match, I venture to think, anywhere on the footstool. And after them--I do not say with them--were winter wrens, bobolinks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, purple finches, solitary vireos, vesper sparrows, field sparrows, white-throated sparrows, song sparrows, catbirds, robins, orioles, tanagers, and a score or two beside.

One other bright circumstance I am bound in honor to speak of,--the abundance of swallows; a state of affairs greatly unlike anything to be met with in my part of Massachusetts: cliff swallows and barn swallows in crowds, and sand martins and tree swallows by no means uncommon. But for the absence of black martins,--a famous colony of which the tourist may see at Concord, while the train waits,--here would have been a second quintette worthy to rank with the thrushes; the flight of one set being as beautiful, not to say as musical, as the songs of the other. As it was, the universal presence of these aerial birds was a continual delight to any man with eyes to notice it. They glorified the open valley as the thrushes glorified the woods.

We shall never again see the like of this, I fear, in our prosier Boston neighborhood. Within my time--within twenty years, indeed--barn swallows summered freely on Beacon Hill, plastering their nests against the walls of the State House and the Athenæum, and even under the busy portico of the Tremont House. I have remembrance, too, of a pair that dwelt, for one season at least, above the door of the old Ticknor mansion, at the head of Park Street. Those days are gone. Now, alas, even in the suburban districts, we may almost say that one swallow makes a summer. An evil change it is, for which not even the warblings of English sparrows will ever quite console me. Yet the present state of things, the reoccupation of Boston by the British, if you please to call it so, is not without its grain of compensation. It makes me fonder of “old Francony.” Skeptic or man of faith, naturalist or supernaturalist, who does not like to feel that there is somewhere a “better country” than the one he lives in?

A DAY IN JUNE

THE FORENOON

“The air that floated by me seem’d to say,
‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day,’
And so I did.”

KEATS.

All signs threatened a day of midsummer heat, though it was only the 2d of June. Before breakfast, even, the news seemed to have got abroad; so that there was something like a dearth of music under my windows, where heretofore there had been almost a surfeit. The warbling vireo in the poplar, which had teased my ear morning after morning, getting shamelessly in the way of his betters, had for once fallen silent; unless, indeed, he had sung his stint before I woke, or had gone elsewhere to practice. The comparative stillness enabled me to hear voices from the hillside across the meadow, while I turned over in my mind a thought concerning the nature of those sounds--a class by themselves, some of them by no means unmusical--which are particularly enjoyable when borne to us from a distance: crow voices, the baying of hounds, cowbell tinkles, and the like. The nasal, high-pitched, penetrating call of the little Canadian nuthatch is one of the best examples of what I mean. _Ank, ank_: the sounds issue from the depths of trackless woods, miles and miles away as it seems, just reaching us, without a breath to spare; dying upon the very tympanum, like a spent runner who drops exhausted at the goal, touching it only with his finger tips. Yet the ear is not fretted. It makes no attempt to hear more. _Ank, ank_: that is the whole story, and we see the bird as plainly as if he hung from a cone at the top of the next fir tree.

“No tramping to-day,” said my friends from the cottage as we met at table. They had been reading the thermometer, which is the modern equivalent for observing the wind and regarding the clouds. But my vacation, unlike theirs, was not an all-summer affair. It was fast running out, and there were still many things to be seen and done. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, with an umbrella and a luncheon, I started for the Notch. I would reverse the usual route, going by way of the railroad--reached by a woodland trail above “Chase’s”--and returning by the highway. Of itself this is only a forenoon’s jaunt, but I meant to piece it out by numerous waits--for coolness and listening--and sundry by-excursions, especially by a search for Selkirk’s violet and an hour or two on Bald Mountain. If the black flies and the mosquitoes would let me choose my own gait, I would risk the danger of sunstroke.

As I come out upon the grassy plain, after the first bit of sharp ascent, a pleasant breeze is stirring, and with the umbrella over my head, and a halt as often as the shade of a tree, the sight of a flower, or the sound of music invites me, I go on with great comfort. Now I am detained by a close bed of dwarf cornel, every face looking straight upward, the waxen white “flowers” inclosing each a bunch of dark pin-points. Now a lovely clear-winged moth hovers over a dandelion head; and a pleasing sight it is, to see his transparent wings beating themselves into a haze about his brown body. And now, by way of contrast, one of our tiny sky-blue butterflies rises from the ground and with a pretty unsteadiness flits carelessly before me, twinkling over the sand.

A bluebird drops into the white birch under which I am standing, and lets fall a few notes of his contralto warble. A delicious voice. For purity and a certain affectionateness it would be hard to name its superior. A vesper sparrow sings from the grass land; and from the woods beyond a jay is screaming. His, by the bye, is another of the voices that are bettered by distance, although, for my own part, I like the ring of it, near or far. Now a song sparrow breaks out in his breezy, characteristically abrupt manner. He is a bird with fine gifts of cheeriness and versatility; but when he sets himself against the vesper, as now, it is like prose against poetry, plain talk against music. So it seems to me at this moment, I mean to say. At another time, in another mood, I might tone down the comparison, though I could never say less than that the vesper is my favorite. His gifts are sweetness and perfection.

So I cross the level fields to Chase’s, where I stand a few minutes before the little front-yard flower-garden, always with many pretty things in it. One of those natural gardeners, the good woman must be, who have a knack of making plants blossom. And just beyond, in the shelter of the first tree, I stop again to take off my hat, put down my umbrella, and speak coaxingly to a suspicious pointer (being a friend of all dogs except surly ones), which after much backing and filling gets his cool nose into my palm. We are on excellent terms, I flatter myself, but at that moment some notion strikes me and I take out my notebook and pencil. Instantly he starts away and sets up a furious bark, looking first at me, then toward the house, circling about me all the while, at a rod’s distance, in a quiver of excitement. “Help! help!” he cries. “Here’s a villain of some sort. I’ve never seen the like. A spy at the very least.” And though he quiets down when I put up the book, there is no more friendliness for this time. Man writing, as Carlyle would have said, is a doubtful character.

Another stage, to the edge of the woods, and I rest again, the breeze encouraging me. A second bluebird is caroling. Every additional one is cause for thankfulness. Imagine a place where bluebirds should be as thick as English sparrows are in our American cities! Imagine heaven! A crested flycatcher screams, an olive-side calls _pip, pip_, a robin cackles, an oven-bird recites his piece with schoolboy emphasis, an alder flycatcher _queeps_, and a vesper sparrow sings. And at the end, as if for good measure, a Maryland yellow-throat adds his _witchery, witchery_. The breeze comes to me over broad beds of hay-scented fern, and at my feet are bunchberry blossoms and the white star-flower. At this moment, nevertheless, the cooling, insect-dispersing wind is better than all things else. Such is one effect of hot weather, setting comfort above poetry.

I leave the wind behind, and take my way into the wood, where there is nothing in particular to delay me except an occasional windfall, which must be clambered over or beaten about. Half an hour, more or less, of lazy traveling, and I come out upon the railroad at the big sugar-maple grove. This is one of the sights of the country in the bright-leaf season, say the first week of October; something, I have never concluded what, giving to its colors a most remarkable depth and richness. Putting times together, I must have spent hours in admiring it, now from different points on the Butter Hill round, now from Bald Mountain. At present every leaf of it is freshly green, and somewhere within it dwells a wood thrush, for whose golden voice I sit down in the shade to listen. He is in no haste, and no more am I. Let him take his time. Other birds also are a little under the weather, as it appears; but the silence cannot last. A scarlet tanager’s voice is the first to break it. High as the temperature is, he is still hoarse. And so is the black-throated blue warbler that follows him. A pine siskin passes overhead on some errand, announcing himself as he goes. There is no need for him to speak twice. Then come three warblers,--a Nashville, a magnolia, and a blue yellow-back; and after them a piece of larger game, a smallish hawk. He breaks out of the dense wood behind me, perches for half a minute in an open maple, where I can see that he has prey of some kind in his talons, and then, taking wing, ascends in circles into the sky, and so disappears. That is locomotion of a sort to make a man and his umbrella envious.

A rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible (but I can see him), is warbling not far off. He has taken the tanager’s tune--which is the robin’s as well--and smoothed it and smoothed it, and sweetened it and sweetened it, till it is smoother than oil and sweeter than honey. I admire it for what it is, a miracle of mellifluency; if you call it perfect, I can only acquiesce; but I cannot say that it stirs or kindles me. Perhaps I haven’t a sweet ear. And hark! the wood thrush gives voice: only a few strains, but enough to show him still present. Now I am free to trudge along up the railroad track, pondering as I go upon the old question why railway sleepers are always too far apart for one step and not far enough for two. At short intervals I pause at the sound of a mourning warbler’s brief song, pretty in itself, and noticeable for its trick of a rolled _r_. Some of the birds add a concluding measure of quick notes, like _wit, wit, wit_. It is long since I have seen so many at once. In truth, I have never seen so many except on one occasion, on the side of Mount Washington. That was ten years ago. One a year, on the average, shows itself to me during the spring passage--none in autumn. Well I remember my first one. Twenty years have elapsed since that late May morning, but I could go to the very spot, I think, though I have not been near it for more than half that time. A good thing it is that we can still enjoy the good things of past years, or of what we call past years.

And a good thing is a railroad, though the sleepers be spaced on purpose for a foot-passenger’s discomfort. Without this one, over which at this early date no trains are running, I should hardly be traversing these miles of rough mountain country on a day of tropical sultriness. The clear line of the track gives me not only passage and a breeze, but an opening into the sky, and at least twice as many bird sights and bird sounds as the unbroken forest would furnish.[10] I drink at the section men’s well--an ice-cold spring inclosed in a bottomless barrel--cross the brook which, gloriously alive and beautiful, comes dashing over its boulders down the White-cross Ravine, fifty feet below me as I guess, and stop in the burning on the other side to listen for woodpeckers and brown creepers. The latter are strangely rare hereabout, and this seems an ideal spot in which to look for them. So I cannot help thinking as I see from how many of the trunks--burned to death and left standing--the bark has warped in long, loose flakes, as if to provide nesting sites for a whole colony of creepers. But the birds are not here; or, if they are, they do not mean that an inquisitive stranger shall know it. An olive-sided flycatcher calls, rather far off, making me suspicious for an instant of a red crossbill, and a white-throated sparrow whistles out of the gulch below me; but I listen in vain for the quick _tseep_ which would put an eighty-seventh name into my vacation catalogue.

Here is the round-leaved violet, one pale-bright, shy blossom. How pleased I am to see it! Hobble-bush and wild red cherry are still in bloom. White Mountain dogwood, we might almost call the hobble-bush; so well it fills the place, in flowering time, of _Cornus florida_ in the Alleghanies. In the twilight of the woods, as in the darkness of evening, no color shows so far as white; which, for aught I know, may be one of the reasons why, relatively speaking, white flowers are so much more common in the forest than in the open country. In my eyes, nevertheless, the leaves of the hobble-bush--leaves and leaf-buds--are, if anything, prettier than the blossoms. Such beauty of shape, such expansiveness, such elegance of crimpling, and such exceeding richness of hue, whether in youth or age! If the bush refuses transplantation, as I have read that it does, I am glad of it. My sympathies are with all things, plants, animals, and men, that insist upon their native freedom, in their native country, with a touch, or more than a touch, of native savagery. Civilization is well enough, within limits; but why be in haste to have all the world a garden? It will be some time yet, I hope, before every valley is exalted.

With progress of this industriously indolent sort it is nearly noon by the time I turn into the footpath that leads down to Echo Lake. Here the air is full of toad voices; a chorus of long-drawn trills in the shrillest of musical tones. If the creatures (the sandy shore and its immediate shallows are thick with them) are attempting to set up an echo, they meet with no success. At all events I hear no response, though the fault may easily be in my hearing, insusceptible as it is to vibrations above a certain pitch of fineness. What ethereal music it would be, an echo of toad trills from the grand sounding-board of Eagle Cliff! In the density of my ignorance I am surprised to find such numbers of these humble, half-domesticated, garden-loving batrachians congregated here in the wilderness. If the day were less midsummery, and were not already mortgaged to other plans, I would go down to Profile Lake to see whether the same thing is going on there. I should have looked upon these lovely sheets of mountain water as spawning-places for trout. But toads!--that seems another matter. If I am surprised at their presence, however, they seem equally so at mine. And who knows? They were here first. Perhaps I am the intruder. I wish them no harm in any case. If black flies form any considerable part of their diet, they could not multiply too rapidly, though every note of every trill were good for a polliwog, and every polliwog should grow into the portliest of toads.

THE AFTERNOON

I spoke a little warmly, perhaps, at the end of the forenoon chapter. Echo Lake, at the foot of it, is one of the places where I love best to linger, and to-day it was more attractive even than usual; the air of the clearest, the sun bright, the mountain woods all in young leaf, the water shining. But the black flies, which had left me undisturbed on the railroad, though I sat still by the half-hour, once I reached the lake would allow me no rest.

It was twelve days since my first visit. The snow was gone, and the trailing arbutus had dropped its last blossoms; but both kinds of shadbush, standing in the hollow where a snowbank had lain ten days ago, were still in fresh bloom. Pink lady’s-slippers were common (more buds than blossoms as yet), and the pink rhodora also; with goldthread, star-flower, dwarf cornel, housonia, and the painted trillium. Chokeberry bushes were topped with handsome clusters of round, purplish buds.

The brightest and prettiest thing here, however, was not a flower, but a bird; a Blackburnian warbler fluttering along before me in the low bushes--an extraordinary act of grace on the part of this haunter of treetops--as if on purpose to show himself. He was worth showing. His throat was like a jewel. A bay-breast, always deserving of notice, was singing among the evergreens near by. So I believed, but the flies were so hot after me that I made no attempt to assure myself. I was fairly chased away from the waterside. One place after another I fled to, seeking one where the breeze should rid me of my tormentors, till at last, in desperation, I took to the piazza of the little shop--now unoccupied--at which the summer tourist buys birch-bark souvenirs, with ginger-beer, perhaps, and other potables. There I finished my luncheon, still having a skirmish with the enemy’s scouts now and then, but thankful to be out of the thick of the battle. The rippling lake shone before me, a few swifts were shooting to and fro above it, but for the time my enjoyment of all such things was gone. That half hour of black-fly persecution had dissipated the happy mood in which the forenoon had been passed, and there was no recovering it by force of will. A military man would have said, perhaps, that I had lost my _morale_. Something had happened to me, call it what you will. But if one string was broken, my bow had another. Quiet meditation being impossible, I was all the readier to go in search of Selkirk’s violet, the possible finding of which was one of the motives that had brought me into the mountains thus early. To look for flowers is not a question of mood, but of patience. To look _at_ them, so as to feel their beauty and meaning, is another business, not to be conducted successfully while poisonous insects are fretting one’s temper to madness.

If I went about this botanical errand doubtingly, let the reader hold me excused. He has heard of a needle in a haystack. The case of my violets was similar. The one man who had seen them was now dead. Years before, he had pointed out to me casually (or like a dunce I had _heard_ him casually) the place where he was accustomed to leave the road in going after them--which was always long before my arrival. This place I believed that I remembered within perhaps half a mile. My only resource, therefore, was to plunge into the forest, practically endless on its further side, and as well as I could, in an hour or so, look the land over for that distance. Success would be a piece of almost incredible luck, no doubt; but what then? I was here, the hour was to spare, and the woods were worth a visit, violets or no violets. So I plunged in, and, following the general course of the road, swept the ground right and left with my eye, turning this way and that as boulders and tangles impeded my steps, or as the sight of something like violet leaves attracted me.

Well, for good or ill, it is a short story. There were plenty of violets, but all of the common white sort, and when I emerged into the road again my hands were empty. “Small,” “rare,” says the Manual. My failure was not ignominious,--or I would keep it to myself,--and I count upon trying again another season. And one thing I _had_ found: my peace of mind. Subjectively, as we say, my hunt had prospered. Now I could climb Bald Mountain with good hope of an hour or two of serene enjoyment at the summit.

The climb is short, though the upper half of it is steep enough to merit the name, and the “mountain” (it will pardon me the quotation marks) is no more than a point of rocks, an outlying spur of Lafayette. Its attractiveness is due not to its altitude, but to the exceptional felicity of its situation; commanding the lake and the Notch, and the broad Franconia Valley, together with a splendid panorama of broken country and mountain forest; and over all, close at hand, the solemn, bare peak of Lafayette.

I took my time for the ascent (blessed be all-day jaunts, say I), minding the mossy boulders, the fern-beds, and the trees (many of them old friends of mine--it is more than twenty years since I began going up and down here), and especially the violets. It was surprising, not to say amusing, now that I had violets in my eye, how ubiquitous the little _blanda_ had suddenly become. Almost it might be said that there was nothing else in the whole forest. So true it is that seeing or not seeing is mostly a matter of prepossession. As for the birds, this was their hour of after-dinner silence. I recall only a golden-crowned kinglet _zeeing_ among the low evergreens about the cone. He was the first one of my whole vacation trip, and slipped at once into the eighty-seventh place in my catalogue, the place I had tried so hard to induce the brown creeper to take possession of two hours before. Creeper or kinglet, it was all one to me, though the kinglet is the handsomer of the two, and much the less prosaic in his dietary methods. In fact, now that the subject suggests itself, the two birds present a really striking contrast: one so preternaturally quick and so continually in motion, the other so comparatively lethargic. Every one to his trade. Let the creeper stick to his bark. Quick or slow, he should still have been Number 88, and thrice welcome, if he would have given me half an excuse for counting him. As things were, he kept out of my reckoning to the end.

“This is the best thing I have had yet.” So I said to myself as I turned to look about me at the summit. It was only half past two, the day was gloriously fair, the breeze not too strong, yet ample for creature comforts,--coolness and freedom,--and the place all my own. If I had missed Selkirk’s violet, I had found his solitude. The joists of the little open summer-house were scrawled thickly with names and initials, but the scribblers and carvers had gone with last year’s birds. I might sing or shout, and there would be none to hear me. But I did neither. I was glad to be still and look.