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"Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare."

In this larch swamp, though I have never really explored it, I have seen, first and last, a good many things. Here grows much of the pear-leaved willow . I notice a few bushes even now as I pass, the reddish twigs each with a tuft of yellowing, red-stemmed leaves at the tip. Here, one June, a Tennessee warbler sang to me; and there are only two other places in the world in which I have been thus favored. Here,--a little farther up the valley,--on a rainy September forenoon, I once sat for an hour in the midst of as pretty a flock of birds as a man could wish to see: south-going travelers of many sorts, whom the fortunes of the road had thrown together. Here they were, lying by for a day's rest in this favorable spot; flitting to and fro, chirping, singing, feeding, playfully quarreling, as if life, even in rainy weather and in migration time, were all a pleasure trip. It was a sight to cure low spirits. I sat on the hay just within the open side of a barn which stands here in the woods, quite by itself, and watched them till I almost felt myself of their company. I have forgotten their names, though I listed them carefully enough, beyond a doubt; but it will be long before I forget my delight in the birds themselves. Ours may be an evil world, as the pessimists and the preachers find so much comfort in maintaining, but there is one thing to be said in its favor: its happy days are the longest remembered. The pain I suffered years ago I cannot any longer make real to myself, even if I would, but the joys of that time are still almost as good as new, when occasion calls them up. Some of them, indeed, seem to have sweetened with age. This is especially the case, I think, with simple and natural pleasures; which may be considered as a good reason why every man should be, if he can, a lover of nature,--a sympathizer, that is to say, with the life of the world about him. The less artificial our joys, the more likelihood of their staying by us.

Beyond this lonely barn the soil of the valley becomes drier and sandier. Here are two or three houses, with broad hayfields about them, in which live many vesper sparrows. No doubt they have lived here longer than any of their present human neighbors. Even now they flit along the wayside in advance of the foot-passenger, running a space, after their manner, and anon taking wing to alight upon a fence rail. Their year is done, but they linger still a few days, out of love for the ancestral fields, or, it may be, in dread of the long journey, from which some of them will pretty certainly never come back.

All the way up the road, though no mention has been made of it, my eyes have been upon the low, bright-colored hills beyond the river,--sugar-maple orchards all in yellow and red, a gorgeous display,--or upon the mountains in front, Kinsman and the more distant Moosilauke. The green meadow is a good place in which to look for marsh hawks,--as well as of great use as a foreground,--and the hill woods beyond are the resort of pileated woodpeckers. I have often seen and heard them here, but there is no sign of them to-day.

Though these fine birds are generally described--one book following another, after the usual fashion--as frequenters of the wilderness, and though it is true that they have forsaken the more thickly settled parts of the country, I think I have never once seen them in the depths of the forest. To the best of my recollection none of our Franconia men have ever reported them from Mount Lafayette or from the Lonesome Lake region. On the other hand, we meet them with greater or less regularity in the more open valley woods, often directly upon the roadside; not only in the Landaff Valley, but on the outskirts of the village toward Littleton and on the Bethlehem road. In this latter place I remember seeing a fellow prancing about the trunk of a small orchard tree within twenty rods of a house; and not so very infrequently, especially in the rum-cherry season, they make their appearance in the immediate vicinity of the hotel; for they, like some of their relatives, notably the sapsucker, are true cherry-birds. In Vermont, too, I have found their freshly cut "peck-holes" on the very skirts of the village. And at the South, so far as I have been able to observe, the story is the same. About Natural Bridge, Virginia, for example, a loosely settled country, with plenty of woodland but no extensive forests, the birds were constantly in evidence. In short, untamable as they look, and little as they may like a town, they seem to find themselves best off, as birds in general do, on the borders of civilization. They have something of Thoreau's mind, we may say: lovers of the wild, they are yet not quite at home in the wilderness, and prefer the woodman's path to the logger's.

Along the wayside are many gray birches , the only ones I remember about Franconia; for which reason I sometimes call the road Gray Birch Road; and just beyond them I stop again. Here is a bit for a painter: a lovely vista, such as makes a man wish for a brush and the skill to use it. The road dips into a little hollow, turns gently, and passes out of sight within the shadow of a wood. And above the over-arching trees rises the pyramidal mass of Mount Cannon, its middle part set with dark evergreens, which are flanked on either side with broad patches of light yellow,--poplars or birches. The sun is getting down, and its level rays flood the whole mountain forest with light.

Into the shadow I go, following the road, and after a turn or two come out at a small clearing and a house. "Rocky Farm," we might name it; for the land is sprinkled over with huge boulders, as if giants had been at play here. Whoever settled the place first must have chosen the site for its outlook rather than for any hope of its fertility. I sit down on one of the stones and take my fill of the mountain glory: Garfield, Lafayette, Cannon, Kinsman, Moosilauke,--a grand horizonful. Cannon is almost within reach of the hand, as it looks; but the arm might need to be two miles long.

Just here the road makes a sudden bend, passes again into light woods, and presently emerges upon a little knoll overlooking the upper Franconia meadows. This is the noblest prospect of the afternoon, and late as the hour is growing I must lean against the fence rail--for there is a house at this point also--and gaze upon it. The green meadow is spread at my feet, flaming maple woods range themselves beyond it, and behind them, close at hand, loom the sombre mountains. I had forgotten that this part of the road was so "viewly," to borrow a local word, and am thankful to have reached it at so favorable a moment. Now the shadow of the low hills at my back overspreads the valley, while the upper world beyond is aglow with light and color.

It is five o'clock, and I must be getting homeward. Down at the valley level the evening chill strikes me, after the exceptional warmth of the day, and by the time Tucker Brook is crossed the bare summit of Lafayette is of a deep rosy purple,--the rest of the world sunless. The day is over, and the remaining miles are taken somewhat hurriedly, although I stop below the Profile House farm to look for a fresh bunch of dumb foxglove,--not easy to find in the open at this late date, many as the plants are,--and at one or two other places to pluck a tempting maple twig. Sated with the magnificence of autumnal forests, hill after hill splashed with color, the eye loves to withdraw itself now and then to rest upon the perfection of a blossom or a leaf. Wagonloads of tourists come down the Notch road, the usual nightly procession, some silent, some boisterously singing. Among the most distressing of all the noises that human beings make is this vulgar shouting of "sacred music" along the public highway. This time the hymn is Jerusalem the Golden, after the upper notes of which an unhappy female voice is vainly reaching, like a boy who has lost his wind in shinning up a tree, and with his last gasping effort still finds the lowest branch just beyond the clutch of his fingers.

"I know not, oh, I know not,"

I hear her shriek, and then a lucky turn in the road takes her out of hearing, and I listen again to the still small voice of the brook, which, whether it "knows" or not, has the grace to make no fuss about it.

Let that one human discord be forgotten. It had been a glorious day; few lovelier were ever made: a day without a cloud , and almost without a breath; a day to walk, and a day to sit still; a long feast of beauty; and withal, it had for me a perfect conclusion, as if Nature herself were setting a benediction upon the hours. As I neared the end of my jaunt, the hotel already in sight, Venus in all her splendor hung low in the west, the full moon was showing its rim above the trees in the east, and at the same moment a vesper sparrow somewhere in the darkening fields broke out with its evening song. Five or six times it sang, and then fell silent. It was enough. The beauty of the day was complete.

The next day, October 1, was no less delightful: mild, still, and cloudless; so that it was pleasant to lounge upon the piazza in the early morning, looking at Lafayette,--good business of itself,--and listening to the warble of a bluebird, the soft chirps of myrtle warblers, or the distant gobbling of a turkey down at one of the river farms; while now and then a farmer drove past from his morning errand at the creamery, with one or two tall milk-cans standing behind him in the open, one-seated carriage. If you see a man on foot as far from the village as this, you may set him down, in ornithological language, as a summer resident or a transient visitor. Franconians, to the manner born, are otherwise minded, and will "hitch up" for a quarter of a mile. As good John Bunyan said, "This is a valley that nobody walks in, but those that love a pilgrim's life."

As I take the Notch road after breakfast the temperature is summer-like, and the foliage, I think, must have reached its brightest. Above the Profile House farm, on the edge of the golf links, where the whole Franconia Valley lies exposed, I seat myself on the wall, inside a natural hedge that borders the highway, to admire the scene: a long verdant meadow, flanked by low hills covered, mile after mile, with vivid reds and yellows; splendor beyond words; a pageant glorious to behold, but happily of brief duration. Human senses would weary of it, though the eye loves color as the palate loves spices and sweets, or, by force of looking at it, would lose all delicacy of perception and taste.

When this free-spoken pair is far enough in the lead, I go back to the road again, traveling slowly and keeping to the shady side, with my coat on my arm. As the climb grows steeper the weather grows more and more like August; and hark! a cicada is shrilling in one of the forest trees,--a long-drawn, heat-laden, midsummer cry. I will tell the entomologist about it, I promise myself. The circumstance must be very unusual, and cannot fail to interest her.

So I go on, up Hardscrabble and Little Hardscrabble, stopping like a short-winded horse at every water-bar, and thankful for every bird-note that calls me to a halt between times. An ornithological preoccupation is a capital resource when the road is getting the better of you. The brook likewise must be minded, and some of the more memorable of the wayside trees. A mountain road has one decided and inalienable advantage, I remark inwardly: the most perversely opinionated highway surveyor in the world cannot straighten it. How fast the leaves are falling, though the air scarcely stirs among them! In some places I walk through a real shower of gold. Theirs is an easy death. And how many times I have been up and down this road! Summer and autumn I have traveled it. And in what pleasant company! Now I am alone; but then, the solitude itself is an excellent companionship. We are having a pretty good time of it, I think,--the trees, the brook, the winding road, the yellow birch leaves, and the human pilgrim, who feels himself one with them all. I hope they would not disown a poor relation.

Down at the lakeside there is beauty of another kind: the level blue water, the clean gray shallows about its margin, the reflections of bright mountains--Eagle Cliff and Mount Cannon--in its face, and soaring into the sky, on either side and in front, the mountains themselves. And how softly the ground is matted under the shrubbery and trees: twin-flower, partridge berry, creeping snowberry, goldthread, oxalis, dwarf cornel, checkerberry, trailing arbutus! The very names ought to be a means of grace to the pen that writes them.

White-throats and a single winter wren scold at me behind my back as I sit on a spruce log, but for some reason there are few birds here to-day. The fact is exceptional. As a rule, I have found the bushes populous, and once, I remember, not many days later than this, there were fox sparrows with the rest. I am hoping some time to find a stray phalarope swimming in the lake. That would be a sight worth seeing. The lake itself is always here, at any rate, especially now that the summer people are gone; and if the wind is right and the sun out, so that a man can sit still with comfort , the absence of other things does not greatly matter.

This clean waterside must have many four-footed visitors, particularly in the twilight and after dark. Deer and bears are common inhabitants of the mountain woods; but for my eyes there is nothing but squirrels, with once in a long while a piece of wilder game. Twice only, in Franconia, have I come within sight of a fox. Once I was alone, in the wood-road to Sinclair's Mills. I rounded a curve, and there the fellow stood in the middle of the way, smelling at something in the rut. After a bit he raised his head and looked down the road in a direction opposite to mine. Then he turned, saw me, started slightly, stood quite still for a fraction of a minute , and vanished in the woods, his white brush waving me farewell. He was gone so instantaneously that it was hard to believe he had really been there.

That was a pretty good look , but far less satisfying than the other of my Franconia experiences. With two friends I had come down through the forest from the Notch railroad by a rather blind loggers' trail, heading for a pair of abandoned farms, grassy fields in which it is needful to give heed to one's steps for fear of bear-traps. As we emerged into the first clearing a fox was not more than five or six rods before us, feeding in the grass. Her eyes were on her work, the wind was in our favor, and notwithstanding two of us were almost wholly exposed, we stood there on the edge of the forest for the better part of half an hour, glasses up, passing comments upon her behavior. Evidently she was lunching upon insects,--grasshoppers or crickets, I suppose,--and so taken up was she with this agreeable employment that she walked directly toward us and passed within ten yards of our position, stopping every few steps for a fresh capture. The sunlight, which shone squarely in her face, seemed to affect her unpleasantly; at all events she blinked a good deal. Her manner of stepping about, her motions in catching her prey,--driving her nose deep into the grass and pushing it home,--and in short her whole behavior, were more catlike than doglike, or so we all thought. Plainly she had no idea of abbreviating her repast, nor did she betray the slightest grain of suspiciousness or wariness, never once casting an eye about in search of possible enemies. A dog in his own dooryard could not have seemed less apprehensive of danger. As often as she approached the surrounding wood she turned and hunted back across the field. We might have played the spy upon her indefinitely; but it was always the same thing over again, and by and by, when she passed for a little out of sight behind a tuft of bushes, we followed, careless of the result, and, as it seemed, got into her wind. She started on the instant, ran gracefully up a little incline, still in the grass land, turned for the first time to look at us, and disappeared in the forest. A pretty creature she surely was, and from all we saw of her she might have been accounted a very useful farm-hand; but perhaps, as farmers sometimes say of unprofitable cattle, she would soon have "eaten her head off" in the poultry yard. She was not fearless,--like a woodchuck that once walked up to me and smelled of my boot, as I stood still in the road near the Crawford House,--but simply off her guard; and our finding her in such a mood was simply a bit of good luck. Some day, possibly, we shall catch a weasel asleep.

"that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude."

Whatever we may call ourselves at home, among the mountains we are lovers of pleasure. Our day's work is to be happy. We take our text from the good Longfellow as theologians take theirs from Scripture:--

"Enjoyment, and not sorrow, is our destined end."

We are not anxious to learn anything; our thoughts run not upon wisdom; if we take note of a plant or a bird, it is rather for the fun of it than for any scholarly purpose. We are boys out of school. I speak of myself and of the man I have called my walking mate. The two collectors of insects, of course, are more serious-minded. "No day without a beetle," is their motto, and their absorption, even in Franconia, is in adding to the world's stock of knowledge. Let them be respected accordingly. Our creed is more frankly hedonistic; and their virtue--I am free to confess it--shines the brighter for the contrast.

This year, nevertheless, old Franconia had for us, also, one most welcome novelty, the story of which I have kept, like the good wine,--a pretty small glassful, I am aware,--for the end of the feast. I had never enjoyed the old things better. Eight or nine years ago, writing--in this magazine--of June in Franconia, I expressed a fear that our delight in the beauty of nature might grow to be less keenly felt with advancing age; that we might ultimately be driven to a more scientific use of the outward world, putting the exercise of curiosity, what we call somewhat loftily the acquisition of knowledge, in the place of rapturous contemplation. So it may yet fall out, to be sure, since age is still advancing, but as far as present indications go, nothing of the sort seems at all imminent. I begin to believe, in fact, that things will turn the other way; that curiosity will rather lose its edge, and the power of beauty strike deeper and deeper home. So may it be! Then we shall not be dead while we live. Sure I am that the glory of mountains, the splendor of autumnal forests, the sweetness of valley prospects, were never more rapturously felt by me than during the season just ended. And still, as I started just now to say, I had special joy this year in a new specimen, an additional bird for my memory and notebook.

The forenoon of September 26, my fourth day, I spent on Garnet Hill. The grand circuit of that hill is one of the best esteemed of our longer expeditions. Formerly we did it always between breakfast and dinner, having to speed the pace a little uncomfortably for the last four or five miles; but times have begun to alter with us, or perhaps we have profited by experience; for the last few years, at any rate, we have made the trip an all-day affair, dining on Sunset Hill, and loitering down through the Landaff Valley--with a side excursion, it may be, to fill up the hours--in the afternoon. This trip, being, as I say, one of those we most set by, I was determined to hold in reserve against the arrival of my fellow foot-traveler; but there is also a pleasant shorter course, not round the hill, but, so to speak, over one side of it: out by the way of what I call High Bridge Road , and back by the road--hardly more than a lane for much of its length--which traverses the hill diagonally on its northeastern slope, and joins the regular Sugar Hill highway a little below the Franconia Inn.

I left the Littleton road for the road to the Streeter neighborhood, crossed Gale River by a bridge pitched with much labor at a great height above it , passed two or three retired valley farms , and then began a long, steep climb. For much of the distance the road--narrow and very little traveled--is lined with dense alder and willow thickets, excellent cover for birds. It was partly with this place in my eye that I had chosen my route, remembering an hour of much interest here some years ago with a large flock of migrants. To-day, as it happened, the bushes were comparatively birdless. White-throats and snowbirds were present, of course, and ruby-crowned kinglets, with a solitary vireo or two, but nothing out of the ordinary. The prospect, however, without being magnificent or--for Franconia--extensive, was full of attractiveness. Gale River hastening through a gorge overhung with forest, directly on my right, Streeter Pond farther away , and the gay-colored hills toward Littleton and Bethlehem,--maple grove on maple grove, with all their banners flying,--these made a delightsome panorama, shifting with every twist in the road and with every rod of the ascent; so that I had excuse more than sufficient for continually stopping to breathe and face about. In one place I remarked a goodly bed of coltsfoot leaves, noticeable for their angular shape as well as for their peculiar shade of green. I wished for a blossom. If the dandelion sometimes anticipates the season, why not the coltsfoot? But I found no sign of flower or bud. Probably the plant is of a less impatient habit; but I have seen it so seldom that all my ideas about it are no better than guesswork. Along the wayside was maiden-hair fern, also, which I do not come upon any too often in this mountain country.

Midway of the hill stands a solitary house, where I found my approach spied upon through a crack between the curtain and the sash of what seemed to be a parlor window; a flattering attention which, after the manner of high public functionaries, I took as a tribute not to myself, but to the r?le I was playing. No doubt travelers on foot are rare on that difficult, out-of-the-way road, and the walker rather than the man was what filled my lady's eye; unless, as may easily have been true, she was expecting to see a peddler's pack. At this point the road crooks a sharp elbow, and henceforth passes through cultivated country,--orchards and ploughed land, grass fields and pasturage; still without houses, however, and having a pleasant natural hedgerow of trees and shrubbery. In one of the orchards was a great congregation of sparrows and myrtle warblers, with sapsuckers, flickers, downy woodpeckers, solitary vireos, and I forget what else, though I sat on the wall for some time refreshing myself with their cheerful society. I agreed with them that life was still a good thing.

Then came my novelty. I was but a little way past this aviary of an apple orchard when I approached a pile of brush,--dry branches which had been heaped against the roadside bank some years ago, and up through which bushes and weeds were growing. My eyes sought it instinctively, and at the same moment a bird moved inside. A sparrow, alone; a sparrow, and a new one! "A Lincoln finch!" I thought; and just then the creature turned, and I saw his forward parts: a streaked breast with a bright, well-defined buff band across it, as if the streaks had been marked in first and then a wash of yellowish had been laid on over them. Yes, a Lincoln finch! He was out of sight almost before I saw him, however, and after a bit of feverish waiting I squeaked. He did not come up to look at me, as I hoped he would do, but the sudden noise startled him, and he moved slightly, enough so that my eye again found him. This time, also, I saw his head and his breast, and then he was lost again. Again I waited. Then I squeaked, waited, and squeaked again, louder and longer than before. No answer, and no sign of movement. You might have sworn there was no bird there; and perhaps you would not have perjured yourself; for presently I stepped up to the brush-heap and trampled it over, and still there was no sign of life. Above the brush was a low stone wall, and beyond that a bare ploughed field. How the fellow had slipped away there was no telling. And that was the end of the story. But I had seen him, and he was a Lincoln finch. It was a shabby interview he had granted me, after keeping me waiting for almost twenty years; but then, I repeated for my comfort, I had seen him.

He was less confusingly like a song sparrow than I had been prepared to find him. His general color , gray with a greenish tinge,--a little suggestive of Henslow's bunting, as it struck me,--this, I thought, supposing it to be constant, ought to catch the eye at a glance. Henceforth I should know what to look for, and might expect better luck; although, if this particular bird's behavior was to be taken as a criterion, the books had been quite within the mark in emphasizing the sly and elusive habit of the species, and the consequent difficulty of prolonged and satisfactory observation of it.

The Lincoln finch, or Lincoln sparrow, the reader should know, is a congener of the song sparrow and the swamp sparrow, a native mostly of the far north, and while common enough as a migrant in many parts of the United States, is, or is generally supposed to be, something of a rarity in the Eastern States.

Meanwhile, having beaten the brush over, and looked up the roadside and down the roadside and over the wall, I went on my way, stopping once for a feast of blackberries,--as many and as good as a man could ask for, long, slender, sweet, and dead ripe; and at the top of the road I cut across a hayfield to the lane before mentioned, that should take me back to the Sugar Hill highway. Now the prospects were in front of me, there was no more steepness of grade, I had seen Tom Lincoln's finch, and the day was brighter than ever. Every sparrow that stirred I must put my glass on; but not one was of the right complexion.

Then, in a sugar grove not far from the Franconia Inn, I found myself all at once in the midst of one of those traveling flocks that make so delightful a break in a bird-lover's day. I was in the midst of it, I say; but the real fact was that the birds were passing through the grove between me and the sky. For the time being the branches were astir with wings. Such minutes are exciting. "Now or never," a man says to himself. Every second is precious. At this precise moment a warbler is above your head, far up in the topmost bough perhaps, half hidden by a leaf. If you miss him, he is gone forever. If you make him out, well and good; he may be a rarity, a prize long waited for; or, quite as likely, while busy with him you may let a ten times rarer one pass unnoticed. In this game, as in any other, a man must run his chances; though there is skill as well as luck in it, without doubt, and one player will take a trick or two more than another, with the same hand.

In the present instance, so far as my canvass showed, the "wave" was made up of myrtle warblers, blackpolls, baybreasts, black-throated greens, a chestnut-side, a Maryland yellow-throat, red-eyed vireos, solitary vireos, one or more scarlet tanagers , ruby-crowned kinglets, chickadees, winter wrens, goldfinches, song sparrows, and flickers. The last three or four species, it is probable enough, were in the grove only by accident, and are hardly to be counted as part of the south-bound caravan. Several of the species were in good force, and doubtless some species eluded me altogether. No man can look all ways at once; and in autumn the eyes must do not only their own work, but that of the ears as well.

All the while the birds hastened on, flitting from tree to tree, feeding a minute and then away, following the stream. I was especially glad of the baybreasts, of which there were two at least, both very distinctly marked, though in nothing like their spring plumage. I saw only one other specimen this fall, but the name is usually in my autumnal Franconia list. The chestnut-side, on the other hand, was the first one I had ever found here at this season, and was correspondingly welcome.

After all, a catalogue of names gives but a meagre idea of such a flock, except to those who have seen similar ones, and amused themselves with them in a similar manner. But I had had the fun, whether I can make any one else appreciate it or not, and between it and my joy over the Lincoln finch I went home in high feather.

On the sixth day came my friend, the second foot-passenger, and was told of my good fortune; and together we began forthwith to walk--and look at sparrows. This, also, was vain, until the morning of October 4. I was out first. A robin was cackling from a tall treetop, as I stepped upon the piazza, and a song sparrow sang from a cluster of bushes across the way. Other birds were there, and I went over to have a look at them: two or three white-throats, as many song sparrows, and a white-crown. Then by squeaking I called into sight two swamp sparrows , and directly afterward up hopped a small grayish sparrow, seen at a glance to be like my bird of nine days before,--like him in looks, but not in behavior. He conducted himself in the most accommodating manner, was full of curiosity, not in the least shy, and afforded me every opportunity to look him over to my heart's content.

And we fancied we should know him thereafter; but a novice's knowledge is only a novice's, as we were to be freshly reminded that very day. Our jaunt was round Garnet Hill, the all-day expedition before referred to. I will not rehearse the story of it; but while we were on the farther side of the hill, somewhere in Lisbon, we found the roadsides swarming with sparrows,--a mixed flock, song sparrows, field sparrows, chippers, and white-crowns. Among them one of us by and by detected a grayish, smallish bird, and we began hunting him, from bush to bush and from one side of the road to the other, carrying on all the while an eager debate as to his identity. Now we were sure of him, and now everything was unsettled. His breast was streaked and had a yellow band across it. His color and size were right, as well as we could say,--so decidedly so that there was no difficulty whatever in picking him out at a glance after losing him in a flying bunch; but some of his motions were pretty song-sparrow-like, and what my fellow observer was most staggered by, he showed a blotch, a running together of the dark streaks, in the middle of the breast,--a point very characteristic of the song sparrow, but not mentioned in book descriptions of Melospiza lincolni. So we chased him and discussed him , till he got away from us for good.

Was he a Lincoln finch? Who knows? We left the question open. But I believe he was. The main reason, not to say the only one, for our uncertainty was the pectoral blotch; and that, I have since learned, is often seen in specimens of Melospiza lincolni. Why the manuals make no reference to it I cannot tell; as I cannot tell why they omit the same point in describing the savanna sparrow. In scientific books, as in "popular" magazine articles, many things must no doubt be passed over for lack of room. In any case, it is not the worst misfortune that could befall us to have some things left for our own finding out.

And after all, the question was not of supreme importance. Though I was delighted to have seen a new bird, and doubly delighted to have seen it in Franconia, the great joy of my visit was not in any such fragment of knowledge, but in that bright and glorious world; mountains and valleys beautiful in themselves, and endeared by the memory of happy days among them. Sometimes I wonder whether the pleasures of memory may not be worth the price of growing old.

SPRING

"He would now be up every morning by break of day, walking to and fro in the valley."--BUNYAN.

It was a white day, the day of the red cherry,--by the almanac the 20th of May. Once in the hill country, the train ran hour after hour through a world of shrubs and small trees, loaded every one with blossoms. Their number was amazing. I should not have believed there were so many in all New Hampshire. The snowy branches fairly whitened the woods; as if all the red-cherry trees of the country round about were assembled along the track to celebrate a festival. The spectacle--for it was nothing less--made me think of the annual dogwood display as I had witnessed it in the Alleghanies and further south. I remembered, too, a similar New England pageant of some years ago; a thing of annual occurrence, of course, but never seen by me before or since. Then it happened that I came down from Vermont just at the time when the shadbushes were in their glory. Like the wild red-cherry trees, as I saw them now, they seemed to fill the world. Such miles on miles of a floral panorama are among the memorable delights of spring travel.

For the cherry's sake I was glad that my leaving home had been delayed a week or two beyond my first intention; though I thought then, as I do still, that an earlier start would have shown me something more of real spring among the mountains, which, after all, was what I had come out to see.

The light showers through which I drove over the hills from Littleton were gone before sunset, and as the twilight deepened I strolled up the Butter Hill road as far as the grove of red pines, just to feel the ground under my feet and to hear the hermit thrushes. How divinely they sang, one on either side of the way, voice answering to voice, the very soul of music, out of the darkening woods! I agree with a friendly correspondent who wrote me, the other day, fresh from a summer in France, that the nightingale is no such singer. I have never heard the nightingale, but that does not alter my opinion. Formerly I wished that the hermit, and all the rest of our woodland thrushes, would practice a longer and more continuous strain. Now I think differently; for I see now that what I looked upon as a blemish is really the perfection of art. Those brief, deliberate phrases, breaking one by one out of the silence, lift the soul higher than any smooth-flowing warble could possibly do. Worship has no gift of long-breathed fluency. If she speaks at all, it is in the way of ejaculation: "Therefore let thy words be few," said the Preacher,--a text which is only a modern Hebrew version of what the hermit thrush has been saying here in the White Mountains for ten thousand years.

One of the principal glories of Franconia is the same in spring as in autumn,--the colors of the forest. There is no describing them: greens and reds of all tender and lovely shades; not to speak of the exquisite haze-blue, or blue-purple, which mantles the still budded woods on the higher slopes. For the reds I was quite unprepared. They have never been written about, so far as I know, doubtless because they have never been seen. The scribbling tourist is never here till long after they are gone. In fact, I stayed late enough, on my present visit, to see the end of them. I knew, of course, that young maple leaves, like old ones, are of a ruddy complexion; but somehow I had never considered that be put off if they keep this up," answered Pepper. "They can cheer all they please for the Dauntless eleven, but they have got to act like gentlemen."

As soon as the two elevens appeared, the practice commenced, and then there was a toss-up for goals, which Dauntless won. They took the south goal and Putnam Hall took the ball. Then came the kick-off, and the game was on.

THE FOOTBALL GAME

At first the playing was rather tame, but inside of a few minutes both elevens warmed up, and from that moment the work became fast and furious.

The Dauntless team had the advantage of weight, but the eleven had not played together as much as had the majority of the Putnam Hall cadets, consequently some of their combination efforts were decidedly ragged. One move resulted in a bad fumble on the part of the left end. The ball was captured by Jack, and he carried it forward fifteen yards before downed.

"Oh, my, isn't it rough!" screamed Laura Ford, as the young major hit the grass with great force, two of the Dauntless men being on top of him.

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