Here were the first trailing blackberry blossoms. The season was making haste. “Come, children, it is the 7th of May,” I seemed to hear the “bud-crowned spring” saying. The woods had burst into almost full leaf within a week. This morning, also, I found the first flowers of the _Dodecatheon_; three plants, each with only one bloom as yet; white, odd-looking, pointed,--like a stylographic pen, my profane clerical fancy suggested. American cowslip and shooting star the flower is called in the Manual. American cyclamen would hit it pretty well, I thought, its most striking peculiarity being the reflexed, cyclamenic carriage of the petals. I had been wondering what those broad root-leaves were, as I passed them here and there in the woods. The present was only my second sight of the blossom in a wild state, the first one having been on the battlefield of Chickamauga. It is matter for thankfulness, an enrichment of the memory, when a pretty flower is thus associated with a famous place. Among the old trees on the Heights a cerulean warbler and a blue yellow-back were singing nearly in the same breath. If I did not become lastingly familiar with the distinction between the two songs, it was not to be the birds’ fault. A second cerulean (or possibly the same one; it was impossible to be certain on that point, nor did it matter) was near the grapevine tangle, and at the moment of my approach was holding a controversy with a creeper. He had reserved the spot, as it appeared, and was insisting upon his claim. My spirits rose. It was this clump of shrubbery that I had come to sit beside, on the chance of seeing again, and tracking to her nest, the female whose behavior had so excited my hopes the afternoon before. “Nest small and neat, in fork of a bough 20-50 feet from the ground:” so I had read in the Key, and henceforth knew what I was to look for. For a full hour I remained on guard. Twice the male cerulean chased some other bird about in a manner extremely suspicious; but he kept her (or him) so constantly on the move that I had no fair sight of her plumage. Beyond that my vigil went for nothing. I must try again. If a man cannot waste an hour once in a while, he had better not undertake the finding of birds’ nests.