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 (this also was in May) 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.