The next morning I set out for Echo Lake. At that height, in that hollow among the mountains, the season must still be young. There, if anywhere, I should find the early violet and the trailing mayflower. And whatever I found, or did not find, at the end of the way, I should have made another ascent of the dear old Notch road, every rod of it the pleasanter for happy memories. I had never traveled it in May, with the glossy-leaved clintonia yet in the bud, and the broad, grassy golf links above the Profile House farm all frosty with houstonia bloom. And many times as I had been over it, I had never known till now that rhodora stood along its very edge. To-day, with the pink blossoms brightening the crooked, leafless, knee-high stems, not even my eyes could miss it. Our one small pear-leaved willow, near the foot of Hardscrabble, was in flower, its maroon leaves partly grown. Well I remembered the June morning when I lighted upon it, and the interest shown by the senior botanist of our little company when I reported the discovery, at the dinner table. He went up that very afternoon to see it for himself; and year after year, while he lived, he watched over it, more than once cautioning the road-menders against its destruction. How many times he and I have stopped beside it, on our way up and down! The “Torrey willow” he always called it, stroking my vanity; and I liked the word. Now a chipmunk speaks to me, as I pass; it is not his fault, nor mine either, perhaps, that I do not understand him; and now, hearing a twig snap, I glance up in time to see a woodchuck scuttling out of sight under the high, overhanging bank. So _he_ is a dweller in these upper mountain woods![5] I should have thought him too nice an epicure to feel himself at home in such diggings. But who knows? Perhaps he finds something hereabout--wood-sorrel or what not--that is more savory even than young clover leaves and early garden sauce. From somewhere on my right comes the sweet--honey-sweet--warble of a rose-breasted grosbeak; and almost over my head, at the topmost point of a tall spruce, sits a Blackburnian warbler, doing his little utmost to express himself. His pitch is as high as his perch, and his tone, pure _z_, is like the finest of wire. Another water-bar surmounted, and a bay-breast sings, and lets me see him,--a bird I always love to look at, and a song that I always have to learn anew, partly because I hear it so seldom, partly because of its want of individuality: a single hurried phrase, pure _z_ like the Blackburnian’s, and of the same wire-drawn tenuity. These warblers are poor hands at warbling, but they are musical to the eye. By this rule,--if throats were made to be looked at, and judged by the feathers on them,--the Blackburnian might challenge comparison with any singer under the sun.