As the road ascends, the aspect of things grows more and more springlike,--or less and less summer-like. Black-birch catkins are just beginning to fall, and a little higher, not far from the Bald Mountain path, I notice a sugar maple still hanging full of pale straw-colored tassels,--encouraging signs to a man who was becoming apprehensive lest he had arrived too late. Then, as I pass the height of land and begin the gentle descent into the Notch, fronting the white peak of Lafayette and the black face of Eagle Cliff, I am aware of a strange sensation, as if I had stepped into another world: bare, leafless woods and sudden blank silence. All the way hitherto birds have been singing on either hand, my ear picking out the voices one by one, while flies and mosquitoes have buzzed continually about my head; here, all in a moment, not a bird, not an insect,--a stillness like that of winter. Minute after minute, rod after rod, and not a breath of sound,--not so much as the stirring of a leaf. I could not have believed such a transformation possible. It is uncanny. I walk as in a dream. The silence lasts for at least a quarter of a mile. Then a warbler breaks it for an instant, and leaves it, if possible, more absolute than before. I am going southward, and downhill; but I am going into the Notch, into the very shadow of the mountains, where Winter makes his last rally against the inevitable. And yes, here are some of the early flowers I have come in search of: the dear little yellow violets, whose glossy, round leaves, no more than half-grown as yet, seem to love the very border of a snowbank. Here, too, is a most flourishing patch of spring-beauties, and another of adder’s-tongue,--dog-tooth violet, so called. Of the latter there must be hundreds of acres in Franconia. I have seen the freckled leaves everywhere, and now and then a few belated blossoms. Here I have it at its best, the whole bed thick with buds and freshly blown flowers. But the round-leaved violet is what I am chiefly taken with. The very type and pattern of modesty, I am ready to say. The spring-beauty masses itself; and though every blossom, if you look at it, is a miracle of delicacy,--lustrous pink satin, with veinings of a deeper shade,--it may fairly be said to make a show. But the violets, scattered, and barely out of the ground, must be sought after one by one. So meek, and yet so bold!--part of the beautiful vernal paradox, that the lowly and the frail are the first to venture.