If we come down a certain steep pitch in the road from Garnet Hill, we remind each other that here he always stopped to look for _Aster Lindleyanus_, telling us meanwhile how problematical the identity of the plant really was. Professor So-and-So had pronounced it Lindleyanus, but Doctor Somebody-Else believed it to be only an odd form of a commoner species. In the Wallace Hill woods, I remember how we spent an afternoon there, he and I, only two years ago, searching for an orchid which just then had come newly under discussion among botanists, and how pleased he was when for once my eyes were luckier than his. If we are on the Landaff road, my companion asks, “Do you remember the Sunday noon when we went home and told E---- that this wood was full of his rare willow? And how he posted over here by himself, directly after dinner, to see it? And how he said, in a tone of whimsical entreaty, ‘Please don’t find it anywhere else; we mustn’t let it become too common’?” Oh yes, I remember; and my companion knows he has no need to remind me of it; but he loves to talk of the absent,--and he knows I love to hear him. That willow I can never see anywhere without thinking of the man who first told me about it. Whether I pass the single small specimen between Franconia and the Profile House, so close upon the highway that the road-menders are continually cutting it back, or the one on the Bethlehem road, or the great cluster of stems on Wallace Hill, it will always be _his_ willow. And indeed this whole beautiful hill country is his. How happy he was in it! I used sometimes to talk to him about the glories of our Southern mountains,--Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia; but he was never to be enticed away even in thought. “I think I shall never go out of New England again,” he would answer, with a smile; and he never did, though in his youth he had traveled more widely than I am ever likely to do. The very roadsides here must miss him, and wonder why he no longer passes, with his botanical box slung over his shoulder and an opera-glass in his hand,--equally ready for a plant or a bird. He was always looking for something, and always finding it. With his happiness, his goodness, his gentle dignity, his philosophic temper, his knowledge of his own mind, his love of all things beautiful, he has made Franconia a dear place for all of us who knew him here. To me, as to all of us, it is dear also for its own sake. This season I returned to it alone,--with no walking mate, I mean to say. He was to join me later, but for eight or ten days I was to follow the road by myself. At night I must make my own forecast of the weather and lay out my own morrow.