As I come down to the lakeside,--making toward the lower end, whither I always go, because there the railroad is least obtrusively in sight and the mountains are faced to the best advantage,--two or three solitary sandpipers flit before me, tweeting and bobbing, and a winter wren (invisible, of course) sings from a thicket at my elbow. A jolly songster he is, with the clearest and finest of tones--a true fife--and an irresistible accent and rhythm. A bird by himself. This fellow hurries and hurries (am I wrong in half remembering a line by some poet about a bird that “hurries and precipitates”?),[6] till the tempo becomes too much for him; the notes can no longer be taken, and, like a boy running down too steep a hill, he finishes with a slide. I think of those pianoforte passages which the most lightninglike of performers--Paderewski himself--are reduced to playing ignominiously with the back of one finger. I know not their technical name, if they have one,--finger-nail runs, perhaps. I remember, also, Thoreau’s description of a song heard in Tuckerman’s Ravine and here in the Franconia Notch. He could never discover the author of it, but pretty certainly it was the winter wren. “Most peculiar and memorable,” he pronounces it, like a “fine corkscrew stream issuing with incessant tinkle from a cork.” “Tinkle” is exactly the word. Trust Thoreau to find _that_, though he could not find the singer. If the thrushes are left out of the account, there is no voice in the mountains that I am gladder to hear. Near the outlet of the lake, in a shaded hollow, lies a deep snowbank, and not far away the ground is matted with trailing arbutus, still in plentiful bloom. One of the most attractive things here is the few-flowered shadbush (_Amelanchier oligocarpa_). The common _A. Canadensis_ grows near by; and it is astonishing how unlike the two species look, although the difference (the visible difference, I mean) is mostly in the arrangement of the flowers,--clustered in one case, separately disposed in the other. To-day the “average observer” would look twice before suspecting any close relationship between them; a week or two hence he would look a dozen times before remarking any distinction. With them, as with the red cherry, it is the blossom that makes the bush. So much for my first May morning on the Notch road and by the lake: a few particulars caught in passing, to be taken for what they are,-- “Samples and sorts, not for themselves alone, but for their atmosphere.”