The first day was one of the good ones, fair and still. As I came out upon the piazza before breakfast and looked up at Lafayette, a solitary vireo was phrasing sweetly from the bushes on one side of the house, and two or three vesper sparrows were remembering the summer from the open fields on the other side. It was the 22d of September, and by this time the birds knew how to appreciate a day of brightness and warmth. Seeing them in such a mood, I determined to spend the forenoon in their society. I would take the road to Sinclair’s Mills,--a woodsy jaunt, yet not too much in the forest, always birdy from one end to the other. “This is living!” I found myself repeating aloud, as I went up the longish hill to the plateau above Gale River, on the Bethlehem road. “This is living!” No more books, no more manuscripts,--my own or other people’s,--no more errands to the city. How good the air was! How glorious the mountains, unclouded, but hazy! How fragrant the ripening herbage in the shelter of the woods!--an odor caught for an instant, and then gone again; something that came of itself, not to be detected, much less traced to its source, by any effort or waiting. The forests were still green,--I had to look closely to find here and there the first touch of red or yellow; but the flowering season was mostly over, a few ragged asters and goldenrods being the chief brighteners of the wayside. About the sunnier patches of them, about the asters especially, insects were hovering, still drinking honey before it should be too late: yellow butterflies, bumble-bees (of some northern kind, apparently, marked with orange, and not so large as our common Massachusetts fellow), with swarms of smaller creatures of many sorts. If I stopped to attend to it, each aster bunch was a world by itself. And more than once I did stop. There was no haste; I had chosen my route partly with a view to just such idling; and the birds were, and were likely to be, nothing but old favorites. And they proved to be not many, after all. The best of them were the winter wrens, which I thought I had never seen more numerous; every one fretting, _tut, tut_, in their characteristic manner, without a note of song. On my way back, the sun being higher, there were many butterflies in the road, flat on the sand, with wings outspread. If ever there is comfort in the world, the butterfly feels it at such times. Here and there half a dozen or more of yellow ones would be huddled about a damp spot. There were mourning-cloaks, also, and many small angle-wings, some species of _Grapta_, I knew not which, of a peculiarly bright red. Once or twice, wishing a name for them, I essayed to catch a specimen under my hat; but it seemed a small business, at which I was only half ashamed to find myself grown inexpert.