Here is the round-leaved violet, one pale-bright, shy blossom. How pleased I am to see it! Hobble-bush and wild red cherry are still in bloom. White Mountain dogwood, we might almost call the hobble-bush; so well it fills the place, in flowering time, of _Cornus florida_ in the Alleghanies. In the twilight of the woods, as in the darkness of evening, no color shows so far as white; which, for aught I know, may be one of the reasons why, relatively speaking, white flowers are so much more common in the forest than in the open country. In my eyes, nevertheless, the leaves of the hobble-bush--leaves and leaf-buds--are, if anything, prettier than the blossoms. Such beauty of shape, such expansiveness, such elegance of crimpling, and such exceeding richness of hue, whether in youth or age! If the bush refuses transplantation, as I have read that it does, I am glad of it. My sympathies are with all things, plants, animals, and men, that insist upon their native freedom, in their native country, with a touch, or more than a touch, of native savagery. Civilization is well enough, within limits; but why be in haste to have all the world a garden? It will be some time yet, I hope, before every valley is exalted. With progress of this industriously indolent sort it is nearly noon by the time I turn into the footpath that leads down to Echo Lake. Here the air is full of toad voices; a chorus of long-drawn trills in the shrillest of musical tones. If the creatures (the sandy shore and its immediate shallows are thick with them) are attempting to set up an echo, they meet with no success. At all events I hear no response, though the fault may easily be in my hearing, insusceptible as it is to vibrations above a certain pitch of fineness. What ethereal music it would be, an echo of toad trills from the grand sounding-board of Eagle Cliff! In the density of my ignorance I am surprised to find such numbers of these humble, half-domesticated, garden-loving batrachians congregated here in the wilderness. If the day were less midsummery, and were not already mortgaged to other plans, I would go down to Profile Lake to see whether the same thing is going on there. I should have looked upon these lovely sheets of mountain water as spawning-places for trout. But toads!--that seems another matter. If I am surprised at their presence, however, they seem equally so at mine. And who knows? They were here first. Perhaps I am the intruder. I wish them no harm in any case. If black flies form any considerable part of their diet, they could not multiply too rapidly, though every note of every trill were good for a polliwog, and every polliwog should grow into the portliest of toads. THE AFTERNOON