I spoke a little warmly, perhaps, at the end of the forenoon chapter. Echo Lake, at the foot of it, is one of the places where I love best to linger, and to-day it was more attractive even than usual; the air of the clearest, the sun bright, the mountain woods all in young leaf, the water shining. But the black flies, which had left me undisturbed on the railroad, though I sat still by the half-hour, once I reached the lake would allow me no rest. It was twelve days since my first visit. The snow was gone, and the trailing arbutus had dropped its last blossoms; but both kinds of shadbush, standing in the hollow where a snowbank had lain ten days ago, were still in fresh bloom. Pink lady’s-slippers were common (more buds than blossoms as yet), and the pink rhodora also; with goldthread, star-flower, dwarf cornel, housonia, and the painted trillium. Chokeberry bushes were topped with handsome clusters of round, purplish buds. The brightest and prettiest thing here, however, was not a flower, but a bird; a Blackburnian warbler fluttering along before me in the low bushes--an extraordinary act of grace on the part of this haunter of treetops--as if on purpose to show himself. He was worth showing. His throat was like a jewel. A bay-breast, always deserving of notice, was singing among the evergreens near by. So I believed, but the flies were so hot after me that I made no attempt to assure myself. I was fairly chased away from the waterside. One place after another I fled to, seeking one where the breeze should rid me of my tormentors, till at last, in desperation, I took to the piazza of the little shop--now unoccupied--at which the summer tourist buys birch-bark souvenirs, with ginger-beer, perhaps, and other potables. There I finished my luncheon, still having a skirmish with the enemy’s scouts now and then, but thankful to be out of the thick of the battle. The rippling lake shone before me, a few swifts were shooting to and fro above it, but for the time my enjoyment of all such things was gone. That half hour of black-fly persecution had dissipated the happy mood in which the forenoon had been passed, and there was no recovering it by force of will. A military man would have said, perhaps, that I had lost my _morale_. Something had happened to me, call it what you will. But if one string was broken, my bow had another. Quiet meditation being impossible, I was all the readier to go in search of Selkirk’s violet, the possible finding of which was one of the motives that had brought me into the mountains thus early. To look for flowers is not a question of mood, but of patience. To look _at_ them, so as to feel their beauty and meaning, is another business, not to be conducted successfully while poisonous insects are fretting one’s temper to madness.