There lay Echo Lake, shimmering in the sun. Beyond was the hotel, its windows still boarded for winter, and on either side of it rose the mountain walls. The White Cross still kept something of its shape on Lafayette, the only snow left in sight, though almost the whole peak had been white ten days before. The cross itself must be fast going. With my glass I could see the water pouring from it in a flood. And how plainly I could follow the trail up the rocky cone of the mountain! Those were good days when I climbed it, lifting myself step by step up that long, steep, boulder-covered slope. I should love to be there now. I wonder what flowers are already in bloom. It must be too early for the diapensia and the Greenland sandwort, I imagine. Yet I am not sure. Mountain flowers are quick to answer when the sun speaks to them. Thousands of years they have been learning to make the most of a brief season. Plants of the same species bloom earlier here than in level Massachusetts. After all, alpine plants, hurried and harried as they are, true children of poverty, have perhaps the best of it. “Blessed are ye poor” may have been spoken to them also. Hardy mountaineers, blossoming in the very face of heaven, with no earthly admirers except the butterflies. I remember the splendors of the Lapland azalea in middle June, with rocks and snow for neighbors. So it will be this year, for Wisdom never faileth. I look and look, till almost I am there on the heights, my feet standing on a carpet of blooming willows and birches, and the world, like another carpet, outspread below. But there is much else to delight me. Even here, so far below the crest of Lafayette, I am above the world. Yonder is one of my pair of deserted farms. Good hours I have had in them. Beyond is the Chase clearing, and still beyond, over another tract of woods, are the pasture lands along the road to “Mears’s.” Then comes the line of the Bethlehem road, marked by a house at long intervals--and thankful am I for the length of them. There I see _my_ house; one of several that I have picked out for purchase, at one time and another, but have never come to the point of paying for, still less of occupying. When my friends and I have wandered irresponsibly about this country it has pleased us to be like children, and play the old game of make-believe. Some of the farmers would be astonished to know how many times their houses have been sold over their heads, and they never the wiser. Further away, a little to the right, I see the pretty farms--romantic farms, I mean, attractive to outsiders--of which I have so often taken my share of the crop from Mount Agassiz, at the base of which they nestle. To the left of all this are the village of Franconia and the group of Sugar Hill hotels, with the Landaff Valley (how green it is!) below them in the middle distance. Nearer still is the Franconia Valley, with the Tucker Brook alders, and far down toward Littleton bright reaches of Gale River.