These are exactly such birds as one might have expected to find here. And the same may be said of a Swainson thrush and a pine siskin. A black-billed cuckoo and a Maryland yellow-throat, on the other hand, the yellow-throat especially, seem less in place. What can have brought the latter to this dry, rocky hilltop is more than I can imagine. A big black-and-yellow butterfly (Turnus) goes sailing high overhead, borne on the wind. For so unsteady a steersman he is a bold mariner. A second look at him, and he is out of sight. Common as he is, he is one of my perennial admirations. The peak of Lafayette is no more a miracle. All the flowers up there know him. Now it is time to go. I have been here an hour and a half, and am determined to have no hurrying on the way homeward, over the old Notch road. Let the day be all alike, a day of leisure and of dreams. A last look about me, a few rods of picking my steep course downward over the rocks at the very top, and I am in the woods. Here, “my distance and horizon gone,” I please myself with looking at bits of the world’s beauty; especially at sprays of young leaves, breaking a twig here and a twig there to carry in my hand; a spray of budded mountain maple or of yellow birch. Texture, color, shape, veining and folding--all is a piece of Nature’s perfect work. No less beautiful--I stop again and again before a bed of them--are the dainty branching beech-ferns. There is no telling how pretty they are on their slender shining stems. And all the way I am taking leave of the road. I may never see it again. “Good-by, old friend,” I say; and the trees and the brook seem to answer me, “Good-by.” BERRY-TIME FELICITIES “A nice and subtle happiness, I see, Thou to thyself proposest.” MILTON. Once more I am in old Franconia, and in a new season. With all my visits to the New Hampshire mountains, I have never seen them before in August. I came on the last day of July,--a sweltering journey. That night it rained a little, hardly enough to lay the dust, which is deep in all these valley roads, and the next morning at breakfast time the mercury marked fifty-seven degrees. All day it was cool, and at night we sat before a fire of logs in the big chimney. The day was really a wonder of clearness, as well as of pleasant autumnal temperature; an exceptional mercy, calling for exceptional acknowledgment. After breakfast I took the Bethlehem road at the slowest pace. The last time I had traveled it was in May. Then every tree had its bird, and every bird a voice. Now it was August--the year no longer young, and the birds no longer a choir. And when birds are neither in tune nor in flocks, it is almost as if they were absent altogether. It seemed to me, when I had walked a mile, that I had never seen Franconia so deserted.