One thing I was especially glad to see: the big pastures on the Wallace Hill road full of hardhack bloom. Many times, in September and October, I had stopped to gaze upon those acres on acres of brown spires; now I beheld them pink. It was really a sight, a sea of color. If cattle would eat _Spiræa tomentosa_, the fields would be as good as gold mines. So I thought. I thought, too, what an ocean of “herb tea” might be concocted from those millions and millions of leafy stalks. The idea was too much for me; imagination was near to being drowned in a sea of its own creating; and I was relieved when we left the rosy wilderness behind us, and came to the famous clump of pear-leaved willow (_Salix balsamifera_) near the edge of the wood. This I must get over the fence and put my hand on, just for old times’ sake. A man may take it as one of the less uncomfortable indications of increasing age when he loves to do things simply because he used to do them, or has done them in remembered company. In that respect I humor myself. If there is anything good in the multiplying of years, by all means let me have it. And so I wore the willow. On the way down the steep hill through the forest my friends pointed out a maple tree which a pileated woodpecker had riddled at a tremendous rate. The trunk contained the pupæ of wasps (they were not strictly wasps, the entomologist was careful to explain, but were always called so by “common people”), and no doubt it was these that the woodpecker had been after. He had gone clean to the heart of the trunk, now on this side, now on that. Chips by the shovelful covered the ground. The big, red-crested fellow must love wasp pupæ almost as well as some people love raspberries. Green leaves, a scanty covering, were still on the tree, but its days were numbered. Who could have foreseen that the stings of insects would bring such destruction? Misfortunes never come singly. After the wasps the woodpecker. “Which things are an allegory.” * * * * * One of my pleasures of the milder sort was to sit on the piazza before breakfast (the lateness of the White Mountain breakfast hour being one of a walking man’s _dis_pleasures) and watch the two morning processions: one of tall milk-cans to and from the creamery,--an institution which any country-born New Englander may be glad to think of, for the comfort it has brought to New England farmers’ wives; the other of boys, each with a tin pail, on their way to serve as caddies at the new Profile House golf links. This latter procession I had never seen till the present year. Half the boys of the village, from seven or eight to fifteen or sixteen years old, seemed to have joined it; some on bicycles, some in buggies, some on foot, none on horseback--a striking omission in the eyes of any one who has ever lived or visited at the South.