Nevertheless he is a beautiful creature, well worth following under any circumstances to note the ease and sureness of his floating flight and admire the beauty of his velvety rufous-black, shoaling into lustrous blue in the rounded crenulations of the after wings. This one I thought worth following for another reason, however, for he seemed to have something on his mind. Not that his flight was direct. A bird with something to do goes to his work in a straight line; but a butterfly must dance along, even if it were to a funeral in the family. And yet with all this my blue and rufous-black white admiral carried in his dancing progress something which told me he was troubled and led me to follow him over the brow of the hill. The hill itself is worth noting. Here the glaciers which some thousands of years ago planed off the rougher surface of eastern New England dropped their chips in a vast terminal moraine of sand and gravel, whose northern declivity is so steep that you may throw a stone from its rim to the top of a pine growing on the level, eighty or ninety feet below. I know many terminal moraines in New England; but I know no other at once so high and so abrupt in its declivity. A few rods back from its summit the trolley car clangs incessantly, and the speed-mad automobilist tears hooting through. Along the crest, in spite of this, sleep peacefully the forefathers of the hamlet. I like to feel that they neither note nor heed the uproar of the highway; that they now and then cock a pleased ear to the rumble of a passing hay-cart or the jog of a farmer’s horse, but that the bedlam of modern hurry whangs by them unperceived. Rather they turn their faces to the sough of the summer winds in the century-old pines which shade the steep and sleep on, happy in the benediction that descends from the spreading branches. Wonderful pines, these, so shading the whole declivity that not more than a dapple of sunlight has touched the ground beneath them for a century. Here the hepatica finds the cool, dry seclusion that it loves and lifts shy blue eyes to you while yet the winter ice nestles beside it among the pine roots. Here while the July sun distills pitchy aroma from the great trees the partridge berry carpets favored spots with the rich green of its little round leaves,--leaves no bigger than the pink nail of your sweetheart’s little finger, a green figured with the scarlet of last year’s berries and the white of its wee starry twin flowers. Here, too, in July the pyrola lifts its spike of bells like a woodland lily-of-the-valley and the pipsissewa shows its waxy flowers to the questing bee.