The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery / Tourist's Edition

by Samuel Adams Drake

THIRD JOURNEY.

I.
THE PEMIGEWASSET IN JUNE.

O child of that white-crested mountain whose springs
Gush forth in the shade of the cliff-eagle's wings,
Down whose slopes to the lowlands thy wild waters shine,
Leaping gray walls of rock, flashing through the dwarf-pine!
Whittier.

PLYMOUTH lies at the entrance to the Pemigewasset Valley, like an encampment pitched to dispute its passage. At present its design is to facilitate the ingress of tourists.

I am sitting at the window this morning looking down the Pemigewasset Valley. It is a gray, sad morning. Wet clouds hang and droop heavily over. In the distance the frayed and tattered edges are rolled up, half-disclosing the humid outlines of the hills on the other side of the valley. The trees are budded with rain-drops. Through a lattice of bordering foliage I look down upon the river, shrunken by drought to half its usual breadth, and exposing its parched bed of sand and pebbles. It gives an expiring gurgle in its stony throat. It is one of those mornings that, in spite of our philosophy, strangely affect the spirits, and are like a presentiment of evil. The clouds are funereal draperies; the river chants a dirge.

In this world of ours, where events push each other aside with such appalling rapidity, perhaps it is scarcely remembered that Hawthorne breathed his last in this house on the night of May 18th, 1864. He who was born in sight of these mountains had come among them to die.

In company with his old college mate and loving friend, General Pierce, he came from Centre Harbor to Plymouth the day previous to the sad event. Devoted friends--and few men have known more devoted--had for some time seen that his days were numbered. The fire had all but gone out from his eye, which seemed interrogating the world of which he was already more than half an inhabitant. A presentiment of his approaching end seemed foreshadowed in the changed look and faltering step of Hawthorne himself: he walked like a man consciously going to his grave. Still, much was hoped--it could hardly be that much was expected--from this journey, and from the companionship of two men grown gray with care, each standing on the pinnacle of his ambition, each disappointed, but united, one to the other, by the ties of life-long friendship; turning their backs upon the gay world, and walking hand-in-hand among the sweet groves and pleasant streams like boys again. It was like a dream of their lost youth: the reality was no more.

On this journey General Pierce was the watchful, tender, and sympathetic nurse. Without doubt either of these men would have died for the other.

But these hopes, these cares, alas! proved delusive. The angel of death came unbidden into the sacred companionship; the shadow of his wings hovered over them unseen. In the night, without a sigh or a struggle, as he himself wished it might be, the hand of death was gently and kindly laid on the fevered brain and fluttering heart. In the morning his friend entered the chamber to find only the lifeless form of Nathaniel Hawthorne plunged in the slumber that knows no awakening. Great heart and mighty brain were stilled forever.

While the weather gives such inhospitable welcome let us employ the time by turning over a leaf from history. According to Farmer, the intervales here were formerly resorted to by the Indians for hunting and fishing. At the mouth of Baker's River, which here joins the Pemigewasset, they had a settlement. Graves, bones, gun-barrels, besides many implements of their rude husbandry, have been discovered. Here, it is said, the Indians were attacked by a party of English from Haverhill, Massachusetts, led by Captain Baker, who defeated them, killed many, and destroyed a large quantity of fur. From him Baker's River receives its name.

Before the French and Indian war broke out this region was debatable ground, into which only the most celebrated and intrepid white hunters ventured. Among these was a young man of twenty-three, named Stark, who lived near the Amoskeag Falls, in what is now Manchester. In April, 1752, Stark was hunting here with three companions, one of whom was his brother William. They had pitched their camp on Baker's River, in the present limits of Rumney, and were prosecuting their hunt with good success, when they suddenly discovered the presence of Indians in their vicinity. Though it was a time of peace, they were not the less apprehensive on that account, and determined to change their position. But the Indians had also discovered the white hunters, and prepared to entrap them. When Stark went out very early the next morning to collect the traps he was intercepted and made prisoner. The Indians then took a position on the bank of the river to ambush his companions as they came down. Eastman, who was on the shore, next fell into their hands; but the two others were in a canoe floating quietly down the stream out of reach. Stark was ordered to hail and decoy them to the shore. He obeyed; but, instead of lending himself to the treachery, shouted to his friends that he was taken, and to save themselves. They instantly steered for the opposite shore, receiving a volley as they did so. Stinson, one of those in the boat, was shot dead; but William Stark escaped through the heroism of his brother, who knocked up the guns of the savages as they covered him with fatal aim.

Stark and his fellow-prisoner were taken to St. Francis by Actæon and his prowling band, with whom they had had the misfortune to fall in. At St. Francis the Indians set Stark hoeing their corn. At first he cut up the corn and spared the weeds; but this expedient not serving to relieve him of the drudgery, he threw his hoe into the river, telling his captors that hoeing corn was the business of squaws, not of warriors. This answer procured him recognition among them as a spirit worthy of themselves. He was adopted into the tribe, and called the "Young Chief." The promise of youth was fulfilled. The young hunter of the White Mountains and the conqueror of Bennington are the same.

The choice is open to leave the railway here and enter the mountains by the Pemigewasset Valley, or to continue by it the route which conducts to the summit of Mount Washington, by Bethlehem and Fabyan's. To journey on by rail to the Profile House is seventy-five miles, while by the common road, following the Pemigewasset, the distance is only thirty miles. A daily stage passes over this route, which I risk nothing in saying is always one of the delightful reminiscences of the whole journey. Deciding in favor of the last excursion, my first care was to procure a conveyance.

At three in the afternoon I set out for Campton, seven miles up the valley, which the carriage-road soon enters upon, and which by a few unregarded turnings is presently as fast shut up as if its mountain gates had in reality swung noiselessly together behind you. Hardly had I recovered from the effect of the deception produced by seeing the same mountain first in front, next on my right hand, and then shifted over to the other side of the valley, when I saw, spanned by a high bridge, the river in violent commotion far down below me.

The Pemigewasset, confined here between narrow banks, has cut for itself two deep channels through its craggy and cavernous bed; but one of these being dammed for the purpose of deepening the other, the general picturesqueness of the fall is greatly diminished. Still, it is a pretty and engaging sight, this cataract, especially if the river be full, although you think of a mettled Arabian harnessed in a tread-mill when you look at it. Livermore Fall, as it is called, is but two miles from Plymouth, the white houses of which look hot in the same brilliant sunlight that falls so gently upon the luxuriant green of the valley. The feature of this fall is the deep water-worn chasm through which it plunges.

By crossing the bridge here the left bank of the stream may be followed, the valley towns of Campton, Thornton, and Woodstock being divided by it into numerous villages or hamlets, frequently puzzling the uninitiated traveller, who has set out in all confidence, but who is seized by the most cruel perplexity, upon hearing that there are four villages in Campton, each several miles distant from the other. One would have pleased him far better.

Crossing this bridge, and descending to the level meadow below the falls, I made a brief inspection of the establishment for breeding and stocking with trout and salmon the depleted mountain streams of New Hampshire. The breeding-house and basins are situated just below the falls, on the banks of the river. This is a work undertaken by the State, with the expectation of repeopling its rivers, brooks, and ponds with their finny inhabitants. All those streams immediately accessible from the villages are so persistently fished by the inhabitants as to afford little sport to the angler from a distance, who is compelled to go farther and fare worse; but the State is certainly entitled to much credit for its endeavor to make two trout grow where only one grew before. It is feared, however, that the experiment of stocking the Pemigewasset with salmon will not prove successful. The farmers who live along the banks say that one of these fish is rarely seen, although the fishery is protected by the most rigid regulations. No one who has not visited the mountains between May 1st—the earliest date when fishing is permitted—and the middle of June, can have an idea of the number of sportsmen every year resorting to the trout streams, or of the unheard-of drain upon those streams. Not the least of many ludicrous sights I have witnessed was that of a man, weighing two hundred pounds, excitedly swinging aloft a trout weighing less than two ounces, and this trophy he exhibited to me with unfeigned triumph—the butcher! This is mere slaughter, and ought not to be tolerated. A pretty sight is to see the breeding-trout follow you in your walk around the margin of their little basin to be fed from your hand. They are tame as pigeons and ravenous as sharks.

Mount Prospect, in Holderness, is the first landmark of note. It is seen, soon after leaving Plymouth, rising from the opposite side of the valley, its green crest commanding a superb view of the lake region below, and of the lofty Franconia Mountains above. It is worth ascending this mountain were it only to see again the beautiful islet-spotted Squam Lake and far-reaching Winnipiseogee quivering in noonday splendor.

The beautiful valley is now open throughout its whole extent. Of course I refer only to that portion lying above Plymouth. But it is an anomaly of mountain valleys. Its length is about twenty-five miles, and its greatest width, I should judge, not more than three or four. For twenty miles it is almost as straight as an arrow. There is nothing to hinder a perfectly free and open view up or down. Contrast this with the wilful and tortuous windings of the Ammonoosuc, or the Saco, which seem to grope and feel their way foot by foot along their cramped and crooked channels. The angle of ascent, too, is here so gradual as to be scarcely noticed until the foot of the mountain wall, at its head, is reached. True, this valley is not clothed with a feeling of overpowering grandeur, but it is beautiful. It is not terrible, but bewitching.

The vista of mountains on the east side of the valley becomes every moment more and more extended, and more and more interesting. A long array of summits trending away to the north, with detached mountains heaved above the lower clusters, like great whales sporting in a frozen sea, is gradually uncovered. Green as a carpet, level as a floor, the valley, adorned with clumps of elms, groves of maples, and strips of tilled land of a rich chocolate brown, makes altogether a picture which sets the eye fairly dancing. Even the daisies, the clover, and the buttercups which so plentifully spangle the meadows seem far brighter and sweeter in this atmosphere, nodding a playful welcome as you pass them by. We are in the country of flowers.

Since passing Blair’s and the bridge over the river to Campton Hollow I was on the alert for that first and most engaging view of the Franconia Mountains which has been so highly extolled. Perhaps I should say that one poetic nature has revealed it to a thousand others. Without doubt this landscape is the more striking because it is the first, and consequently deepest, impression of grand mountain scenery obtained by those upon whom at a turn of the road, and without premonition, it flashes like the realization of some ecstatic vision.

Half a mile below the little hamlet of West Campton the road crosses the point of a hill pushed well out into the valley. It is here that the circlet of mountains is seen enclosing the valley on all sides like a gigantic palisade. In one place, far away in the north, this wall is shattered to its centre, like the famous Breach of Roland; and through this enormous loop-hole we see golden mists rising above the undiscovered country beyond. We are looking through the far-famed Franconia Notch. On one side the clustered peaks of Lafayette lift themselves serenely into the sky. On the left a silvery light is playing on the ledges of Mount Cannon, softening all the asperities of this stern-visaged mountain. The two great groups now stand fully and finely exposed; though the lower and nearer summits are blended with the higher by distance. Remark the difference of outline. A series of humps marks the crest-line of the group, which culminates in the oblique wall of Mount Cannon. On the contrary, that on the right, culminating in Lafayette, presents two beautiful and regular pyramids, older than Cheops, which sometimes in early morning exactly resemble two stately monuments, springing alert and vigorous as the day which gilds them. At a distance of twenty miles it demands good eyes and a clear atmosphere to detect the supporting lines of these pyramidal structures, which in reality are two separate mountains, Liberty and Flume. This exquisite landscape seldom fails of producing a rapturous outburst from those who are making the journey for the first time.

There are many points of resemblance between this view and that of the White Mountains from Conway Corner. Both unfold at once, and in a single glance, the principal systems about which all the subordinate chains seem manœuvring under the commanding gaze of Washington or Lafayette.

Soon after starting it was evident that my driver’s loquaciousness was due to his having “crooked his elbow” too often while loitering about Plymouth. The frequent plunge of the wheels into the ditches by the roadside, accompanied with a shower of mud, was little conducive to the calm and free enjoyment of the beauties of the landscape. The driver alone was unconcerned, and as often as good fortune enabled him to steer clear of upsetting his passengers would articulate, thickly, “Don’t be alarmed, Cap’: no one was ever hurt on this road.”

Silently committing myself to that Providence which is said to watch over the destinies of tipplers, I breathed freely only when we drew up at the hospitable door of the village inn, bespattered with mud, but with no broken bones.

Sanborn’s, at West Campton, is the old road-side inn that long ago swung the stag-and-hounds as its distinctive emblem. A row of superb maples shades the road. Here we have fairly entered the renowned intervales, that gleam among the darker forests or groves like patches of blue in a storm-clouded sky. Looking southward, across the level meadows, the hills of Rumney flinging up smooth, firm curves, and the more distant, downward-plunging outline of Mount Prospect, in Holderness, close the valley. Upon the left, where the clearings extend quite to the summits of the near hills, the maple groves interspersed among them resemble soldiers advancing up the green slopes in columns of attack. Following this line a little, the valley of Mad River is distinguished by the deep trough through which it descends from the mountains of Waterville. And here, peering over the nearer elevations, the huge blue-black mass of Black Mountain flings two splendid peaks aloft.

For a more intimate acquaintance with these surroundings the hillside pasture above the school-house gives a perspective of greater breadth; while that from the Ellsworth road is in some respects finer still. About two miles up this road the valley of the East Branch, showing the massive Mount Hancock, cicatriced with one long, narrow scar, is lifted into view. The other features of the landscape remain the same, except that Mount Cannon is now cut off by the hill rising to the north of us. As often as one of these hidden valleys is thus revealed we are seized with a longing to explore it.

One need not push inquiry into the antecedents of Campton or the neighboring villages very far. The township was originally granted to General Jabez Spencer, of East Haddam, Connecticut, in 1761. In 1768 a few families had come into Campton, Plymouth, Hebron, Sandwich, Rumney, Holderness, and Bridgewater. No opening had been made for civilized men on this side of Canada except for three families, who had gone fifty miles into the wilderness to begin a settlement where Lancaster now is. The name is derived simply from the circumstance that the first proprietors built a camp when they visited their grant. The different villages are much frequented by artists, who have spread the fame of Campton from one end of the Union to the other. But a serpent has entered even this Eden—the villagers are sighing for the advent of the railway.

Having dedicated one day to an exploration of the Mad River Valley, I can pronounce it well worth any tourist’s while to tarry long enough in the vicinity for the purpose. It is certainly one of the finest exhibitions of mountain scenery far or near. Here is a valley twelve miles long, at the bottom of which a rapid river bruises itself on a bed of broken rock, while above it are heaped mountains to be picked out of a thousand for peculiarity of form or structure. The Pemigewasset is passed by a ford just deep enough at times to invest the journey with a little healthy excitement at the very beginning. The ford has, however, been carefully marked by large stones placed at the edge of the submerged road.

Fording the river and climbing the hill which lies across the entrance to this land-locked valley, I was at once ushered upon a scene of great and varied charm. Right before me, sunning his three peaks four thousand feet above, was the prodigious mass of Black Mountain. Far up the valley it stretched, forming an unbroken wall nearly ten miles long, and apparently sealing all access from the Sandwich side. A nipple, a pyramid, and a flattened mound protruding from the summit ridge constitute these eminences, easily recognized from the Franconia highway among a host of lesser peaks. At the southern end of this mountain the range is broken through, giving passage to a rough and straggling road—fourteen hundred feet above the sea-level—to Sandwich Centre, and to the lake towns south of it. This pass is known as Sandwich Notch.

Campton Village lies along the hill-slope opposite to Black Mountain. Completely does it fill the artistic sense. Its situation leaves nothing to be desired in an ideal mountain village. So completely is it secluded from the rest of the world by its environment of mountains, that you might pass and repass the Pemigewasset Valley a hundred times without once surprising the secret of its existence. All those houses, half hid beneath groves of maples, bespeak luxurious repose. Opposite to Black Mountain, whose dark forest drapery hides the mass of the mountain, is the immense whitish-yellow rock called Welch Mountain. Only a scanty vegetation is suffered to creep among the crevices. It is really nothing but a big excrescent rock, having a principal summit shaped somewhat like a Martello tower; and, indeed, resembling one in ruins. The bright ledges brilliantly reflect the sun, causing the eye to turn gratefully to the sombre gloom of the evergreens crowding the sides of the neighboring mountains. Welch Mountain reminded me, I hardly know why, of Chocorua; but the resemblance can scarcely extend farther than to the meagreness, mutually characteristic, and to the blistered, almost calcined ledges, which in each case catch the earliest and latest beams of day. In fact, I could think only of a leper sunning his scars, and in rags.

At the head of the vale, alternately coming into and retreating from view—for we are still progressing—is the mysterious triple-crowned mountain known on the maps as Tripyramid. When first seen it seems standing solitary and alone, and to have wrapped itself in a veil of thinnest gauze. As we advance it displays the white streak of an immense slide, which occurred in 1869. This mountain is visible from the shore of the lake at Laconia. It is one of the first to greet us from the elevated summits, though from no point is its singularly admirable and well-proportioned architecture so advantageously exhibited as when approaching by this valley. Its northern peak stands farthest from the others, yet not so far as to mar the general grace and harmony of form. Hail to thee, mountain of the high, heroic crest, for thy fortunate name and the gracious, kingly mien with which thou wearest thy triple crown! Prince thou art and potentate. None approach thy forest courts but do thee homage.

The end of the valley was reached in two hours of very leisurely driving. The road abruptly terminated among a handful of houses scattered about the bottom of a deep and narrow vale. This is, beyond question, the most remarkable mountain glen into which civilization has thus far penetrated. On looking up at the big mountains one experiences a half-stifled feeling; and, on looking around the scattered hamlet, its dozen houses seem undergoing perpetual banishment.

This diminutive settlement, in which signs of progress and decay stand side by side—progress evidenced by new and showy cottages; decay by abandoned and dilapidated ones—is at the edge of a region as shaggy and wild as any in the famed Adirondack wilderness. It fairly jostles the wilderness. It braves it. It is really insolent. Yet are its natural resources so slender that the struggle to keep the breath in it must have been long and obstinate. A wheezy saw-mill indicates at once its origin and its means of livelihood; but it is evident that it might have remained obscure and unknown until doomsday, had not a few anglers stumbled upon it while in pursuit of brooks and waters new.

The glen is surrounded by peaks that for boldness, savage freedom, and power challenge any that we can remember. They threaten while maintaining an attitude of lofty scorn for the saucy intruder. The curious Noon Peak—we have at length got to the end of the almost endless Black Mountain—nods familiarly from the south. It long stood for a sun-dial for the settlement; hence its name. Tecumseh, a noble mountain, and Osceola, its worthy companion, rise to the north. A short walk in this direction brings Kancamagus[31] and the gap between this mountain and Osceola into view. All these mountains stand in the magnificent order in which they were first placed by Nature; but never does the idea of inertia, of helpless immobility, cross the mind of the beholder for a single moment.

The unvisited region between Greeley’s, in Waterville, and the Saco is destined to be one of the favorite haunts of the sportsman, the angler, and the lover of the grand old woods. It is crossed and recrossed by swift streams, sown with lakes, glades, and glens, and thickly set with mountains, among which the timid deer browses, and the bear and wildcat roam unmolested. Fish and game, untamed and untrodden mountains and woods, welcome the sportsman here. With Greeley’s for a base, encampments may be pitched in the forest, and exploration carried into the most out-of-the-way corners. The full zest of such a life can only be understood by those to whom its freedom and unrestraint, its healthful and vigorous existence, have already proved their charm. The time may come when the mountains shall be covered with a thousand tents, and the summer-dwellers will resemble the tribes of Israel encamped by the sweet waters of Sion.

Waterville maintains unfrequent communication with Livermore and the Saco by a path twelve miles long—constructed by the Appalachian Mountain Club—over which a few pedestrians pass every year. I have explored this path for several miles beyond Beckytown while visiting the great slide which sloughed off from the side of Tripyramid, and the cascades on the way to it. Osceola, Hancock, and Carrigain, three remarkably fine mountains, offer inviting excursions to expert climbers. I was reluctantly compelled to renounce the intention of passing over the whole route, which should occupy, at least, two days or parts of days, one night being spent in camp.

The Mad River drive is a delightful episode. In the way of mountain valley there is nothing like it. Bold crag, furious torrent, lonely cabin, blue peak, deep hollow, choked up with the densest foliage, constitute its varied and ever-changing features. The overhanging woods looked as if it had been raining sunshine; the road like an endless grotto of illuminated leaves, musical with birds, and exhaling a thousand perfumes.

The remainder of the route up the Pemigewasset is more and more a revelation of the august summits that have so constantly met us since entering this lovely valley. Boldly emerging from the mass of mountains, they present themselves at every mile in new combinations. Through Thornton and Woodstock the spectacle continues almost without intermission. Gradually, the finely-pointed peaks of the Lafayette group deploy and advance toward us. Now they pitch sharply down into the valley of the East Branch. Now the great shafts of stone are crusted with silvery light, or sprayed with the cataract. Now the sun gilds the slides that furrow, but do not deface them. Stay a moment at this rapid brook that comes hastening from the west! It is an envoy from yonder great, billowy mountain that lords it so proudly over

“many a nameless slide-scarred crest
And pine-dark gorge between.”

That is Moosehillock. Facing again the north, the road is soon swallowed up by the forest, and the forest by the mountains. A few poor cottages skirt the route. Still ascending, the miles grow longer and less interesting, until the white house, first seen from far below, suddenly stands uncovered at the left. We are at the Flume House, and before the gates of the Franconia Notch.

II.
THE FRANCONIA PASS.

Beyond them, like a sun-rimmed cloud,
The great Notch Mountains shone,
Watched over by the solemn-browed
And awful face of stone!—Whittier.

WHEN Boswell exclaimed in ecstasy, “An immense mountain!” Dr. Johnson sneered, “An immense protuberance!” but he, the sublime cynic, became respectful before leaving the Hebrides. Charles Lamb, too, at one time pretended something approaching contempt for mountains; but, after a visit to Coleridge, he made the amende honorable in these terms:

“I feel I shall remember your mountains to the last day of my life. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love unknown to himself; which he finds out when he leaves the lady.”

Notwithstanding their prepossessions against nature, and their undisguised preference for the smoke and dirt of London, the mountains awoke something in these two men which was apparently a revelation of themselves unto themselves. I have felt a higher respect for both since I knew that they loved mountains, as I pity those who have only seen heaven through the smoke of the city. It is not easy to explain two ideas so essentially opposite as are presented in the earlier and later declarations of these widely famous authors, unless we agree, keeping “Elia’s” odd simile in mind, that in the first case they should, like woman, be taken, not at what she says, but what she means.

The Flume House is the proper tarrying-place for an investigation of the mountain gorge from which it derives both its custom and its name. It is also placed opposite to the Pool, another of those natural wonders with which the pass is crowded, and which tempt us at every step to turn aside from the travelled road.

Fronting the hotel is a belt of woods, with two massive mountains rising behind. In the concealment of these woods the Pemigewasset, contracted to a modest stream, runs along the foot of the mountains. A rough, zigzag path leads through the woods to the river and to the Pool. Now raise the eyes to the summit-ridge of yonder mountain. The peak finely reproduces the features of a gigantic human face, while the undulations of the ridge fairly suggest a recumbent human figure wrapped in a shroud. The outlines of the forehead and nose are curiously like the profile of Washington; hence the colossal figure is called Washington Lying in State. This immortal sculpture gave rise to the idea that the tomb of Washington, like that of Desaix, on the St. Bernard, should be on the great summit that bears his name.

From the Flume House I looked up through the deep cleft of the Notch—an impressive vista. To the left is Cannon, or Profile Mountain; to the right the beetling crags of Eagle Cliff; then the pointed, shapely peaks of Lafayette; and so the range continues breaking off and off, bending away into lesser mountains that finally melt into pale-blue shadows. Now a stray cloud atop a peak gives it a volcanic character. Now a puff scatters it like thistle-down. It is a sultry summer’s morning, and banks of film hang like huge spider’s-webs in the tree-tops. Soon they detach themselves, and, floating lazily upward, are seized by a truant breeze, spun mischievously round, and then settle quietly down on the highest peaks like young eaglets on their nest.

Let us first walk down to the Pool. This Pool is a caprice of the river. Imagine a cistern, deeply sunk in granite, receiving at one end a weary cascade, which seems to crave a moment’s rest before hurrying on down the rocky pass. In the mystery and seclusion of ages, and with only the rude implements picked up by the way, the river has hollowed a basin a hundred feet wide and forty deep out of the stubborn rock. Without doubt Nature thus first taught us to cut the hardest marble with sand and water. Cliffs traversed by cracks rise a hundred feet higher. The water is a glossy and lustrous sea-green, and of such marvellous transparency that you see the brilliant pebbles sparkling at the bottom, shifting with the waves of light like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Overtopping trees lean timidly over and peer down into the Pool, which coldly repulses their shadows. Only the colorless hue of the rocks is reflected; and the stranger, seeing an old man with a gray beard standing erect in a boat, has no other idea than that he has arrived on the borders and is to be accosted by the ferryman of Hades.

The Flume is reached by going down the road a short distance, and then diverging to the left and crossing the river to the Flume Brook. A carriage-way conducts almost to the entrance of the gorge. Then begins an easy and interesting promenade up the bed of the brook.

This is a remarkable rock-gallery, driven several hundred feet into the heart of the mountain, through which an ice-cold brook rushes. The miracle of Moses seems repeated here sublimely. Some unknown power smote the rock, and the prisoned stream gushed forth free and lightsome as air. You approach it over broad ledges of freckled granite, polished by the constant flow of a thin, pellucid sheet of water to slippery smoothness. Proceeding a short distance up this natural esplanade, you enter a damp and gloomy fissure between perpendicular walls, rising seventy feet above the stream, and, on lifting your eyes suddenly, espy an enormous bowlder tightly wedged between the cliffs. Now try to imagine a force capable of grasping the solid rock and dividing it in halves as easily as you would an apple with your two hands.

At sight of the suspended bowlder, which seems, like Paul Pry, to have “just dropped in,” I believe every visitor has his moment of hesitation, which he usually ends by passing underneath, paying as he goes with a tremor of the nerves, more or less, for his temerity. But there is no danger. It is seen that the deep crevice, into which the rock seems jammed with the especial purpose of holding it asunder, also hugs the intruder like a vise; so closely, indeed, that, according to every appearance, it must stay where it is until doomsday, unless released by some passing earthquake from its imprisonment. Sentimental tourists do not omit to find a moral in this curiosity, which really looks to be on the eve of dropping, with a loud splash, into the torrent beneath. On top of the cliffs I picked up a visiting-card, on which some one with a poetic turn had written, “Does not this bowlder remind you of the sword of Damocles?” To a civil question, civil reply: No; to me it looks like a nut in a cracker.

Over the gorge bends an arcade of interlaced foliage shot through and through with sunshine; and wherever cleft or cranny can be found young birches, sword-ferns, trailing vines, insinuating their long roots in the damp mould, garland the cold granite with tenderest green. The exquisite white anemone blooms in the mossy wall wet with tiny streams that do not run but glide unperceived down. What could be more cunning than the persistency with which these hardy waifs, clinging or drooping along the craggy way, draw their sustenance from the rock, which seems to nourish them in spite of itself? Underneath your feet the swollen torrent storms along the gorge, dashing itself recklessly against intruding bowlders, or else passing them with a curl of disdain. How gallantly it surmounts every obstacle in its way! How crystal-clear are its waters! On it speeds, scattering pearls and diamonds right and left, like the prodigal it is; unpolluted, as yet, by the filth of cities, or turned into a languid, broken-spirited drudge by dams or mill-wheels. “Stop me?” it seems exclaiming. “Why, I am offspring of the clouds, their messenger to the parched earth, the mountain maid-of-all-work! Stay; step aside here in the sun and I will show you my rainbow-signet! When I rest, do you not behold the mother imaged in the features of the child? Stop me! Put your hand in my bosom and see how strong and full of life are my pulse-beats. To-morrow I shall be vapor. Thought is not freer. I do not belong to earth any more than the eagle sailing above yonder mountain-top.”

Overhead a fallen tree-trunk makes a crazy bridge from cliff to cliff. The sight of the gorge, with the flood foaming far below, the glitter of falling waters through the trees, the splendid light in the midst of deepest gloom, the solemn pines—the odorous forest, the wildness and the coolness—impart an indescribable charm to the spot that makes us reluctant to leave it. Many ladies ascend to the head of the gorge and, crossing on the rude bridge, leave their visiting-cards on the other side; one had left her pocket-handkerchief, with the scent fresh upon it. I picked it up, and out hopped a toad.

After the Pool and the Flume, an ascent of the mountain behind the hotel will be found conducive to enjoyment of another kind. This mountain commands delicious views of the valley of the Pemigewasset. A short hour is usually sufficient for the climb. It was a very raw, windy morning on which I climbed it, but the uncommon purity of the air and the exceeding beauty of the landscape were most rarely combined with cloud effects seen only in conjunction with a brisk north-west wind. I had taken a station similar to that occupied by Mount Willard with respect to the Saco Valley, now opening a vista essentially different from that most memorable one in my mountain experience. The valley is not the same. You see the undulating course of the river for many leagues, and but for an intercepting hill, which hides them, might distinguish the houses of Plymouth. The vales of Woodstock, Thornton, and Campton, spotted with white houses, lie outspread in the sun, between enclosing mountains; and the windings of the Pemigewasset are now seen dark and glossy, now white with foam, appearing, disappearing, and finally lost to view in the blended distance. The sky was packed with clouds. Over the vivid green of the intervales their black shadows drifted swiftly and noiselessly, first turning the light on, then off again, with magical effect. To look up and see these clouds all in motion, and then, looking down, see those weird draperies darkly trailing over the land, was a reminiscence of

“The dim and shadowy armies of our unquiet dreams—
Their footsteps brush the dewy fern and paint the shaded streams.”

The mountain ridges flowed southward with marvellous smoothness to the vanishing-point, on one side of the valley bright green, on the other indigo blue. This picture was not startling, like that from the Crawford Notch, but, in its own way, was incomparable. The sunsets are said to be beautiful beyond description.

One looks up the Notch upon the great central peaks composing the water-shed—Cannon, Lafayette, Lincoln, and the rest—to see crags, ridges, black forests, rising before him in all their gloomy magnificence.

On one side all is beauty, harmony, and grace; on the other, a packed mass of bristling, steep-sided mountains seem storming the sky with their gray turrets. Could we but look over the brawny shoulders of the mountains opposite to us, the eye would take in the vast, untrodden solitudes of the Pemigewasset forests cut by the East Branch and presided over by Mount Carrigain—a region as yet reserved for those restless and adventurous spirits whom the beaten paths of travel have ceased to charm or attract. But an excursion into this “forest primeval” is to be no holiday promenade. It is an arduous and difficult march over slippery rocks, through tangled thickets, or up the beds of mountain torrents. Hard fare and a harder bed of boughs finish the day, every hour of which has been a continued combat with fresh obstacles. At this price one may venture to encounter the virgin wilderness or, as the cant phrase is, “try roughing it.” It is a curious feeling to turn your back upon the last cart-path, then upon the last foot-path; to hear the distant baying of a hound grow fainter and fainter—in a word, to exchange at a single step the sights and sounds of civilized life, the movement, the bustle, for a silence broken only by the hum of bees and the murmur of invisible waters.

I left the Flume House in company with a young-old man, whom I met there, and in whom I hoped to find another and a surer pair of eyes, for, were he to have as many as Argus, the sight-seer would find employment for them all.

While gayly threading the green-wood, we came upon a miniature edition of the Pool, situated close to the highway, called the Basin. A basin in fact it is, and a bath fit for the gods. It is plain to see that the stream once poured over the smooth ledges here, instead of making its exit by the present channel. A cascade falls into it with hollow roar. This cistern has been worn by the rotary motion of large pebbles which the little cascade, pouring down into it from above, set and kept actively whirling and grinding at its own mad caprice. But this was not the work of a day. Long and constant attrition only could have scooped this cavity out of the granite, which is here so clean, smooth, and white, and filled to the brim with a grayish-emerald water, light, limpid, and incessantly replenished by the effervescent cascade. In the beginning this was doubtless an insignificant crevice, into which a few pebbles and a handful of sand were dropped by the stream, but which, having no way of escape, were kept in a perpetual tread-mill, until what was at first a mere hole became as we now see it. The really curious feature of the stone basin is a strip of granite projecting into it which closely resembles a human leg and foot, luxuriously cooling itself in the stream. Such queer freaks of nature are not merely curious, but they while away the hours so agreeably that time and distance are forgotten.

As we walked on, the hills were constantly hemming us in closer and closer. Suddenly we entered a sort of crater, with high mountains all around. One impulse caused us to halt and look about us. In full view at our left the inaccessible precipices of Mount Cannon rose above a mountain of shattered stones, which ages upon ages of battering have torn piecemeal from it. Its base was heaped high with these ruins. Seldom has it fallen to my lot to see anything so grandly typical of the indomitable as this sorely battered and disfigured mountain citadel, which nevertheless lifts and will still lift its unconquerable battlements so long as one stone remains upon another. Hewed and hacked, riven and torn, gashed and defaced in countless battles, one can hardly repress an emotion of pity as well as of admiration. I do not recollect, in all these mountains, another such striking example of the denuding forces with which they are perpetually at war. When we see mountains crumbling before our very eyes, may we not begin to doubt the stability of things that we are pleased to call eternal? Still, although it seems erected solely for the pastime of all the powers of destruction, this one, so glorious in its unconquerable resolve to die at its post—this one, exposing its naked breast to the fury of its deadliest foes—so stern and terrific of aspect, so high and haughty, so dauntlessly throwing down the gauntlet to Fate itself—assures us that the combat will be long and obstinate, and that the mountain will fall at last, if fall it must, with the grace and heroism of a gladiator in the Roman arena. The gale flies at it with a shriek of impotent rage. Winter strips off its broidered tunic and flings white dust in its aged face. Rust corrodes, rains drench, fires scorch it; lightning and frost are forever searching out the weak spots in its harness; but, still uplifting its adamantine crest, it receives unshaken the stroke or the blast, spurns the lightning, mocks the thunder, and stands fast. Underneath is a little lake, which at sunset resembles a pool of blood that has trickled drop by drop from the deep wounds in the side of the mountain.

We are still advancing in this region of wonders. In our front soars an insuperable mass of forest-shagged rock. Behind it rises the absolutely regal Lafayette. Our footsteps are stayed by the glimmer of water through trees by the road-side. We have reached the summit of the pass.

Six miles of continued ascent from the Flume House have brought us to Profile Lake, which the road skirts. Although a pretty enough piece of water, it is not for itself this lake is resorted to by its thousands, or for being the source of the Pemigewasset, or for its trout—which you take for the reflection of birds on its burnished surface—but for the mountain rising high above, whose wooded slopes it so faithfully mirrors. Now lift the eyes to the bare summit! It is difficult to believe the evidence of the senses! Upon the high cliffs of this mountain is the remarkable and celebrated natural rock sculpture of a human head, which, from a height twelve hundred feet above the lake, has for uncounted ages looked with the same stony stare down the pass upon the windings of the river through its incomparable valley. The profile itself measures about forty feet from the tip of the chin to the flattened crown which imparts to it such a peculiarly antique appearance. All is perfect, except that the forehead is concealed by something like the visor of a helmet. And all this illusion is produced by several projecting crags. It might be said to have been begotten by a thunder-bolt.

Taking a seat within a rustic arbor on the high shore of the lake, one is at liberty to peruse at leisure what, I dare say, is the most extraordinary sight of a lifetime. A change of position varies more or less the character of the expression, which is, after all, the marked peculiarity of this monstrous alto relievo; for let the spectator turn his gaze vacantly upon the more familiar objects at hand—as he inevitably will, to assure himself that he is not the victim of some strange hallucination—a fascination born neither of admiration nor horror, but strongly partaking of both emotions, draws him irresistibly back to the Dantesque head stuck, like a felon’s, on the highest battlements of the pass. The more you may have seen, the more your feelings are disciplined, the greater the confusion of ideas. The moment is come to acknowledge yourself vanquished. This is not merely a face, it is a portrait. That is not the work of some cunning chisel, but a cast from a living head. You feel and will always maintain that those features have had a living and breathing counterpart. Nothing more, nothing less.

But where and what was the original prototype? Not man; since, ages before he was created, the chisel of the Almighty wrought this sculpture upon the rock above us. No, not man; the face is too majestic, too nobly grand, for anything of mortal mould. One of the antique gods may, perhaps, have sat for this archetype of the coming man. And yet not man, we think, for the head will surely hold the same strange converse with futurity when man shall have vanished from the face of the earth.

This gigantic silhouette, which has been dubbed the Old Man of the Mountain, is unquestionably the greatest curiosity of this or any other mountain region. It is unique. But it is not merely curious; nor is it more marvellous for the wonderful accuracy of outline than for the almost superhuman expression of frozen terror it eternally fixes on the vague and shadowy distance—a far-away look; an intense and speechless amazement, such as sometimes settles on the faces of the dying at the moment the soul leaves the body forever—untranslatable into words, but seeming to declare the presence of some unutterable vision, too bright and dazzling for mortal eyes to behold. The face puts the whole world behind it. It does everything but speak—nay, you are ready to swear that it is going to speak! And so this chance jumbling together of a few stones has produced a sculpture before which Art hangs her head.

I renounce in dismay the idea of reproducing the effect on the reader’s mind which this prodigy produced on my own. Impressions more pronounced, yet at the same time more inexplicable, have never so effectually overcome that habitual self-command derived from many experiences of travel among strange and unaccustomed scenes. From the moment the startled eye catches it one is aware of a Presence which dominates the spirit, first with strange fear, then by that natural revulsion which at such moments makes the imagination supreme, conducts straight to the supernatural, there to leave it helplessly struggling in a maze of impotent conjecture. But, even upon this debatable ground, between two worlds, one is not able to surprise the secret of those lips of marble. The Sphinx overcomes us by his stony, his disdainful silence. Let the visitor be ever so unimpassioned, surely he must be more than mortal to resist the impression of mingled awe, wonder, and admiration which a first sight of this weird object forces upon him. He is, indeed, less than human if the feeling does not continually grow and deepen while he looks. The face is so amazing, that I have often tried to imagine the sensations of him who first discovered it peering from the top of the mountain with such absorbed, open-mouthed wonder. Again I see the tired Indian hunter, pausing to slake his thirst by the lake-side, start as his gaze suddenly encounters this terrific apparition. I fancy the half-uttered exclamation sticking in his throat. I behold him standing there with bated breath, not daring to stir hand or foot, his white lips parted, his scared eyes dilated, until his own swarthy features exactly reflect that unearthly, that intense amazement stamped large and vivid upon the livid rock. There he remains, rooted to the spot, unable to reason, trembling in every limb. For him there are no accidents of nature; for him everything has its design. His moment of terrible suspense is hardly difficult to understand, seeing how careless thousands that come and go are thrilled, and awed, and silenced, notwithstanding you tell them the face is nothing but rocks.

If the effect upon minds of the common order be so pronounced, a first sight of the Great Stone Face may easily be supposed to act powerfully upon the imaginative and impressible. The novelist, Hawthorne, makes it the interpreter of a noble life. For him the Titanic countenance is radiant with majestic benignity. He endows it with a soul, surrounds the colossal brow with the halo of a spiritual grandeur, and, marshalling his train of phantoms, proceeds to pass inexorable judgment upon them. Another legend—like its predecessor, too long for our pages—runs to the effect that a painter who had resolved to paint Christ sitting in judgment, and who was filled with the grandeur of his subject, wandered up and down the great art palaces, the cathedrals of the Old World, seeking in vain a model which should in all things be the embodiment of his ideal. In despair at the futility of his search he hears a strange report, brought by some pious missionaries from the New World, of a wonderful image of the human face which the Indians looked upon with sacred veneration. The painter immediately crossed the sea, and caused himself to be guided to the spot, where he beheld, in the profile of the great White Mountains, the object of his search and fulfilment of his dream. The legend is entitled Christus Judex.

Had Byron visited this place of awe and mystery, his “Manfred,” the scene of which is laid among the mountains of the Bernese Alps, would doubtless have had a deeper and perhaps gloomier impulse; but even among the eternal realms of ice the poet never beheld an object that could so arouse the gloomy exaltation he has breathed into that tragedy. His line—

“Bound to earth, he lifts his eye to heaven”—

becomes descriptive here.

Again and again we turn to the face. We go away to wonder if it is still there. We come back to wonder still more. An emotion of pity mingles with the rest. Time seems to have passed it by. It seems undergoing some terrible sentence. It is a greater riddle than the gigantic stone face on the banks of the Nile.

All effects of light and shadow are so many changes of countenance or of expression. I have seen the face cut sharp and clear as an antique cameo upon the morning sky. I have seen it suffused, nay, almost transfigured, in the sunset glow. Often and often does a cloud rest upon its brow. I have seen it start fitfully out of the flying scud to be the next moment smothered in clouds. I have heard the thunder roll from its lips of stone. I recall the sunken cheeks, wet with the damps of its night-long vigil, glistening in the morning sunshine—smiling through tears. I remember its emaciated visage streaked and crossed with wrinkles that the snow had put there in a night; but never have I seen it insipid or commonplace. On the contrary, the overhanging brow, the antique nose, the protruding under-lip, the massive chin, might belong to another Prometheus chained to the rock, but whom no punishment could make lower his haughty head.

I lingered by the margin of the lake watching the play of the clouds upon the water, until a loud and resonant peal, followed by large, warm drops, admonished me to seek the nearest shelter. And what thunder! The hills rocked. What echoes! The mountains seemed knocking their stony heads together. What lightning! The very heavens cracked with the flashes.

“Far along
From peak to peak the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder! not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!”

III.
THE KING OF FRANCONIA.

Hills draw like heaven
And stronger, sometimes, holding out their hands
To pull you from the vile flats up to them.
E. B. Browning.

AT noon we reached the spacious and inviting Profile House, which is hid away in a deep and narrow glen, nearly two thousand feet above the sea. No situation could be more sequestered or more charming. The place seems stolen from the unkempt wilderness that shuts it in. An oval, grassy plain, not extensive, but bright and smiling, spreads its green between a grisly precipice and a shaggy mountain. And there, if you-will believe me, in front of the long, white-columned hotel, like a Turkish rug on a carpet, was a pretty flower-garden. Like those flowers on the lawn were beauties sauntering up and down in exquisite morning toilets, coquetting with their bright-colored parasols, and now and then glancing up at the grim old mountains with that air of elegant disdain which is so redoubtable a weapon—even in the mountains. Little children fluttered about the grass like beautiful butterflies, and as unmindful of the terrors that hovered over them so threateningly. Nurses in their stiff grenadier caps and white aprons, lackeys in livery, cadets in uniform, elegant equipages, blooded horses, dainty shapes on horseback, cavaliers, and last, but not least, the resolute pedestrian, or the gentlemen strollers up and down the shaded avenues, made up a scene as animated as attractive. There is tonic in the air: there is healing in the balm of these groves. Even the horses step out more briskly. Peals of laughter startle the solemn old woods. You hear them high up the mountain side. There go a pair of lovers, the gentleman with his book, whose most telling passages he has carefully conned, the lady with her embroidery, over which she bends lower as he reads on. Ah, happy days! What is this youth, which, having it, we are so eager to escape, and, when it is gone, we look back upon with such longing?

The lofty crag opposite the hotel is Eagle Cliff, a name at once legitimate and satisfying, although it is now untenanted by the eagles which formerly made their home in the security of its precipitous rocks. The cliff is also seen to great advantage from Echo Lake, half a mile farther on, of which it constitutes a striking feature. In simple parlance it is an advanced spur of Mount Lafayette. The high and curving wall of this cliff encloses on one side the Profile Glen, while Mount Cannon forms the other. The precipices tower so far above the glen that large trees look like shrubs. Behind Eagle Cliff, almost isolating it from the mountain, of which it is the barbacan, a hideous ravine yawns upon the pass. Here and there, among the thick-set evergreen trees, beech and birch and maple, spread masses of rich green, and mottle it with softness. The purple rock bulges daringly out, forming a parapet of adamant.

The turf underneath the cliff was most beautifully and profusely spangled with the delicate pink anemone, the fleur des fées, that pale darling of our New England woods, to which the arbutus resigns the sceptre of spring. It is a moving sight to see these little drooping flowers, so shy and modest, yet so meek and trustful, growing at the foot of a bare and sterile rock. The face hardened looking up; grew soft looking down. “Don’t tread on us!” “May not a flower look up at a mountain?” they seem to plead. Lightly fall the dews upon your upturned faces, dear little flowers! Soft be the sunshine and gentle the winds that kiss those sky-tinted cheeks! In thy sweet purity and innocence I see faces that are beneath the sod, flowers that have blossomed in Paradise.

We see also, from the hotel, the singular rock that occasioned the change of name from Profile to Cannon Mountain. It nearly resembles a piece of heavy ordnance protruding, threateningly, from the parapet of a fortress.

Taking one of the well-worn paths conducting to the water-side, a few minutes’ walk brings us to the shore of Echo Lake, with Eagle Cliff now rising grandly on our right. Nowhere among the White Hills is there a fuller realization of a mountain lake than this. Light flaws frost it with silver. Sharp keels cut it as diamonds cut glass. The water is so transparent that you see fishes swimming or floating indolently about.

Echo Lake is somewhat larger than Profile Lake, and is only a step from the road. Its sources are in the hundred streams that descend the surrounding mountains, and its waters are discharged by the valley, lying between us and the heights of Bethlehem, into the Ammonoosuc. Therefore, in coming from one lake to the other we have crossed the summit of the pass. On one side the waters flow to the Merrimac, on the other to the Connecticut. An idle fancy tempted me to bring a cup of water from Profile and cast it into Echo Lake, forgetting that, although divided in their lives, the twin lakes had yet a common destiny in the abyss of the ocean. I found the outlook from the boat-house on the whole the most satisfying, because one looks back directly through the deep chasm of the Notch.

In this beautiful little mountain-tarn the true artist finds his ideal. The snowy peak of Lafayette looked down into it with a freezing stare. Cannon Mountain now showed his retreating wall on the right. The huge, castellated rampart of Eagle Cliff lifted on its borders precipices dripping with moisture, and glistening in the sun like casements. Except for the lake, the whole aspect would be irredeemably savage and forbidding—a blind landscape; but when the sun sinks behind the long ridge of Mount Cannon, purpling all these grisly crags, and the cloaked shadows, groping their way foot by foot up the ravines, seem spectres risen from the depths of the lake, you see, underneath the cliffs, long and slender spears of golden light thrust deep into its black and glossy tide, crimsoning it as with its own life-blood. Then, too, is the proper moment for surprising these vain old mountains viewing themselves in their mountain mirror, in which the bald, the wrinkled, and the decrepit appear young, vigorous, and gloriously fair; to see them gloating over their swarthy features like the bandit in “Fra Diavolo.” Their ragged mantles are changed to gaudy cashmeres, picturesquely twisted about their brawny shoulders, their snows to laces. Oh the pomp, the majesty of these sunsets, which so glorify the upturned faces of the haggard cliffs; which transmute, as in the miracle, water into wine; which instantly transform these rugged mountain walls into gates of jasper, and ruby, and onyx—glowing, effulgent, enrapturing! And then, after the sun drops wearily down the west, that gauze-like vapor, spun from the breath of evening, rising like incense from the surface of the lake, which the mountains put on for the masque of night; and, finally, the inquisitive stars piercing the lake with ice-cold gleams, or the full-moon breaking in one great burst of splendor on its level surface!

The echo adds its feats of ventriloquism. The marvel of the phonograph is but a mimicry of Nature, the universal teacher. Now the man blows a strong, clear blast upon a long Alpine horn, and, like a bugle-call flying from camp to camp, the martial signal is repeated, not once, but again and again, in waves of bewitching sweetness and with the exquisite modulations of the wood-thrush’s note. From covert to covert, now here, now there, it chants its rapturous melody. Once again it glides upon the entranced ear, and still we lean in breathless eagerness to catch the last faint cadence sighing itself away upon the palpitating air. A cannon was then fired. The report and echo came with the flash. In a moment more a deep and hollow rumbling sound, as if the mountains were splitting their huge sides with suppressed laughter, startled us.

The ascent of Mount Lafayette fittingly crowns the series of excursions through which we have passed since leaving Plymouth. This mountain dominates the valleys north and south with undisputed sway. It is the King of Franconia.

At seven in the morning I crossed the little clearing, and, turning into the path leading to the summit, found myself at the beginning of a steep ascent. It was one of the last and fairest days of that bright season which made the poet exclaim,

“And what is so fair as a day in June?”

The thunder-storm of the previous afternoon, which continued its furious cannonade at intervals throughout the night, had purified the air and given promise of a day favorable for the ascension. No clouds were upon the mountains. Everything betokened a pacific disposition.

The path at once attacks the south side of Eagle Cliff. A short way up, openings afford fine views of Mount Cannon and its weird profile, of the valley below, and of the glen we have just left. The stupendous mass of Eagle Cliff, suspended a thousand feet over your head, accelerates the pace.

After an hour of steady, but not rapid, climbing, the path turned abruptly under the shattered, but still formidable, precipices of the cliff, which rose some distance higher, skirted it awhile, and then began to zigzag among huge rocks along the narrow ridge uniting the cliff with the mass of the mountain. Two deep ravines fall away on either side. For two or three hundred yards, from the time the shoulder of the cliff is turned until the mountain itself is reached, the walk is as romantic an episode of mountain climbing as any I can recall, except the narrow gully of Chocorua. But this passage presents no such difficulties as must be overcome there. Although heaped with rocks, the way is easy, and is quite level. In one place, where it glides between two prodigious masses of rock dislodged from the cliff, it is so narrow as to admit only a single person at a time. When I turned to look back down the black ravine, cutting into the south side of the mountain, my eye met nothing but immense rocks stopped in their descent on the very edge of the gulf. It is among these that a way has been found for the path, which was to me a reminiscence of the high defiles of the Isthmus of Darien; to complete the illusion, nothing was now wanting except the tinkling bells of the mules and the song of the muleteer. I climbed upon one of the high rocks, and gazed to my full content upon the granite parapet of Mount Cannon.

In a few rods more the path encountered the great ravine opening into the valley of Gale River. Through its wide trough brilliant strips of this valley gleamed out far below. The village of Franconia and the heights of Lisbon and Bethlehem now appeared on this side.

I think that the perception of a distance climbed is greater to one who is looking down from a great height than to one looking up. Doubtless the imagination, which associates the plunging lines of a deep gorge with the horror of a fall, has much to do with this impression. Upon crossing a bridge of logs, the peak of Lafayette leaped up; yet so distant as to promise no easy conquest. Somewhere down the gorge I heard the roar of a brook; then the report of the cannon at Echo Lake; but up here there was no echo.

The usual indications now assured me that I was nearing the top. In three-quarters of an hour from the time of leaving the natural bridge, joining Eagle Cliff with the mountain, I stood upon the first of the great billows which, rolling in to a common centre, appear to have forced the true summit a thousand feet higher.

The first, perhaps the most curious, thing that I noticed—for one hardly suspects the existence of considerable bodies of water in these high regions, and, therefore, never comes upon them except unawares—was two little lakelets, nestling in the hollow between me and the main peak. Reposing amid the sterility of the high peaks, these lakes surround themselves with such plants as have survived the ascent from below, or, nourished by the snows of the summit, those that never do descend into temperate climates. Thus an appearance of fertility—one of those deceptions that we welcome, knowing it to be such—greets us unexpectedly. But its appearance is weird and forbidding. Here the extremes of arctic and temperate vegetation meet and embrace; here the flowers of the valley annually visit their pale sisters, banished by Nature to these Siberian solitudes; and here the rough, strong Alpine grass, striking its roots deep among the atoms of sand, granite, or flint, lives almost in defiance of Nature herself; and when the snows come and the freezing north winds blow, and it can no longer stand erect, throws itself upon the tender plants, like a brave soldier expiring on the body of his helpless comrade, saved by his own devotion.

But these Alpine lakes always provoke a smile. When some distance beyond the Eagle Lakes, as they are called, and higher, I caught, underneath a wooded ridge of Cannon, the sparkle of one hidden among the summits on the opposite side of the Notch. The immense, solitary Kinsman Mountain overtops Cannon as easily as Cannon does Eagle Cliff. In its dark setting of the thickest and blackest forests this lake blazed like one of the enormous diamonds which our forefathers so firmly believed existed among these mountains. They call this water—only to be discovered by getting above it—Lonesome Lake, and in summer it is the chosen retreat of one well known to American literature, whom the mountains know, and who knows them.

I descended the slope to the plateau on which the lakes lie, soon gaining the rush-grown shore of the nearest. Its water was hardly drinkable, but your thirsty climber is not apt to be too fastidious. These lakes are prettier from a distance; the spongy and yielding moss, the sickly yellow sedge surrounding them, and the rusty brown of the brackish water, do not invite us to tarry long.

The ascent of the pinnacle now began. It is too much a repetition, though by no means as toilsome, of the Mount Washington climb to merit particular description. This peak, too, seems disinherited by Nature. The last trees encountered are the stunted firs with distorted little trunks, which it may have required half a century to grow as thick as the wrist. I left the region of Alpine trees to enter that of gray rocks, constantly increasing in size toward the summit, where they were confusedly piled in ragged ridges, one upon another, looming large and threateningly in the distance. But as often as I stopped to breathe I scanned “the landscape o’er” with all the delight of a wholly new experience. The fascination of being on a mountain-top has yet to be explained. Perhaps, after all, it is not susceptible of analysis.

After gaining the highest visible point, to find the real summit still beyond, I stopped to drink at a delicious spring trickling from underneath a large rock, around which the track wound. I was now among the ruin and demolition of the summit, standing in the midst of a vast atmospheric ocean.

Had I staked all my hopes upon the distant view, no choice but disappointment was mine to accept. Steeped in the softest, dreamiest azure that ever dull earth borrowed from bright heaven, a hundred peaks lifted their airy turrets on high. These castles of the air—for I will maintain that they were nothing else—loomed with enchanting grace, the nearest like battlements of turquoise and amethyst, or, receding through infinite gradations to the merest shadows, seemed but the dusky reflection of those less remote. The air was full of illusions. There was bright sunshine, yet only a deluge of semi-opaque golden vapor. There were forms without substance. See those iron-ribbed, deep-chested mountains! I declare it seemed as if a swallow might fly through them with ease! Over the great Twin chain were traced, apparently on the air itself, some humid outlines of surpassing grace which I recognized for the great White Mountains. It was a dream of the great poetic past: of the golden age of Milton and of Dante. The mountains seemed dissolving and floating away before my eyes.

Stretched beneath the huge land-billows, the valleys—north, south, or west—reflected the fervid sunshine with softened brilliance, and all those white farms and hamlets spotting them looked like flakes of foam in the hollows of an immense ocean.

Heaven forbid that I should profane such a scene with the dry recital of this view or that! I did not even think of it. A study of one of Nature’s most capricious moods interested me far more than a study of topography. How should I know that what I saw were mountains, when the earth itself was not clearly distinguishable? Alone, surrounded by all these delusions, I had, indeed, a support for my feet, but none whatever for the bewildered senses.

I found the mountain-top untenanted except by horse-flies, black gnats, and active little black spiders. These swarmed upon the rocks. I also found buttercups, the mountain-cranberry, and a heath, bearing a little white flower, blossoming near the summit. There were the four walls of a ruined building, a cairn, and a signal-staff to show that some one had been before me. This staff is 5259 feet above the ocean, or 3245 feet above the summit of the Franconia Pass.

The ascent required about three, and the descent about two hours. The distance is not much less than four miles; but, these miles being a nearly uninterrupted climb from the base to the summit of the mountain, haste is out of the question, if going up, and imprudent, if coming down. There are no breakneck or dangerous places on the route; nor any where the traveller is liable to lose his way, even in a fog, except on the first summit, where the new and old paths meet, and where a guide-board should be erected.

IV.
FRANCONIA, AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

Believe if thou wilt that mountains change their places, but believe not that men change their dispositions.—Oriental Proverb.

ALTHOUGH one may make the journey from the Profile House to Bethlehem with greater ease and rapidity by the railway recently constructed along the side of the Franconia range, preference will unquestionably be given to the old way by all who would not lose some of the most striking views the neighborhood affords. Beginning near the hotel, the railway skirts the shore of Echo Lake, and then plunges into a forest it was the first to invade. By a descent of one hundred feet to the mile, for nine and a half miles, it reaches the Ammonoosuc at Bethlehem station. I have nothing to say against the locomotive, but then I should not like to go through the gallery of the Louvre behind one.

From Echo Lake the high-road to Franconia, Littleton, and Bethlehem winds down the steep mountain side into the valley of Gale River. To the left, in the middle distance, appear the little church-tower and white buildings constituting the village of Franconia Iron Works. This village is charmingly placed for effectively commanding a survey of the amphitheatre of mountains which isolates it from the neighboring towns and settlements.

As we come down the three-mile descent, from the summit of the pass to the level of the deep valley, and to the northern base of the notch-mountains, an eminence rises to the left. Half-way up, occupying a well-chosen site, there is a hotel, and on the high ridge another commands not only this valley, but also those lying to the west of it. On the opposite side to us rise the green heights of Bethlehem, Mount Agassiz being conspicuous by the observatory on its summit. Those farm-houses dotting the hill-side show how the road crooks and turns to get to the top. Following these heights westward, a deep rift indicates the course of the stream dividing the valley, and of the highway to Littleton. Between these walls the long ellipse of fertile land beckons us to descend.

I am always most partial to those grassy lanes and by-ways going no one knows where, especially if they have well-sweeps and elm-trees in them; but here also is the old red farm-house, with its antiquated sweep, its colony of arching elms, its wild-rose clustering above the porch, its embodiment of those magical words, “Home, sweet home.” It fits the rugged landscape as no other habitation can. It fits it to a T, as we say in New England. More than this, it unites us with another and different generation. What a story of toil, privation, endurance these old walls could tell! How genuine the surprise with which they look down upon the more modern houses of the village! Here, too, is the Virginia fence, on which the king of the barn-yard defiantly perches. There is the field behind it, and the men scattering seed in the fallow earth. Yonder, in the mowing-ground, a laborer is sharpening his scythe, the steel ringing musically under the quick strokes of his “rifle.”

Over there, to the left, is the rustic bridge, and hard by a clump of peeled birches throw their grateful shade over the hot road. Many stop here, for the white-columned trunks are carved with initials, some freshly cut, some mere scars. But why mutilate the tree? What signify those letters, that every idler should gratify his little vanity by giving it a stab? Do you know that the birch does not renew its bark, and that the tree thus stripped of its natural protection is doomed? Cease, then, I pray you, this senseless mutilation; nor call down the just malediction of the future traveller for destroying his shade. Unable to escape its fate, the poor tree, like a victim at the stake, stoically receives your barbarous strokes and gashes. Refrain, then, traveller, for pity’s sake! Have a little mercy! Know that the ancients believed the tree possessed of a soul. Remember the touching story of Adonis, barbarously wounded, surviving in a pine, where he weeps eternally. Consider how often is the figure of “The Tree” used in the Scriptures as emblematic of the life eternal! Who would wish to inhabit a treeless heaven?

The stream—which does not allow us to forget that it is here—is a vociferous mountain brook. Hardly less forward is the roadside fountain gushing into a water-trough its refreshing abundance for the tired and dusty wayfarer. It makes no difference in the world whether he goes on two legs or on four. “Drink and be filled” is the invitation thus generously held out to all alike. With what a sigh of pleasure your steaming beast lifts his reluctant and dripping muzzle from the cool wave, and after satisfying again and again his thirst, luxuriously immersing his nose for the third and fourth time, still pretends to drink! How deliciously light and limpid and sparkling is the water, and how sweet! How it cools the hot blood! You quaff nectar. You sip it as you would champagne. It tastes far better, you think, pouring from this half-decayed, moss-crusted spout than from iron, or bronze, or marble. Come, fellow-traveller, a bumper! Fill high! God bless the man who first invented the roadside fountain! He was a true benefactor of his fellow-man.

Turn once more to the house. A little girl tosses corn, kernel by kernel, to her pet chickens. There go a flight of pigeons: they curvet and wheel, and settle on the ridge-pole, where they begin to flirt, and strut, and coo. The men in the field look up at the top of the mountain, to see if it is not yet noon. And now a woman, with plump bare arms, coming briskly to the open door, puts the dinner-horn to her lips with one hand while placing the other lightly upon her hip. She does not know that act and attitude are alike inviting. How should she?

Let us follow the pretty stream that is our guide. Franconia has the reputation of being the hottest in summer and in winter the coldest of the mountain villages. It is hot. The houses are strung along the road for a mile. People may or may not live in them: you see nobody. One modest church-tower catches the eye for a moment, and then, as we enter the heart of the village, a square barrack of a building, just across the stream, is pointed out as the old furnace, which in times past gave importance to this out-of-the-way corner. But the old furnace is now deserted except by cows from the neighboring pastures, who come and go through its open doors in search of shade. At present the river, which brings its music and its freshness to the very doors of the villagers, is the only busy thing in the place.

During the Rebellion the furnace was kept busy night and day, turning out iron to be cast into cannon. The very hills were melted down for the defence of the imperilled Union. In the adjoining town of Lisbon the discovery of gold-bearing quartz turned the heads of the usually steady-going population. The precious deposits were first found on the Bailey farm, in 1865, and similar specimens were soon detected on the farms adjoining. It is said the old people could scarcely be made to credit these reports until they had seen and handled the precious metal; for the country had been settled nearly a century, and the presence of any but the baser ores was wholly unsuspected and disbelieved.

There is one peculiarity, common to all these mountain villages, to which I must allude. A stranger is not known by any personal peculiarity, but by his horse. If you ask for such or such a person, the chances are ten to one you will immediately be asked in return if he drove a bay horse, or a black colt, or a brown mare with one white ear; so quick are these lazy-looking men, that loll on the door-steps or spread themselves out over the shop-counters, to observe what interests them most. The girls here know the points of a horse better than most men, and are far more reckless drivers than men. To a man who, like myself, has lived in a horse-stealing country, it does look queerly to see the barn-doors standing open at night. But then every country has its own customs.

One seeks in vain for any scraps of history or tradition that might shed even a momentary lustre upon this village out of the past. Yet its situation invites the belief that it is full of both. Disappointed in this, we at least have an inexhaustible theme in the dark and tranquil mountains bending over us.

Mount Lafayette presents toward Franconia two enormous green billows, rolled apart, the deep hollow between being the great ravine dividing the mountain from base to summit. Over this deep incision, which, from the irregularity of one of its ridges, looks widest at the top, presides, with matchless dignity, the bared and craggy peak whose dusky brown gradually mingles with the scant verdure checked hundreds of feet down. With what hauteur it seems to regard this effort of Nature to place a garland on its bronzed and knotted forehead! One can never get over his admiration for the savage grace with which the mountain, which at first sight seems literally thrown together, develops a beauty, a harmony, and an intelligence giving such absolute superiority to works of Nature over those of man.

The side of Mount Cannon turned toward the village now elevates two almost regular triangular masses, one rising behind the other, and both surmounted by the rounded summit, which, except in its mass, has little resemblance to a mountain. It is seen that on two-thirds of these elevations a new forest has replaced the original growth. Twenty-five years ago a destructive fire raged on this mountain, destroying all the vegetation, as well as the thin soil down to the hard rock. Even that was cracked and peeled like old parchment. This burning mountain was a scene of startling magnificence during several nights, when the village was as light as day, the sky overspread an angry glow, and the river ran blood-red. The hump-backed ridges, connecting Cannon with Kinsman, present nearly the same appearance from this as from the other side of the Notch—or as remarked when approaching from Campton.

The superb picture seen from the upper end of the valley, combining, as it does, the two great chains in a single glance of the eye, is extended and improved by going a mile out of the village to the school-house on the Sugar Hill road. It is a peerless landscape. I have gazed at it for hours with that ineffable delight which baffles all power of expression. It will have no partakers. One must go there alone and see the setting sun paint those vast shapes with colors the heavens alone are capable of producing.

Distinguished by the beautiful groves of maple that adorn its crest, Sugar Hill is destined to grow more and more in the popular esteem. No traveller should pass it by. It is so admirably placed as to command in one magnificent sweep of the eye all the highest mountains; it is also lifted into sun and air by an elevation sufficiently high to reach the cooler upper currents. The days are not so breathless or so stifling as they are down in the valley. You look deep into the Franconia Notch, and watch the evening shadows creep up the great east wall. Extending beyond these nearer mountains, the scarcely inferior Twin summits pose themselves like gigantic athletes. Passing to the other side of the valley, we see as far as the pale peaks of Vermont, and those rising above the valley of Israel’s River. But better than all, grander than all, is that kingly coronet of great mountains set on the lustrous green cushion of the valley. Nowhere, I venture to affirm, will the felicity of the title, “Crown of New England,”[32] receive more unanimous acceptance than from this favored spot. Especially when a canopy of clouds overspreading permits the pointed peaks to reflect the illuminated fires of sunset does the crown seem blazing with jewels and precious stones. All the great summits are visible here, and all the ravines, except those in Madison, are as clearly distinguished as if not more than ten instead of twenty miles separated us.

The high crest of Sugar Hill unfolds an unrivalled panorama. This is but faint praise. Yet I find myself instinctively preferring the landscape from Goodenow’s; for those great horizons, uncovered all at once, like a magnificent banquet, are too much for one pair of eyes, however good, or however unwearied with continued sight-seeing. As we cannot look at all the pictures of a gallery at once, we naturally single out the masterpieces. The effort to digest too much natural scenery is a species of intellectual gluttony the overtaxed brain will be quick to revenge, by an attack of indigestion or a loss of appetite.

I was very fond of walking, in the cool of the evening, either in this direction or to the upper end of the village, on the Bethlehem road. There is one point on this road, before it begins in earnest its ascent of the heights, that became a favorite haunt of mine. Emerging from the concealment of thick woods upon a sandy plain, covered here with a thick carpet of verdure, and skirted by a regiment of pines seemingly awaiting only the word of command to advance into the valley, a landscape second to none that I have seen is before you. At the same time he would be an audacious mortal who attempted to transfer it to page or canvas. Nothing disturbs the exquisite harmony of the scene. To the left of you are all the White Mountains, from Adams to Pleasant; in front, the Franconia range, from Kinsman to the Great Haystack. Here is the deep rent of the Notch from which we have but lately descended. Here, too, overtopped and subjugated by the superb spire of Lafayette, the long and curiously-distorted outline of Eagle Cliff pitches headlong down into the half-open aperture of the pass. Nothing but an earthquake could have made such a breach. How that tremendous, earth-swooping ridge seems battered down by the blows of a huge mace! Unspeakably wild and stern, the fractured mountains are to the valley what a raging tempest is to the serenest of skies: one part of the heavens convulsed by the storm, another all peace and calm. Thus from behind his impregnable outworks Lafayette, stern and defiant, keeps eternal watch and ward over the valley cowering at his feet.

From this spot, too, sacred as yet from all intrusion, the profound ravine, descending nearly from the summit of Lafayette, is fully exposed. It is a thing of cracks, crevices, and rents; of upward curves in brilliant light; of black, mysterious hollows, which the eye investigates inch by inch, to where the gorge is swallowed up by the thick forests underneath. The whole side of the principal peak seems torn away. Up there, among the snows, is the source of a flashing stream which comes roaring down through the gorge. Storms swell it into an ungovernable and raging torrent. Thus under the folds of his mantle the lordly peak carries peace or war for the vale.

After the half-stifled feeling experienced among the great mountains, it is indeed a rare pleasure to once more come forth into full breathing-space, and to inspect at leisure from some friendly shade the grandeur magnified by distance, yet divested of excitements that set the brain whirling by the rapidity of their succession. If the wayfarer chances to see, as I did, the whole noble array of high summits presenting a long, snowy line of unsullied brilliance against a background of pale azure, he will account it one of the crowning enjoyments of his journey.

The Bridal Veil Falls, lying on the northern slope of Mount Kinsman, will, when a good path shall enable tourists to visit them, prove one of the most attractive features of Franconia. Truth compels me to say that I did not once hear them spoken of during the fortnight passed in the village, although fishermen were continually bringing in trout from the Copper-mine Brook, on which these falls are situated. The height of the fall is given at seventy-six feet, and its surroundings are said to be of the most romantic and picturesque character. Its marvellous transparency, which permits the ledges to be seen through the gauze-like sheet falling over them, has given to it its name.

From Franconia I took the daily stage to Littleton, which lies on both banks of the Ammonoosuc, and, turning my back upon the high mountains, ran down the rail to Wells River, having the intention of cultivating a more intimate acquaintance with that most noble and interesting entrance formed by the meeting of the Ammonoosuc with the Connecticut.

V.
THE CONNECTICUT OX-BOW.

Say, have the solid rocks
Into streams of silver been melted,
Flowing over the plains,
Spreading to lakes in the fields?
Longfellow.

THE Connecticut is justly named “the beautiful river,” and its valley “the garden of New England.” Issuing from the heart of the northern wilderness, it spreads boundless fertility throughout its stately march to the sea. It is not a rapid river, but flows with an even and majestic tide through its long avenue of mountains. Radiant envoy of the skies, its mission is peace on earth and good-will toward men. As it advances the confluent streams flock to it from their mountain homes. On one side the Green Mountains of Vermont send their hundred tributaries to swell its flood; on the other side the White Hills of New Hampshire pour their impetuous torrents into its broad and placid bosom. Two States thus vie with each other in contributing the wealth it lavishes with absolutely impartial hand along the shores of each.

Unlike the storied Rhine, no crumbling ruins crown the lofty heights of this beautiful river. Its verdant hill-sides everywhere display the evidences of thrift and happiness; its only fortresses are the watchful and everlasting peaks that catch the earliest beams of the New England sun and flash the welcome signal from tower to tower. From time to time the mountains, which seem crowding its banks to see it pass, draw back, as if to give the noble river room. It rewards this benevolence with a garden-spot. Sometimes the mountains press too closely upon it, and the offended stream repays this temerity with a barrenness equal to the beneficence it has just bestowed. Where it is permitted to expand the amphitheatres thus created are the highest types of decorative nature. Graciously touching first one shore and then the other, making the loveliest windings imaginable, the river actually seems on the point of retracing its steps; but, yielding to destiny, it again resumes its slow march, loitering meanwhile in the cool shadows of the mountains, or indolently stretching itself at full length upon the green carpet of the level meadows. Every traveller who has passed here has seen the Happy Valley of Rasselas.[33]

Such is the renowned Ox-Bow of Lower Coös. Tell me, you who have seen it, if the sight has not caused a ripple of pleasurable excitement?

Here the Connecticut receives the waters of the Ammonoosuc, flowing from the very summit of the White Hills, and, in its turn, made to guide the railway to its own birthplace among the snows of Mount Washington. Here the valley, graven in long lines by the ploughshare, heaped with fruitful orchards and groves, extends for many miles up and down its checkered and variegated floor. But it is most beautiful between the villages of Newbury and Haverhill, or at the Great and Little Ox-Bow, where the fat and fecund meadows, extending for two miles from side to side of the valley, resemble an Eden upon earth, and the villages, prettily arranged on terraces above them, half-hid in a thick fringe of foliage, the mantel-ornaments of their own best rooms. Only moderate elevations rise on the Vermont side; but the New Hampshire shore is upheaved into the finely accentuated Benton peaks, behind which, like a citadel within its outworks, is uplifted the gigantic bulk of Moosehillock—the greatest mountain of all this valley, and its natural landmark—keeping strict watch over it as far as the Canadian frontiers.

The traveller approaching by the Connecticut Valley holds this exquisite landscape in view from the Vermont side of the river. The tourist who approaches by the valley of the Merrimac enjoys it from the New Hampshire shore.

The large village of Newbury, usually known as the “Street,” is built along a plateau, rising well above the intervale, and joined to the foothills of the Green Mountains. The Passumpsic Railway coasts the intervale, just touching the northern skirt of the village. The village of Haverhill is similarly situated with respect to the skirt of the White Mountains; but its surface is much more uneven, and it is elevated higher above the valley than its opposite neighbor. The Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railway, having crossed the divide between the waters of the Merrimac and the Connecticut, now follows the high level, after a swift descent from Warren Summit. These plateaus, or terraces, forming broken shelves, first upon one side of the valley, then upon the other, strongly resemble the remains of the ancient bed of a river of tenfold the magnitude of the stream as we see it to-day. They give rise at once to all those interesting conjectures, or theories, which are considered the special field of the geologist, but are also equally attractive to every intelligent observer of Nature and her wondrous works.

Of these two villages, which are really subdivided into half a dozen, and which so beautifully decorate the mountain walls of this valley, it is no treason to the Granite State to say that Newbury enjoys a preference few will be found to dispute. It has the grandest mountain landscape. Moosehillock is lifted high above the Benton range, which occupies the foreground. The whole background is filled with high summits—Lafayette feeling his way up among the clouds, Moosehillock roughly pushing his out of the throng. Meadows of emerald, river of burnished steel, hill-sides in green and buff, and etched with glittering hamlets, gray mountains, bending darkly over, cloud-detaining peaks, vanishing in the far east—surely fairer landscape never brought a glow of pleasure to the cheek, or kindled the eye of a traveller, already sated with a panorama reaching from these mountains to the Sound.

We are now, I imagine, sufficiently instructed in the general characteristics of the famed Ox-Bow to pass from its picturesque and topographical features into the domain of history, and to summon from the past the details of a tragedy in war, which, had it occurred in the days of Homer, would have been embalmed in an epic. Our history begins at a period before any white settlement existed in the region immediately about us. No wonder the red man relinquished it only at the point of the bayonet. It was a country worth fighting for to the bitter end.

VI.
THE SACK OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES.

“L’histoire à sa vérité; la legende a la sienne.”

IN the month of September, 1759, the army of Sir Jeffrey Amherst was in cantonments at Crown Point. A picked corps of American rangers, commanded by Robert Rogers, was attached to this army. One day an aide-de-camp brought Rogers an order to repair forthwith to head-quarters, and in a few moments the ranger entered the general’s marquee.

“At your orders, general,” said the ranger, making his salute.

“About that accursed hornet’s-nest of St. Francis?” said the general, frowning.

“When I was a lad, your excellency, we used to burn a hornet’s-nest, if it became troublesome,” observed Rogers, significantly.

“And how many do you imagine, major, this one has stung to death in the last six years?” inquired General Amherst, fumbling among his papers.

“I don’t know; a great many, your excellency.”

“Six hundred men, women, and children.”

The two men looked at each other a moment without speaking.

“At this rate,” continued the general, “his Majesty’s New England provinces will soon be depopulated.”

“For God’s sake, general, put a stop to this butchery!” ejaculated the exasperated ranger.

“That’s exactly what I have sent for you to do. Here are your orders. You are commanded, and I expect you to destroy that nest of vipers, root and branch. Remember the atrocities committed by these Indian scoundrels, and take your revenge; but remember, also, that I forbid the killing of women and children. Exterminate the fighting-men, but spare the non-combatants. That is war. Now make an end of St. Francis once and for all.”

Nearly a hundred leagues separated the Abenaqui village from the English; and we should add that once there, in the heart of the enemy’s country, all idea of help from the army must be abandoned, and the rangers, depending wholly upon themselves, be deprived of every resource except to cut their way through all obstacles. But this was exactly the kind of service for which this distinctive body of American soldiers was formed.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst had said to Rogers, “Go and wipe out St. Francis for me,” precisely as he would have said to his orderly, “Go and saddle my horse.”

But this illustrates the high degree of confidence which the army reposed in the chief of the rangers. The general knew that this expedition demanded, at every stage, the highest qualities in a leader. Rogers had already proved himself possessed of these qualities in a hundred perilous encounters.

That night, without noise or display, the two hundred men detailed for the expedition left their encampment, which was habitually in the van of the army. On the evening of the twenty-second day since leaving Crown Point a halt was ordered. The rangers were near their destination. From the top of a tree the doomed village was discovered three miles distant. Not the least sign that the presence of an enemy was suspected could be seen or heard. The village wore its ordinary aspect of profound security. Rogers therefore commanded his men to rest, and prepare themselves for the work in hand.

At eight in the evening, having first disguised himself, Rogers took Lieutenant Turner and Ensign Avery, and with them reconnoitred the Indian town. He found it the scene of high festivity, and for an hour watched unseen the unsuspecting inhabitants celebrating with dancing and barbaric music the nuptials of one of the tribe. All this marvellously favored his plans. Not dreaming of an enemy, the savages abandoned themselves to unrestrained enjoyment and hilarity. The fête was protracted until a late hour under the very eyes of the spies, who, finding themselves unnoticed, crept boldly into the village, where they examined the ground and concerted the plan of attack.

At length all was hushed. The last notes of revelry faded on the still night air. One by one the drowsy merry-makers retired to their lodges, and soon the village was wrapped in profound slumber—the slumber of death. This was the moment so anxiously awaited by Rogers. Time was precious. He quickly made his way back to the spot where the rangers were lying on their arms. One by one the men were aroused and fell into their places. It was two in the morning when he left the village. At three the whole body moved stealthily up to within five hundred yards of the village, where the men halted, threw off their packs, and were formed for the assault in three divisions. The village continued silent as the grave.

St. Francis was a village of about forty or fifty wigwams, thrown together in a disorderly clump. In the midst was a chapel, to which the inhabitants were daily summoned by matin and vesper bell to hear the holy father, whose spiritual charge they were, celebrate the mass. The place was enriched with the spoil torn from the English and the ransom of many miserable captives. We have said that these Indians had slain and taken, in six years, six hundred English: that is equivalent to one hundred every year.

The knowledge of numberless atrocities nerved the arms and steeled the hearts of the avengers. When the sun began to brighten the east the three bands of rangers, waiting eagerly for the signal, rushed upon the village.

A deplorable and sickening scene of carnage ensued. The surprise was complete. The first and only warning the amazed savages had were the volleys that mowed them down by scores and fifties. Eyes heavy with the carousal of the previous night opened to encounter an appalling carnival of butchery and horror. Two of the stoutest of the rangers—Farrington and Bradley—led one of the attacking columns to the door where the wedding had taken place. Finding it barred, they threw themselves so violently against it that the fastenings gave way, precipitating Bradley headlong among the Indians who were asleep on their mats. All these were slain before they could make the least resistance.

On all sides the axe and the rifle were soon reaping their deadly harvest. Those panic-stricken, half-dazed wretches who rushed pell-mell into the streets either ran stupidly upon the uplifted weapons of the rangers or were shot down by squads advantageously posted to receive them. A few who ran this terrible gauntlet plunged into the river flowing before the village, and struck boldly out for the opposite shore; but the avengers had closed every avenue of escape, and the fugitives were picked off from the banks. The same fate overtook those who tumbled into their canoes and pushed out into the stream. The frail barks were riddled with shot, leaving their occupants an easy target for a score of rifles. The incessant flashes, the explosions of musketry, the shouts of the assailants, and the yells of their victims were all mingled in one horrible uproar. For two hours this massacre continued. Combat it cannot be called. Rendered furious by the sight of hundreds of scalps waving mournfully in the night-wind in front of the lodges, the pitiless assailants hunted the doomed savages down like blood-hounds. Every shot was followed by a death-whoop, every stroke by a howl of agony. For two horrible hours the village shook with explosions and echoed with frantic outcries. It was then given up to pillage, and then to the torch, and all those who from fear had hid themselves perished miserably in the flames. At seven o’clock in the morning all was over. Silence once more enveloped the hideous scene of conflagration and slaughter. The village of St. Francis was the funeral pyre of two hundred warriors. Rogers had indeed taken the fullest revenge enjoined by Sir Jeffrey Amherst’s orders.

From this point our true history passes into the legendary.

While the sack of St. Francis was going on a number of the Abenaquis took refuge in the little chapel. Their retreat was discovered. A few of their assailants having collected in the neighborhood precipitated themselves toward it, with loud cries. Others ran up. Two or three blows with the butt of a musket forced open the door, when the building was instantly filled with armed men.

An unforeseen reception awaited them. Lighted candles burnt on the high altar, shedding a mild radiance throughout the interior, and casting a dull glow upon the holy vessels of gold and silver upon the altar. At the altar’s foot, clad in the sacred vestments of his office, stood the missionary, a middle-aged, vigorous-looking man, his arms crossed upon his breast, his face lighted up with the exaltation of a martyr. Face and figure denoted the high resolve to meet fate half-way. Behind him crouched the knot of half-crazed savages, who had fled to the sanctuary for its protection, and who, on seeing their mortal enemies, instinctively took a posture of defence. The priest, at two or three paces in advance of them, seemed to offer his body as their rampart. The scene was worthy the pencil of a Rembrandt.

At this sight the intruders halted, the foremost even falling back a step, but the vessels of gold and silver inflamed their cupidity to the highest pitch; while the hostile attitude of the warriors was a menace men already steeped in bloodshed regarded a moment in still more threatening silence, and then by a common impulse recognized by covering the forlorn group with their rifles.

Believing the critical moment come, the priest threw up his hands in an attitude of supplication, arresting the fatal volley as much by the dignity of the gesture itself, as by the resonant voice which exclaimed, in French, “Madmen, for pity’s sake, for the sake of Him on the Cross, stay your hands! This violence! What is your will? What seek ye in the house of God?”

A gunshot outside, followed by a mournful howl, was his sole response.

The priest shuddered, and his crisped lips murmured an ave. He comprehended that another soul had been sent, unshriven, to its final account.

“Hear him!” said a ranger, in a mocking undertone; “his gabble minds me of a flock of wild geese.”

A burst of derisive laughter followed this coarse sally.

In fact, they had not too much respect for the Church of Rome, these wild woodsmen, but were filled with ineradicable hatred for its missionaries, domesticated among their enemies, in whom they believed they saw the real heads of the tribes, and the legitimate objects, therefore, of their vengeance.

“Yield, Papist! Come, you shall have good quarter; on the word of a ranger you shall,” cried an authoritative voice, the speaker at the same time advancing a step, and dropping his rifle the length of his sinewy arms.

“Never!” answered the ecclesiastic, crossing himself.

A suppressed voice from behind hurriedly murmured in his ear, “Écoutez: rendez-vous, mon père: je vous en supplie!”

“Jamais! mieux vaut la mort que la miséricorde de brigands et meurtriers!” ejaculated the missionary, rejecting the counsel also, with a vehement shake of the head.

“Grand Dieu! tout, donc, est fini,” sighed the voice, despairingly.

The rangers understood the gesture better than the words. An officer, the same who had just spoken, again impatiently demanded, this time in a higher and more threatening key,

“A last time! Do you yield or no? Answer, friar!”

The priest turned quickly, took the consecrated Host from the altar, elevated it above his head, and, in a voice that was long remembered by those who heard it, exclaimed,

“To your knees, monsters! to your knees!”

What the ranger understood of this pantomime and this command was that they conveyed a scornful and a final refusal. Muttering under his breath, “Your blood be upon your own head, then,” he levelled his gun and pulled the trigger. A general discharge from both sides shook the building, filling it with thick and stifling smoke, and instantly extinguishing the lights. The few dim rays penetrating the windows, and which seemed recoiling from the frightful spectacle within, enabled the combatants vaguely to distinguish each other in the obscurity. Not a cry was heard; nothing but quick reports or blows signaled the progress of this lugubrious combat.

This butchery continued ten minutes, at the end of which the rangers, with the exception of one of their number killed outright, issued from the chapel, after having first stripped the altar, despoiled the shrine of its silver image of the Virgin, and flung the Host upon the ground. While this profanation was enacting a voice rose from the heap of dead at the altar’s foot, which made the boldest heart among the rangers stop beating. It said,

“The Great Spirit of the Abenaquis will scatter darkness in the path of the accursed Pale-faces! Hunger walks before and Death strikes their trail! Their wives weep for the warriors that do not return! Manitou is angry when the dead speak. The dead have spoken!”

The torch was then applied to the chapel, and, like the rest of the village, it was fast being reduced to a heap of cinders. But now something singular transpired. As the rangers filed out from the shambles the bell of the little chapel began to toll. In wonder and dread they listened to its slow and measured strokes until, the flames having mounted to the belfry, it fell with a loud clang among the ruins. The rangers hastened onward. This unexpected sound already filled them with gloomy forebodings.

After the stern necessities of their situation rendered a separation the sole hope of successful retreat, the party which carried along with it the silver image was so hard pressed by the Indians, and by a still more relentless enemy, famine, that it reached the banks of the Connecticut reduced to four half-starved, emaciated men. More than once had they been on the point of flinging their burden into some one of the torrents every hour obstructing their way; but as one after another fell exhausted or lifeless, the unlucky image passed from hand to hand, and was thus preserved up to the moment so eagerly and so confidently looked for, during that long and dreadful march, to end all their privations.

But the chastisement of heaven, prefigured in the words of the expiring Abenaqui, had already overtaken them. Half-crazed by their sufferings, they mistook the place of rendezvous appointed by their chief, and, having no tidings of their comrades, believed themselves to be the sole survivors of all that gallant but ill-fated band. In this conviction, to which a mournful destiny conducted, they took the fatal determination to cross the mountains under the guidance of one of their number who had, or professed, a knowledge of the way through the Great Notch of the White Hills.

For four days they dragged themselves onward through thickets, through deep snows and swollen streams, without sustenance of any kind, when three of them, in consequence of their complicated miseries, aggravated by finding no way through the wall of mountains, lost their senses. What leather covered their cartouch-boxes they had already scorched to a cinder and greedily devoured. At length, on the last days of October, as they were crossing a small river dammed by logs, they discovered some human bodies, not only scalped, but horribly mangled, which were supposed to be some of their own band. But this was no time for distinctions. On them they accordingly fell like cannibals, their impatience being too great to await the kindling of a fire to dress their horrid food by. When they had thus abated somewhat the excruciating pangs they before endured, the fragments were carefully collected for a future store.

My pen refuses to record the dreadful extremities to which starvation reduced these miserable wretches. At length, after some days of fruitless wandering up and down, finding the mountains inexorably closing in upon them, even this last dreadful resource failed, and, crawling under some rocks, they perished miserably in the delirium produced by hunger and despair, blaspheming, and hurling horrible imprecations at the silver image, to which, in their insanity, they attributed all their sufferings. One of them, seizing the statue, tottered to the edge of a precipice, and, exerting all his remaining strength, dashed it down into the gulf at his feet.

Tradition affirms that the first settlers who ascended Israel’s River found relics of the lost detachment near the foot of the mountains; but, notwithstanding the most diligent search, the silver image has thus far eluded every effort made for its recovery.

VII.
MOOSEHILLOCK.

And so, when restless and adrift, I keep
Great comfort in a quietness like this,
An awful strength that lies in fearless sleep,
On this great shoulder lay my head, nor miss
The things I longed for but an hour ago.
Sarah O. Jewett.

MOOSEHILLOCK, or Moosilauke,[34] is one of four or five summits from which the best idea of the whole area of the White Mountains may be obtained. It is not so remarkable for its form as for its mass. It is an immense mountain.

Lifted in solitary grandeur upon the extreme borders of the army of peaks to which it belongs, and which it seems defending, haughtily over-bearing those lesser summits of the Green Mountains confronting it from the opposite shores of the Connecticut, which here separates the two grand systems, like two hostile armies, the one from the other, Moosehillock resembles a crouching lion, magnificent in repose, but terrible in its awakening.

This immense strength, paralyzed and helpless though it seems, is nevertheless capable of arousing in us a sentiment of respectful fear—respect for the creative power, fear for the suspended life we believe is there. The mountain really seems lying extended under the sky listening for the awful command, “Arise and walk!”

This mountain received a name before Mount Washington, and is in some respects, as I hope to point out, the most interesting of the whole group. In the first place, it commands a hundred miles of the Connecticut Valley, including, of course, all the great peaks of the Green Mountain and Adirondack chains. Again, its position confers decided advantages for studying the configuration of the Franconia group, to which, in a certain sense, it is allied, and of the ranges enclosing the Pemigewasset Valley, which it overlooks. Moosehillock stands in the broad angle formed by the meeting waters of the Connecticut and the Ammonoosuc. In a word, it is an advanced bastion of the whole cluster of castellated summits, constituting the White Mountains in a larger meaning.

Therefore no summit better repays a visit than Moosehillock; yet it is astonishing, considering the ease of access, how few make the ascent. The traveller can hardly do better than begin here his experiences of mountain adventure, should chance conduct him this way; or, if making his exit from the mountain region by the Connecticut Valley, he may, taking it in his way out, make this the appropriate pendant of his tours, romantic and picturesque.

Having been so long known to and frequented by the Indian as well as white hunters, the mountain is naturally the subject of considerable legend,[35] which the historian of Warren has scrupulously gathered together. One of these tales, founded on the disaster of Rogers, recounts the sufferings of two of his men, hopelessly snared in the great Jobildunk ravine. But that tale of horror needs no embellishment from romance. This enormous rent, equally hideous in fact as in name, cut into the vitals of the mountain so deeply that a dark stream gushes from the gaping wound, conceals within its mazes several fine cascades. Owing to long-continued drought, the streams were so puny and so languid when I visited the mountain that I explored only the upper portion of the gorge, which bristles with an untamed forest, levelling its myriad spears at the breast of the climber.

The greater part of the mountain lies in the town of Benton, or, perhaps, it would be nearer the truth to say that fully half the township is appropriated by its prodigious earthwork. But, to reach it without undergoing the fatigues of a long march through the woods, it is necessary to proceed to the village of Warren, which is twenty miles north of Plymouth, and about fourteen south of Haverhill. Behind the village rises Mount Carr. Still farther to the north the summits of Mounts Kineo, Cushman, and Waternomee, continuing this range now separating us from the Pemigewasset Valley, form also the eastern wall of the valley of Baker’s River, which has its principal source in the ravines of Moosehillock. There is a bridle-path opening communication with the mountain from the Benton side, on the north; and so with Lisbon and Franconia. A carriage-road is also contemplated on that side, which will render access still more feasible for a large summer population; while a bridle-path, lately opened between two peaks of the Carr range, facilitates ingress from the Pemigewasset side.

I set out from the village of Warren on one of the hottest afternoons of an intensely hot and dry summer. The five miles between the village and the base of the mountain need not detain the sight-seer. At the crossing of Baker’s River I remarked again the granite-bed honey-combed with those curious pot-holes sunk by whirling stones, first set in motion and then spun around by the stream, which here, breaking up into several wild pitches, pours through a rocky gorge. But how gratefully cool and refreshing was even the sound of rushing water in that still, stifling atmosphere, coming, one would think, from a furnace! Then for two miles more the horse crept along the road, constantly ascending the side of the valley, until the last house was reached. Here we passed a turnpike-gate, rolled over the crisped turf of a stony pasture through a second gate, and were at the foot of Moosehillock.

In a trice we exchanged the sultriness, the dryness, the dust, parching or suffocating us, of a shadeless road, for the cool, moist air of the mountain-forest and the delectable sound of running water. A brook shot past; then another; then the horse, who stopped when he liked, and as often as he liked, like a man forced to undertake a task which he is determined shall cost his task-masters dearly, began a languid progress up the increasing declivity before us. His sighs and groans, as he plodded wearily along, were enough to melt a heart of stone. I therefore dismounted and walked on, leaving the driver to follow as he could. The question was, not how the horse should get us up the mountain, but how we should get the horse up.

They call it four and a half miles from the bottom to the top. The distances indicated by the sign-boards, nailed to trees, did not appear to me exact. They are not exact; and the reason why they are not is sufficiently original to merit a word of explanation. Having long observed the effect of imagination, especially in computing distances, the builder of the road, as he himself informed me, adopted a truly ingenious method of his own. He lengthened or shortened his miles according as the travelling was good or bad. For example: the first mile, being an easy one, was stretched to a mile and a quarter. The last mile is also very good travelling. That, too, he lengthened to a mile and a half. In this way he reduced the intervening two and a half miles of the worst road to one and three-fourth miles. This absolutely harmless piece of deception, he averred, considerably shortened the most difficult part of the journey. No one complained that the good miles were too long, while the bad ones were now passed over with far less grumbling than before they were abbreviated by this simple expedient, which very few, I am convinced, would have thought of. In fact, the sum of the whole distance being scrupulously adhered to, it is the most civil piece of engineering of which I have any knowledge.

The road up is rough, tedious, and, until the ridge at the foot of the south peak is reached, uninteresting. It crooks and turns with absolute lawlessness while climbing the flanks of the southern peak, skirting also the side of the profound ravine eating its way into the mountain from the south. Nearing this summit we obtained through an opening a glimpse of Mount Washington, veiled in the clouds. The trees now visibly dwindled. Just before reaching the ridge, where it joins this peak, a fine spring, deliciously cold, gushed from the mountain side. A few rods more of ascent brought us quite out upon the long, narrow, curving backbone of the mountain, uplifting its sharp edge between two profound gorges, connecting the peaks set at its two extremes, between which Nature has decreed a perpetual divorce. The sun was just setting as we emerged upon this natural way conducting from peak to peak along the airy crest of the mountain.

Although this, it will be remembered, is one of the longest miles, according to the scale of computation in vogue here, the unexpected speed which the horse now put forth, the sight of the squat, little Tip-Top House, clinging to the summit beyond, the upper and nether worlds floating or fading in splendor, while the night-breezes sweeping over cooled our foreheads, and rudely jostled the withered trees, drawn a little apart to the right and left to let us pass, quickly replaced that weariness of mind and body which the mountain exacts of all who pass over it on a sultry midsummer’s day.

At the extremity of the ridge, which is only wide enough for the road, a gradual ascent led to the high summit and to a level plateau of a few acres at its top. This was treeless, but covered with something like soil, smooth, and, being singularly free from the large stones found everywhere else, affords good walking in any direction. The house is built of rough stone, and, though of primitive construction, is comfortable, and even inviting. Furthermore, its materials being collected on the spot, one accepts it as still constituting a part of the mountain, which, indeed, at a little distance it really seems to be. In the evening I went out, to find the mountain blindfolded with clouds. Soon rain began to drive against the window-panes in volleys. At a late hour we heard wheels grinding on the rocks outside, and then a party of tourists drove up to the door, dripping and crestfallen at having undertaken the ascent with a storm staring them in the face. But they had only this one day, they said, and were “bound” to go up the mountain. So up they toiled through pitch darkness, through rain and cloud, passed the night in a building said to be on the summit, and returned down the mountain in the morning, to catch their train, through as dense a fog as ever exasperated a hurried tourist. But they had been to the top! Are there anywhere else in the world people who travel two hundred miles for a single day’s recreation?

It is very curious, this being domesticated on the top of a mountain. We go to bed wondering if the scene will not all vanish in our dreams. It was very odd, too, to see the tourists silently mount their buck-board in the morning, and disappear, within a stone’s throw, in clouds. Detaching themselves to all intents from earth, they began a flight in air. Walking a short distance, perhaps a gunshot, from the house, I groped my way back with difficulty. The case seemed desperate.

But grandest scene of all was the breaking up of the storm. Shortly after noon the high sun began to exert a sensible influence upon the clouds. A perceptible warmth, replacing the chill and clammy mists, began to pervade the mountain-top. Presently a dim sun-ray shot through. Then, as if a noiseless explosion had suddenly rent them, the whole mass of clouds was torn in ten thousand tatters flying through space. All nature seemed seized with sudden frenzy. Here a summit and there a peak was seen, struggling fiercely in the grasp of the storm. Coming up with rushing noise, the west wind charged home the routed storm-clouds with fresh squadrons. What indescribable yet noiseless tumult raged in the heavens! Even the mountains seemed scarcely able to stem the tide of fugitives. A panic seized them. Fear gave them wings. They rushed pell-mell into the ravines and clung to the tree-tops; they dashed themselves blindly against the adamant of Lafayette, only to fall back broken into the deep fosse beneath. Bolts of dazzling sunshine continually tore through them. The gorges themselves seemed heaped with the wounded and the dying. But the rushing wind, trampling the fugitives down, dispersed and cut them mercilessly to pieces. One was irresistibly carried away by this rage of battle. In ten minutes I looked around upon a clear sky. One cloud, impaled on the gleaming spear of Lafayette, hung limp and lifeless; another floated like a scarf from the polished casque of Chocorua; a third, taken prisoner en route, humbly held the train of Washington. All the rest of the phantom host, using its power to render itself invisible, vanished from sight as if the mountains had swallowed it up.

The landscape being now fully uncovered, I enjoyed all its rare perfection. It is a superb and fascinating one, invested with a powerful individuality, surrounded by a charm of its own. You wish to see the two great chains? There they are, the greater rising over the lesser, in the order fixed by Nature. That sunny space in the softened coloring of old tapestry, more to the right, is the Pemigewasset Valley, and the spot from where not long ago we looked up at this mountain looming large in the distance. We raise our eyes to glance up the East Branch upon Mount Hancock and the peaks of Carrigain peeping over. We touch with magic wand the faint cone of Kearsarge, so dim that it seems as if it must rise and float away; then, continuing to call the roll of mountains, Moat, Tripyramid, Chocorua, and all our earlier acquaintances rise or nod among the Sandwich peaks. Some draw their cloud-draperies over their bare shoulders, some sun their naked and hairy breasts in savage luxury. We alight like a bird upon the glassy bosom of Winnepiseogee the incomparable, and, like the bird, again rise, refreshed, for flights still more remote. We sweep over the Uncanoonucs into Massachusetts, steadying the eye upon far Wachusett as we pass from the Merrimac Valley. Now come thronging in upon us the mountains of the Connecticut Valley. We rest awhile upon the transcendently beautiful expanse of the Ox-Bow, and its playthings of villages, strung along the glittering necklace of the river. Across this valley, lifting our eyes, we wander among the loftiest peaks of the Green Mountains—those colossal verd-antiques—exchanging frozen glances across the placid expanse of Champlain with the haughtiest summits of the Adirondacks. We grow tired of this. One last look, this time up the valley, reveals to us the wide and curious gap between two distant mountains, and far beyond Memphremagog, where these mountains rise, we scan all the route travelled by Rogers, the perils of which are fresh in our memory. We pass on unchallenged into the dominions of Victoria.

Is not this a landscape worth coming ten miles out of one’s way to see? And yet the half is not told. I have merely indicated its dimensions. Now let the reader, drawing an imaginary line from peak to peak, go over at leisure all that lies between. I merely prick the chart for him. Moosehillock, not quite five thousand feet high, overlooks all New Hampshire, pushes investigation into Maine and Massachusetts, is familiar with Vermont, distant with New York, and has an eye upon Canada. It is said the ocean has been seen, but I did not see it.

Circumstances compelled me to drive the old horse, who has made more ascensions of the mountain than any living thing, back to Warren. No other was to be had for love or money. Had there been time I would have preferred walking, but there was not. This horse measured sixteen hands. His thin body and long legs resembled a horse upon stilts. He looked dejected, but resigned. I argued that he would be able to get down the mountain somehow; and, once out of the woods, I could count on his eagerness to get home, to some extent, perhaps. I was not deceived in either expectation.

The road, as I have said, is for most of the way a rough, steep, and stony one. In order to check the havoc made by sudden showers, and to hold the thin soil in place, hemlock-boughs were spread over it, artfully concealing those protruding stones which the scanty soil refused to cover. He who intrusted himself to it did not find it a bed of roses. The buck-board was the longest, clumsiest, and most ill-favored it has ever been my lot to see. This vehicle, being peculiar to the mountains, demands, at least, a word. It is a very primitive and ingenious affair, and cheaply constructed. Naturally, therefore, it originated where the farmers were poor and the roads bad. But what is the buck-board? Every one has seen the spring-board of a gymnasium or of a circus. A smooth plank, ten feet long, resting upon trestles placed at either end, assists the acrobat to vault high in the air. Each time he falls the rebound sends him up again. This is the principle of the buck-board. Remove the trestles, put a pair of wheels in the place of each, and you have the vehicle itself, minus shafts or pole, according as one or two horses are to draw it. Increased weight bends the board or the spring more and more until it is in danger of touching the ground. The passengers sit in the hollow of this spring, the natural tendency of which is to shoot them into the air.

I am justified in speaking thus of the road and the vehicle. But who shall describe the horse? That animal was possessed of a devil, and, like the swine of the miracle, ran violently all the way down the mountain, without stopping for water or breath. Fortunate indeed for me was it that the sea was not at the bottom. In three-quarters of an hour, half of which was spent in the air, I was at the foot of the mountain which had required two tedious hours to ascend. How the quadruped managed to avoid falling headlong fifty times over the concealed stones I have no idea. How I contrived to alight, when a wheel, coming violently against one of these stones, put the spring-board in play—how I contrived to alight, I remark, during this game of battledoor and shuttlecock, never twice in the same place, is to this day an enigma.

The houses of ancient Rome frequently bore the inscription for the benefit of strangers, “Cave canem.” This could be advantageously replaced here, upon the first turnpike-gate, at the mountain’s foot, with the warning, “Beware of the horse!”

VIII.
BETHLEHEM.

Ros. O Jupiter! how weary are my spirits!
Touch. I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not weary.
As You Like It.

HAVING finished with the western approach to the White Mountains, I was now at liberty to retrace my route up the Ammonoosuc Valley, which so abounds in picturesque details—farms, hamlets, herds, groups of pines, maples, torrents, roads feeling their way up the heights—to that anomaly of mountain towns, Bethlehem. Thanks to the locomotive, the journey is short. The villages of Bath, Lisbon, Littleton, are successively entered; the same flurry gives a momentary activity to each station, the same faces crowd the platforms, and the same curiosity is exhibited by the passengers, whose excitement receives an increase with every halt of the laboring train.

Bethlehem is ranged high up, along the side of a mountain, like the best china in a cupboard. The crest of Mount Agassiz[36] rises behind it. Beneath the village the ground descends, rather abruptly, to the Ammonoosuc, which winds, through matted woods, its way out of the mountains. There are none of those eye-catching gleams of water which so agreeably diversify these interminable miles of forest and mountain land.

It is only by ascending the slopes of Mount Agassiz that we can secure a stand-point fairly showing the commanding position of Bethlehem, or where its immediate surroundings may be viewed all at once. It is so situated, with respect to the curvature of this mountain, that at one end of the village they do not know what is going on at the other. One end revels in the wide panorama of the west, the other holds the unsurpassed view of the great peaks to the east.

Bethlehem has risen, almost by magic, at the point where the old highway up the Ammonoosuc is intersected by that coming from Plymouth, the Pemigewasset Valley, and the Profile House. In time a small roadside hamlet naturally clustered about this spot. Dr. Timothy Dwight, the pioneer traveller for health and pleasure among these mountains, passed through here in 1803. Speaking of the appearance of Bethlehem, he says: “There is nothing which merits notice, except the patience, enterprise, and hardihood of the settlers which have induced them to stay upon so forbidding a spot; a magnificent prospect of the White Mountains; and a splendid collection of other mountains in their neighborhood, particularly on the south-west.” It was then reached by only one wretched road, which passed the Ammonoosuc by a dangerous ford. The few scattered habitations were mere log-cabins, rough and rude. The few planting-fields were still covered with dead trees, stark and forbidding, which the settlers, unable to fell with the axe, killed by girdling, as the Indians did.

From this historical picture of Bethlehem in the past, we turn to the Bethlehem of to-day. It is turning from the post-rider to the locomotive. Not a single feature is recognizable except the splendid prospect of the White Mountains, and the magnificent collection of other mountains, which call forth the same admiration to-day. Fortunate geographical position, salubrity, fine scenery—these, and these alone, are the legitimate cause of what may be termed the rise and progress of Bethlehem. All that the original settlers seem to have accomplished is to clear away the forests which intercepted, and to make the road conducting to the view.

It is the position of Bethlehem with respect to the recognized points or objects of interest that gives to it a certain strategic advantage. For example, it is admirably situated for excursions north, south, east, or west. It is ten miles to the Profile, twelve to the Fabyan, seventeen to the Crawford, fifteen to the Waumbek, and eighteen to the base of Mount Washington. One can breakfast at Bethlehem, dine on Mount Washington, and be back for tea; and he can repeat the experience with respect to the other points named as often as inclination may prompt. Moreover, the great elevation exempts Bethlehem from the malaria and heat of the valleys. The air is dry, pure, and invigorating, rendering it the paradise of those invalids who suffer from periodical attacks of hay-fever. Lastly, it is new, or comparatively new, and possesses the charm of novelty—not the least consideration to the thousands who are in pursuit of that and that only.

Bethlehem Street is the legitimate successor of the old road. This is a name sui generis which seems hardly appropriate here, although it is so commonly applied to the principal thoroughfares of our inland New England villages. It has a spick-and-span look, as if sprung up like a bed of mushrooms in a night. And so, in fact, it has; for Bethlehem as a summer resort dates only a few years back its sudden rise from comparative obscurity into the full blaze of popular fame and favor. The guide-book of fifteen years ago speaks of the one small but comfortable hotel, kept by the Hon. J. G. Sinclair. In fact, very little account was made of it by travellers, except to remark the magnificent view of the White Mountains on the east, or of the Franconia Mountains on the south, as they passed over the then prescribed tour from North Conway to Plymouth, or vice versa.

But this newness, which you at first resent, besides introducing here and there some few attempts at architectural adornment, contrasts very agreeably with the ill-built, rambling, and slip-shod appearance of the older village-centres. They are invariably most picturesque from a distance. But here there is an evident effort to render the place itself attractive by making it beautiful. Good taste generally prevails. I suspect, however, that the era of good taste, beginning with the incoming of a more refined and intelligent class of travellers, communicated its spirit to two or three enterprising and sagacious men,[37] who saw in what Nature had done an incentive for their own efforts. We walk here in a broad, well-built thoroughfare, skirted on both sides with hotels, boarding-houses, and modern cottages, in which three or four thousand sojourners annually take refuge. All this has grown from the “one small hotel” of a dozen years ago. Shade-trees and grass-plots beautify the way-side. An immense horizon is visible from these houses, and even the hottest summer days are rendered endurable by the light airs produced and set in motion by the oppressive heats of the valley. The sultriest season is, therefore, no bar to out-of-door exercise for persons of average health, rendering walks, rambles, or drives subject only to the will or caprice of the pleasure-seeker. But in the evening all these houses are emptied of their occupants. The whole village is out-of-doors, enjoying the coolness or the panorama with all the zest unconstrained gratification always brings. The multitudes of well-dressed promenaders surprise every new-comer, who immediately thinks of Saratoga or Newport, and their social characteristics. Bethlehem, he thinks, must be the ideal of those who would carry city or, at least, suburban life among the mountains; who do not care a fig for solitude, but prefer to find their pleasures still connected with their home life. They are seeing life and seeing nature at the same time.

Sauntering along the street from the Sinclair House, a strikingly large and beautiful prospect opens as we come to the Belleview. Here the road, making its exit from the village, descends to the Ammonoosuc. The valley broadens and deepens, exposing to view all the town of Littleton, picturesquely scattered about the distant hill-sides. Its white houses resemble a bank of daisies. The hills take an easy attitude of rest. Six hundred feet below us the bottom of the valley exhibits its rich savannas, interspersed with cottages and groves. Above its deep hollow the Green Mountains glimmer in the far west. “Ah!” you say, “we will stop here.”

Let us now again, leaving the Sinclair House behind, ascend the road to the Profile. It is not so much travelled as it was before the locomotive, in his coat-of-mail, sounded his loud trumpet at the gates of Franconia. A mile takes us to the brow of the hill. We hardly know which way to look first. Two noble and comprehensive views present themselves. To the left Mount Agassiz rears his commanding peak. In front of us, across a valley, is the great, deeply-cloven Franconia Notch. Lafayette is superb here. Now the large, compact mass of Moosehillock looms on the extreme right, together with all those striking objects lately studied or observed from the village of Franconia, which so quietly reposes beneath us. But this landscape properly belongs to the environs of Bethlehem, and never is it so incomparably grand as when the summits are fitfully revealed, battling fiercely with storm-clouds. Every phase of the conflict is watched with eager attention. Seeing all this passion above, it calls up a smile to look down at the unbroken and unconscious tranquillity of the valley.

Facing now in the direction of Bethlehem, the eye roves over the broad basin of the Ammonoosuc for many miles up and down. The hills of Littleton, Whitefield, Dalton, Carroll, and Jefferson bend away from the opposite side; and over the last the toothed Percy Peaks[38] rise blue and clear at the point where the waters of the Connecticut and the Androscoggin, approaching each other, conduct the Grand Trunk Railway out of the mountains. The west is packed with the high summits of the Green Mountain chain. The great White Mountains are concealed, as yet, by the swell of the mountain down whose side the road conducts to the village. “This,” you exclaim, “this is the spot where we will pitch our tents!” But there is no public-house here, and we are reluctantly forced to descend. In proportion as we go down, this seemingly limitless panorama suffers a partial eclipse. The landscape changes from the high-wrought epic to the grand pastoral, if such a distinction may be applied to differing forms of mountain scenery. This approach is, without doubt, the most striking introduction to Bethlehem. It is curiously instructive, too, as regards the relative merits of successive elevations, each higher than the other, as proper view-points.

A third ramble is altogether indispensable before we can say that we know Bethlehem of the Hills. The direction is now to the east, by the road to the Crawford House, or Fabyan’s, or the Twin. We continue along the high plateau, in the shade of sugar-maples or Lombardy poplars, to the eastern skirt of the village, the houses getting more and more unfrequent, until we come upon the edge of the slope to the Ammonoosuc, where the road to Whitefield, Lancaster, and Jefferson, leaving the main thoroughfare, drops quietly down into Bethlehem Hollow. No envious hill now obstructs the truly “magnificent view.” Through the open valley the lordly mountains again inthrall us with the might of an overpowering majesty.

This locality has taken the name of the great hotel erected here by Isaac Cruft, whose hand is visible everywhere in Bethlehem. The Maplewood, as it is called, easily maintains at its own end the prestige of Bethlehem for rapid growth. When I first visited the place, in 1875, I found a modest roadside hostelry accommodating sixty guests; five years later a mammoth structure, in which six hundred could be accommodated, had risen, like Aladdin’s palace, on the same spot. Instead of our little musical entertainment, our mock-trial, our quiet rubber of whist, of an evening, there were readings, lectures, balls, masquerades, theatricals, musicales, for every day of the week.

But Bethlehem is emphatically the place of sunsets. In this respect no other mountain resort can pretend to equal it. From no other village are so many mountains visible at once; at no other has the landscape such length and breadth for giving full effect to these truly wonderful displays. More because the sublimity of the scene deserves a permanent chronicle than from any confidence in my own ability to reproduce it, I attempt in black and white to describe one of unparalleled intensity of color, one that may never be repeated, certainly never excelled, while the sun, the heavens, and the mountains shall last.

A cold drizzle having set in on the day of my arrival, the mountains were invisible when I rose in the morning. I looked, but they were no longer there. I was much vexed at the prospect of being storm-bound, or of making under compulsion a sojourn I had beforehand resolved to make at my own good will and pleasure. So strongly is the spirit of resistance developed in us. After a critical investigation of the weather, it crossed my mind like an intuition that something extraordinary was preparing behind the enormous masses of clouds clinging like wet draperies to the skirts of the mountains, forming an impenetrable curtain, now and then slowly lifted by the fresh north wind, now suddenly distended or collapsing like huge sails, but noiselessly and mysteriously as the ghostly canvas of the Flying Dutchman.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, the wind having freshened, the lower clouds broke apart here and there—just enough to reveal to us that ever-new picture of the White Mountains, beautifully robed in fresh snow, above the darker line of forest; but so thoroughly were the high summits blended with the dull silver-gray of upper sky that the true line of separation defied the keenest scrutiny to detect it. This produced a curious optical illusion. Extended sumptuously along the crest-line, rivalling the snow itself, a bank of white clouds rendered the deception perfect, since just above them began that heavy and dull expanse which overspread and darkened the whole heavens, thus imperfectly delineating a second line of summits mounting to a prodigious height. They seemed miles upon miles high.

Up stretched this gigantic and shadowy phantasm of towers, domes, and peaks, illimitably, as if mountains and heavens were indeed come together in eternal alliance. At the same time the finger dipped in water could trace a more conclusive outline on glass than the eye could find here. The summits, a little luminous, emitted a cold, spectral glare. It gave you a chill to look at them. No sky, no earth, no deep gorges, no stark precipices—no anything except that dead wall, so sepulchral in its gray gloom that equally mind and imagination failed to find one familiar outline or contour. The true peaks seemed clouds, and the clouds peaks. But this phantasm was only the prologue.

At the hour of sunset all the lower clouds had disappeared. The upper heavens now wore that deep grape-purple impervious to light or warmth, and producing the effect of a vast dome hung with black. The storm replaced the azure tint of the sky with the most sombre color in its laboratory. The light visibly waned. The icy peaks still reflected a boreal glitter. But in the west these funereal draperies fell a little short of touching the edge of the horizon—a bare hand’s-breadth—leaving a crevice filled with golden light, pure and limpid as water, clear and vivid as winnowed sunshine. The sun’s eye would soon be applied to this peep-hole. A feverish impatience seized us. We could see the people at their doors and in the street standing silent and expectant, with their faces turned to the heavens. From a station near Cruft’s Ledge we watched intently for the moment when this splendid light, concentrated in one level sheet, should fall upon the great mountains.

In a few seconds a yellow spot of piercing brilliancy appeared in this narrow band of light. One look at it was blinding; a second would have paralyzed the optic nerve. Mechanically we put up our hands to shut it out. Imagine a stream of molten iron—hissing-hot and throwing off fiery spray—gushing from the side of a furnace! Even that can give but a feeble idea of the unspeakable intensity of this last sun-ray. It blazed. It flooded us with a suffocating effulgence. Suppose now this cataract of liquid flame suddenly illuminating the pitchy darkness of a cavern in the bowels of the earth. The effect was electrifying. Confined between the upper and nether expanse—dull earth and brooding sky—rendered tenfold more dazzling by the blackness above, beneath, the sun poured upon the great mountains one magnificent torrent of radiance. In an instant the broad land was deluged with the supreme glories of that morning when the awful voice of God uttered the sublime command,

“Let there be light, and there was light.”

An electric shock awoke the torpid earth, transfigured the mountains. On swept the mighty wave, shedding light, and warmth, and splendor where a moment before all was dark, cold, and spiritless. Like Ajax before Troy, the giant hills braced on their dazzling armor. Like Achilles’s shield, they threw back the brightness of the sun. Every tree stood sharply out. Every cavern disclosed its inmost secrets. Twigs glittered diamonds, leaves emitted golden rays. All was ravishingly beautiful.

This superb exhibition continued while one might count a hundred. Then all the lower mountains took on that ineffable purple that baffles description. Starr King, Cherry Mountain, were resplendent. As if the livid and thick-clustered clouds above had been trodden by invisible feet, these peaks seemed drenched with the juice of the wine-press. The high summits, buried in snow and cloud, were yet coldly impassive, but presently, little by little, the light crept up and up. Now it seized the topmost pinnacles. Heavens, what a sight! Ineffable glory seemed quenched in the sublime terrors of that moment. On our right the Twin and Franconia mountains glowed, from base to summit, like coals of fire. The lower forests were wrapped in flame. Then all the snowy line of peaks, from Adams to Clinton, turned blood-red. No pale rose or carnation tints, as in those enrapturing summer sunsets so often witnessed here. The stupendous and flaming mountains of hell seemed risen before us, clothed with immortal terrors. We stood rooted to the spot, like men who saw the judgment-day dawning, the solid earth consuming, before their doubting eyes. Everlasting, unquenchable fires seemed encompassing us about. Nothing more weird, more unearthly, or more infernal was ever seen. Even the country-people, stolid and indifferent as they usually are, regarded it with mingled stupefaction and dismay.

The drama approached its climax. Before we were aware, the valley grew dark. But still, the granite peaks of Lafayette, and of that admirable pyramid, Mount Garfield, which even the greater mountain cannot reduce to impotence, glowed like iron drawn from the fire. Their incandescent points, thrust upward into the black gulf of the heavens, towered above the blacker gulfs below unspeakably. By degrees the scorching heat cooled. The great Franconia spires successively paled. But long after they seemed reduced to ashes, the red flame still lingered upon the snows of Mount Washington. At last that, too, faded out. Life was extinct. The great summit took on a wan and livid hue. Night kindly spread her mantle over the lifeless form of the mountain, which still disclosed its larger outlines rigid, majestic, even in death.

Twilight succeeded—twilight steeped in silence and coolness, in the thousand odors exhaled by the teeming earth. One by one the birds hushed their noisy twitter. Overcome by their own perfumes, flowers shut their dewy petals and drooped their tender little heads. The river seemed a drowsy voice rising from the depths of the forest, complaining that it alone should toil on while all else reposed. With night comes the feeling of immensity. With sleep the conviction that we are nothing, and that the order of nature disturbs itself in nothing for us. If we awake, well; if not, well again. What if we should never wake? One such splendid pageant as I have attempted to describe instinctively quenches human pride. It is true, a sunset is in itself nothing, but it compels you to admit that the world moves for itself, not for you. Believe it not a gorgeous display in which you, the critical spectator, assist, but the signal that the day ends and the night cometh. A spectacle that can arouse the emotions of joy, fear, hope, suspense—nothing? Perhaps. God knows.

There are very pleasant walks, affording fine views of all the highest mountains, around the eastern slope or to the summit of the mountain rising at the back of the hotel. The bare but grassy crest of this mountain, one of my favorite haunts, enabled me to reconnoitre my route in advance up the valley, and to look over into the yet unvisited region of Jefferson, or back again, at the environs of Franconia. The glory that pours down upon these hills, the vales they infold, the wild streams, the craggy mountain spurs, the soft, velvety clearings that turn their dimpled cheeks to be kissed by the sunshine, may all be seen and fully enjoyed from this spot.

The heights behind us are well-wooded on the summits, but below this belt of woodland extends a broad band of sunny clearings checkered with fields of waving grain. These fields are among the highest cultivated lands in New England. Long tillage was necessary to reduce this refractory soil to subjection. Farther down, toward the railway-station, the pastures are so encumbered with stones that a sheep would turn from them in dismay. To mow among these stones a man would have to go down on his knees.

There is a beautiful orchard of sugar-maples down the road to the Hollow; but it always makes me sad to see these trees standing with their naked sides pierced and bleeding from gaping wounds.

At the corner of this road my attention was arrested by a sign-board planted in front of an unpainted cottage, behind which rose a clump of magnificent birches. I walked over to see what it could mean. The sign-board bore the name “Sir Isaac Newton Gay,” in large black letters. Here was a spur to curiosity! A knight, or at least a baronet, living in humble seclusion, yet parading his quality thus in the face of the world! Going to the gate, my perplexity increased upon seeing the grass-plot in front of the dwelling literally covered with broken glass, lamp-chimneys, bits of colored china, bottles of every imaginable shape and size stuck upright upon sticks, interspersed with lumps of white quartz. Some cabalistic meaning, doubtless, attached to the display. This brilliant rubbish sparkled in the sun, filling the enclosure with the cheap glitter of a pawnbroker’s shop-window. The thing so far announced a little eccentricity, at least, so I made bold to push my investigation still farther, and was rewarded by finding, piled against the trunk of a tree, at the back of the house, a heap of skulls of animals as high as my head. The recluse’s intent was now plain. Here was a lesson that he who ran might read. The rubbish in the front yard illustrated the pomp, glitter, and emptiness of life; the monument of skulls its true estate, divested of all false show or pretence. Without doubt this was a philosopher worthy of his name.

I was admitted by a singular-looking being, with dry, straight, lank hair, weak features, watery eyes, and a shuffling gait. Some accident having partially closed one eye, gave him a look of preternatural wisdom. He was ready to give an opinion on any subject under the sun, no matter how difficult or abstruse, as soon as broached, and stroked his scanty beard while doing so with evident self-complacency. I had a moment to see that the walls were papered with old handbills of county fairs, travelling shows, and the like, the floor covered with patches of carpet as various as Joseph’s coat, when my man began a formula similar to what the Bearded Lady drawls out or the Tattooed Man recites through his nose to gaping rustics at a country muster, at ten cents a head. He told where he was born, how old he was, and how long he had lived in Bethlehem. At the proper moment I put my hand in my pocket and took out a dime, which he thankfully accepted, and dropped inside a broken coffee-pot.

“Sir,” I observed, “seeing you are American-born, I infer your title must have been conferred by some foreign potentate?”

“No; that is my name.”

“But,” I pursued, “has it not an unrepublican sound in a country where titles are regarded with distrust, not to say aversion?”

“I tell you it is my name,” with some heat; “I was named for the great Sir Isaac Newton.”

“Your pardon, Sir Isaac. May I ask if you inherit the genius of your distinguished namesake?”

“Well, yes, to some extent I do; I philoserphize a good deal. I read a good many books folks leaves here, besides what newspapers I can pick up; but you see it costs a lifetime to get knowledge.”

Jaques, the misanthrope, wandering in the Forest of Arden, was not more astonished at Touchstone’s philosophy than I at this answer. “Very true,” I assented. “What is your philosophy of life?”

He tapped his forehead with his forefinger, but it was only too evident the apartment was untenanted. He remained a moment or two as if in deep thought, and then began,

“Well, I’m eighty-six years of age, come next July.”

My flesh began to creep: he was beginning, for the third time, his eternal formula. The hermit, fumbling a red handkerchief, resumed,

“I can say I’ve never wanted for necessaries, and don’t propose to give myself any trouble about it.” And then he expatiated on the folly of fretfulness.

The Hermit of Bethlehem, as he is called, but who opens his door wide for the world to enter, is a very ordinary sort of hermit indeed. Still, his very feebleness of intellect, his vanity even, should be a shield instead of a target for those who, like myself, are lured by the unmeaning trumpery at his door, which has no other significance in the world than a childish passion for objects that glitter in the sun.

The constituents of hotel life do not belong to any locality: they are universal. It is curious to see here people who have spent half their lives in India, or China, or Australia moving about among the untravelled with the well-bred ease and adaptation to circumstances that newly-fledged tourists can neither understand nor imitate. It is very droll, too, that people who have lived ten years in the same street, at home, without knowing each other, meet here for the first time.

I beg to introduce another acquaintance picked up by the roadside while walking from the Twin Mountain House to Bethlehem. Had I been driving, the incident would still have waited for a narrator.

Climbing the hill-side at a snail’s pace was a peddler’s cart, drawn by a scrubby little white horse, and bearing a new broom for an ensign, which seemed to symbolize that this petty trader meant to sweep the road clean of its loose cash. The sides of the cart were gayly decorated with pans, basins, dippers by the dozen, and bristled with knickknacks for barter or ready money, from a gridiron to a door-mat. The movement of the vehicle over the stony road kept up a lively clatter, which announced its coming from afar. There being for the moment, no house in sight, the proprietor was engaged in picking raspberries by the roadside.

The peddler—well, he was little, and stubby too, like his horse, for whom he had dismounted to lighten the pull up-hill. The animal seemed to know his business, for he stopped short as often as he came to a water-bar, blew a cloud from his nostrils, champed his bit, and distended his sides so alarmingly with a long, deep respiration, that the patched-up harness seemed in danger of bursting. He then glanced over his shoulder toward his master, shook his head deprecatingly, and, with a deep sigh, moved on.

The little merchant of small wares and great had on a rusty felt hat, rakishly set on one side of his bullet head, and a faded olive-green coat, rather short in the skirts, to conceal two patches in his trousers. The latter were tucked into a pair of dusty boots very much turned up at the toes. His face was a good deal sunburnt, and his hair, eyebrows, and mustache were the color of the road—sandy. Except a pair of scissors, the points of which protruded from his left-hand vest-pocket, I perceived no weapon offensive or defensive about him. He was a very innocent-looking peddler indeed.

As I was passing him he held out a handful of ripe fruit. The hand was disfigured with an ugly cicatrice: it was rather dirty. He accompanied the offer with an invitation to “hop on” his cart and ride. This double civility emanated from a gentleman and a peddler.

The walk from Crawford’s to Bethlehem is rather fatiguing; but I said, as in duty bound, “No” (I said it because the thought of riding through Bethlehem Street on the top of a peddler’s cart appeared ridiculous in my eyes—with shame I confess it), “thank you; your horse already has all he can pull, and I have only a mile or two farther to go.”

The peddler then fell into step with me, taking a long, even stride that brought back old recollections. I said,

“You have been a soldier.”

“How know you dat?”

“By your gait—you do not walk, you march: by that sabre-cut on your right hand.”

“Ha! you goot eyes haf; but it a payonet vas.”

Believing I saw a veteran of our great civil war, I asked, with undisguised interest,

“Where did you serve? Where were you wounded?”

“Von year und half in war mit Danemark, von year und half mit Oustria, und two mit Vrance.”

I looked at him again. What! That undersized, insignificant appearing little chap, whom I could easily have pitched into the ditch, he a soldier of Sadowa, of Metz, of Paris. Bah!

“So, the wars over, you emigrated to America?”

“Right avay. Ven I get home from Baris I tell Linda, my vife, ‘Look here, Linda: I been soldier six year. Now I plenty fighting got. Dere’s two hunder thaler in the knapsack. Shut your mouth tight, open your eye close, and we get out of dis double-quig.’ She say ‘Where I go?’ und I tell her the U-nited States, by hell, befor anoder var come. She begin to cry, I begin to schwear, und we settle it right avay.”

I asked if he minded telling how he came by the wound in his hand. This is what he told me in his broken English:

When Marshal Bazaine made his last desperate effort to shake off the deadly gripe the Prussians had fastened upon Metz, a battalion of tirailleurs suddenly surrounded an advanced post established by the Germans in the suburbs. The morning was foggy, and the surprise complete. The picket had hardly the time to run to their arms before they were driven back pell-mell on the reserve, amid a shower of balls. The reserve took refuge in a stone building surrounded by a thick hedge, maintaining an irregular fire from the windows. One of the last to cross the court-yard, with the French at his heels, was our German. Before he could gain the friendly shelter of the house he stumbled and fell headlong, his gun flying through the air as he came to the ground, so that he was not only prostrate but disarmed.

Half-stunned, he scrambled to his knees just as his nearest pursuer made a savage lunge with his sabre-bayonet. The Prussian instinctively grasped it. While trying thus to parry the deadly thrust, the keen weapon pierced his hand, and he was a second time borne to the earth, or, rather, pinned to it by his adversary’s bayonet.

“Rendez-vous Allemand, cochon!” screamed the Frenchman, bestriding the little Prussian with a look of mortal hatred.

“Je ne fous combrends,” replied the wounded man, drawing a revolver with his free hand and shooting his enemy dead. “I couldn’t helb it, I vas so mad,” finished the ex-soldier, running to serve two of his customers, who stood waiting for him at a gate by the roadside. I left him exhibiting ribbons, edgings, confectionery—heaven knows what!—with all the volubility of an experienced shopman.

IX.
JEFFERSON, AND THE VALLEY OF ISRAEL’S RIVER.

Through the valley runs a river, bright and rocky, cool and swift,
Where the wave with many a quiver plays around the pine-tree’s drift.
Good Words.

IT remains to introduce the reader into the valley watered by Israel’s River, and for this purpose we take the rail from Bethlehem to Whitefield, and from Whitefield to Jefferson.

Like Bethlehem, Jefferson lies reposing in mid-ascent of a mountain. Here the resemblance ends. The mountain above it is higher, the valley beneath more open, permitting an unimpeded view up and down. The hill-side upon which the clump of hotels is situated makes no steep plunge into the valley, but inclines gently down to the banks of the river. Instead of crowding upon and jostling each other, the mountains forming opposite sides of this valley remain tranquilly in the alignment they were commanded not to overstep. The confusion there is reduced to admirable order here; the smooth slopes, the clean lines, the ample views, the roominess, so to speak, of the landscape, indicate that everything has been done without haste, with precision, and without deviation from the original plan, which contemplated a paradise upon earth.

Issuing from the wasted sides of Mount Jefferson and Mount Adams, Israel’s River runs a short north-westerly course of fifteen miles into the Connecticut at Lancaster. This beautiful stream received its name from Israel Glines, a hunter, who frequented these regions long before the settlement of the country. The road from Lancaster to Gorham follows the northern highlands of its valley to its head, then crossing the dividing ridge which separates its waters from those of Moose River, descends this stream to the Androscoggin at Gorham.

On the north side Starr King Mountain rises 2400 feet above the valley and 3800 feet above the sea. On the south side Cherry Mountain lifts itself 3670 feet higher than the tide-level. These two mountains form the broad basin through which Israel’s River flows for more than half its course. The village of Jefferson Hill lies on the southern slope of Starr King, and, of course, on the north side of the valley. Cherry Mountain, the most prominent object in the foreground, is itself a fine mountain study. It looks down through the great Notch, greeting Chocorua. It is conspicuous from any elevated point north of the Franconia group—from Fabyan’s, Bethlehem, Whitefield, Lancaster, etc. Owl’s Head is a conspicuous protuberance of this mountain. Over the right shoulder of Cherry Mountain stand the great Franconia Peaks, and to the right of these, its buildings visible, is Bethlehem. Now look up the valley.

We see that we have taken one step nearer the northern wing of the great central edifice whose snowy dome dominates New England. We are advancing as if to turn this magnificent battle-line of Titans, on whose right Madison stands in an attitude to repel assault. Adams next erects his sharp lance, Jefferson his shining crescent, Washington his broad buckler, and Monroe his twin crags against the sky. Jefferson, as the nearest, stands boldly forward, showing its tremendous ravines, and long, supporting ridges, with great distinctness. Washington loses something of its grandeur here; at least it is not the most striking object; that must be sought for among the sable-sided giants standing at his right hand. The southern peaks, being foreshortened, show only an irregular and flattened outline which we do not look at a second time. From Madison to Lafayette, our two rallying points, the distance can hardly be less than forty miles as the eye travels: the entire circuit it is able to trace cannot fall short of seventy or eighty miles. As at Bethlehem, the view out of the valley is chiefly remarkable for its contrast with every other feature.

I took a peculiar satisfaction in these views, they were so ample, so extensive, so impressive. Here you really feel as if the whole noble company of mountains were marshalled solely for your delighted inspection. At no other point is there such unmeasured gratification in seeing, because the eye roves without hinderance over the grandest summits, placed like the Capitol at the head of its magnificent avenue. It alights first on one pinnacle, then flits to another. It interrogates these immortal structures with a calm scrutiny. It dives into the cool ravines; it seeks to penetrate, like the birds, the profound silence of the forests. It toils slowly up the broken crags, or loiters by the cascades, hanging like athletes from dizzy brinks. It shrinks, it admires, it questions; it is grave, gay, or thoughtful by turns. I do not believe the man lives who, looking up to those mountains as in the face of the Deity, can deliberately utter a falsehood: the lie would choke him.

Furthermore, you get the best idea of height here, because the long amphitheatre of mountains is seen steadily growing in stature toward the great central group; and comparison is, by all odds, the best of teachers for the eye.

If for no other reason than the respect due to age, Jefferson deserves a moment to itself. It was granted, October 3d, 1765, to John Goffe, under the name of Dartmouth. The road diverging here, and crossing Cherry Mountain to Fabyan’s, is the oldest, as it long was the only highway through the White Mountains. In those early times the travelled way was by the Connecticut River and Lancaster through this valley to the White Mountain Notch. The divergent road is the old turnpike between Vermont and Portland. Gradually, as settlements were pushed farther and farther up the Ammonoosuc, a way was made by Bath, Lisbon, Littleton, and Dalton, to Lancaster; but to pass beyond it was still necessary to follow the old route; nor was it until after the settlement of Bethlehem cleared the way that an execrable horse-path was made over the present great highway up the Ammonoosuc. In 1803 President Dwight passed over this new road on his second excursion to the great Notch. Few travellers would now be willing to undergo what he did to see the mountains. There were then only three or four houses in the sixteen miles between Bethlehem and the Notch.

One of the first settlers of Jefferson was Colonel Joseph Whipple, mentioned in the narrative of Nancy, the ill-starred mountain-maid, who died while following her faithless lover in his flight from Jefferson out of the mountains. Colonel Whipple lived on the road to Cherry Mountain, near the mill. In 1797 his was the only house on the road. During the Revolution a party of Indians, led by a white man, surrounded the house, and made Whipple their prisoner. Inventing some pretext, the colonel obtained leave to go into another room, from which he made his escape by a window and fled to the woods, where he successfully eluded pursuit.

Finding myself already well advanced toward the summit of Starr King, I finished the ascent of this mountain during an afternoon’s stroll. Nothing worthy of remark, except the exquisite view from the summit, presented itself. Here I met again a throng of old acquaintances, and encountered a crowd of new ones. Here I saw something like a shadow darken the side of Mount Washington, and watched it creep steadily up and up to the summit. The shadow was the smoke of the locomotive making its last ascent for the day, under the eyes of thousands of spectators, who look at it to turn away with a smile, a shrug, or a shake of the head.

The name of Starr King has become a household word with all travellers in the White Mountains. It was most fitting that he who interpreted Nature so well and so truly should receive his monument at her hands. To him the mountains were emblematic of her highest perfection. He loved them. His tone when speaking of them is always tender and caressing. They appealed to his rare and exquisite perception of the beautiful, to his fine and sensitive nature, capable of detecting intuitively what was hid from common eyes. He felt their presence to be ennobling and uplifting. He opened for us the charmed portal. We accompanied him through an earthly paradise then first revealed to us by the fervor and wealth of his description. He led us to the shadiest retreats, the coolest groves, the most secluded glens. He guided our footsteps up the steep mountain-side to the bleak summit. Thrice fitting was it that a mountain should perpetuate the name of Thomas Starr King. As was said at the grave of Gautier, he too dated “from the creation of the beautiful.”

---

I have now rested four days at Ethan Crawford’s, who lives on the side of Boy Mountain, five miles east of Jefferson Hill, on the road to Gorham. This Ethan is a son of the celebrated guide and host so well known to former travellers by the sobriquet of Keeper of the Mountains.

I go to the window, and facing toward the setting sun look down the broadening valley of Israel’s River, over the glistening house-tops of Whitefield, into and beyond the Connecticut Valley. I have Mitten Mountain and Cherry Mountain, both heavily wooded, just over the way, although the view of these elevations is in part intercepted by a nearer mountain, also covered with a vigorous forest. At this moment I hear the rush of the stream far down in the Hollow; and, following the serpentine line its dark course makes among the press of hills, am confronted by the massive slopes of Madison and Adams, the sombre ravine and castled crags of Jefferson, and the hoary crest of Washington. I am really in the heart of the mountains.

Swiftly from these mountains descend, with exquisite grace, enormous billows of deep sea-green, which do not subside but lift themselves proudly at the foot of those great overhanging walls of olive and malachite. Here rolling together, their foliage, bright or dark, repeats the effect of flaws sweeping over a sunny sea. Their deep hollows, arching sides, and limpid crests perfect the resemblance to the moment when, having exerted its utmost energy, the panting ocean stands exhausted and motionless in the grasp of the north wind.

These lower mountains, interposing a barrier between the two valleys of the Ammonoosuc and of Israel’s River, seem, you think, pushed up from the yielding earth simply by the enormous weight of the higher and neighboring mountains whose keen summit-lines cut New England in halves. At this hour these lines are edged with dull gold. All along the wavering heights I can detect with the naked eye isolated black crags, and can plainly see the deep dents in the broken cornices and capitals of the grand old mountains—those vestiges of their primordial architecture. Here the inclined ridge of the plateau, connecting the pinnacle of Washington with the peaks of Monroe, is traced along its whole extent. At this distance its craggy outline breaks in light ripples, announcing nothing of that wilderness of stones assailing the climber. All the asperities are softened into capricious harmonies. Below yawn the ravines.

The tracks of old slides and torrents in the side of Monroe remind you of the branches of a gigantic fossil tree, exposed by a fracture dividing the mountain in two. Such is, in fact, the impression received by looking at this mountain; but the object which most excites my attention is the broad and deep rent in the side of Jefferson, over which hang on one side the crumbling counterfeits of towers and battlements, while on the other cataracts, like necklaces, are suspended over its unfathomed abysses. Cloud-shadows drift noiselessly along the warm steeps. Cataracts glisten brightly in the sun. The grave peaks look down unmoved on the play of the one and the sport of the other.

The picture of life in East Jefferson would not be complete without the old hound dozing in the sun, the turkey-cocks strutting consequentially up and down, the barn-swallows darting swiftly in and out, the ring of young Ethan’s anvil, and the bleating of sheep far up the mountain-side. I see them nibbling the fresh herbage, and watch the gambols of the lambs like a child—only the child laughs aloud, and I do not laugh. Voices come down the hillside, and I see the slow movement of a hammock and the flutter of a dress in the maple-grove. Poetry and perfume mingle with the scent of wild-flowers and songs of golden-mouthed birds.

Evening does not drive us within doors, the nights are so enchanting. Day fades imperceptibly out. Even the stars seem disconcerted. One by one they peep, and then flit from view. We watch the slow mustering of the celestial host in silence. A meteor leaps from heaven to earth. The fire-flies resemble a shower of sparks, or, as darkness deepens, a phosphorescent sea. Dorbeetles hurtle the still air, and frogs sing barcarolles in the misty fens. Now the mountains put on their sable armor that is to render them invisible. Here the poet must assist us:

“It is the hush of night; and all between
Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen—
Save darkened Jura, whose capped heights appear
Precipitously steep.”

Light seems reluctant to leave the summits. It does not wholly fade out of the west until a late hour. In a clear and starry night all the surrounding mountains can be distinguished long after the valley is steeped in darkness. At half-past nine I could easily tell the time by my watch; and even at this hour a pale, nebulous light still lingered where the sun had gone down. So at near two thousand feet above the full sea one peers over into that deeper horizon where twilight and dawn meet and embrace on the dusky threshold of midnight.

While in the neighborhood, I devoted a day to an exploration of the Ravine of the Cascades. This ravine is entered from a point on the Gorham road about three miles distant from the Mount Adams House. A cart-way crosses the meadow here to an abandoned mill which is on the stream coming from the ravine, and by which you must ascend. A more beautiful example of a mountain brook it has never been my lot to see. The ascent is, however, tedious and toilsome in the extreme over the smooth and slippery rocks in its bed. Four hours of this brought me to the region of low trees, and to the foot of the first fall, which, I judged, descended about thirty feet. This way to the summit is open only to the most vigorous climbers. Even then it is better to descend into the ravine from the gap between Adams and Jefferson in order to visit these cascades.

The two most profitable excursions to be made here are undoubtedly the ascent of Mount Adams and the drive to the top of Randolph Hill. I have found on the first summit irrefragable evidence that, next to Washington and Lafayette, Adams is the peak which summer tourists are most desirous of ascending. A good path, on which there is a camp, leads to the summit. Having other views in regard to this mountain, which I had so often admired from a distance, I made a third reconnoisance of its outworks and its remarkable ravine, while en route for Randolph Hill.

Unquestionably fine as the views are along this road, on which you are at one time rolling smoothly over meadow or upland, with the great northern peak rising to its full height, or again toiling up a stony hill-side to obtain a much better idea of its real character and prodigious dimensions, the climax is reserved until, turning from the highway, you begin a slow advance up the long hill-side that makes an almost uninterrupted descent for five miles to the Androscoggin. Here I saw from a balcony what I had before seen from the ground-floor. The view is large and expansive. You look down the surging land into the Androscoggin. You look over among the mountains circling its head, huddled together like a frightened herd. You look down into the valley of the Moose, and through the gap in the great chain you again see the valley of the Peabody and the Carter Notch. Now you hold the great northern peaks admiringly at arm’s-length, as you would an old friend. Putting an imaginary hand on each broad shoulder, you scan them from head to foot. They submit calmly and with condescension to your lengthened scrutiny. Presently the low sun floods them with royal purple and gilds the topmost crags with refined gold. You glance up the valley. The little river comes like a stream of fire which the huge mountains seem crowding forward to trample out. Now look down. The same mountains seem spurning the glittering serpent away from their feet.

King’s Ravine is as well seen from this point, perhaps, as any. It is a huge natural niche excavated high up the mountain. You see everything—grizzled spruces, blackened shafts of stone, rifted walls, tawny crags—all in one glance. It is formidable and forbidding, though a way has been made through it by which to ascend Mount Adams. Now that there is a good path skirting the ravine and avoiding it, that look will usually suffice to deter sensible people from attempting to reach the summit by it. It is far better to descend into it and grope one’s way down through and underneath the bowlders. The same, and even greater, obstacles are encountered as in Tuckerman’s. In early spring the walls of the ravine are streaked with slowly-melting snows. These gulches, all converging toward the bottom, send a torrent roaring down with noise equal to surf on a hard sea-beach. This torrent is the principal source of the Moose.

Well do I remember my first venture here. I had walked from Gorham. Seeing a man chopping wood by the side of the road, I entered into conversation with him; but at the first suggestion I let fall of an intention to climb to the ravine he gaped open-mouthed. To ascend the brook to the ravine, the escarpment of the ravine to the high precipices, the precipices to the gate-way, was an exploit in those days. But this was long ago. A good climber now puts King’s Ravine down in his list of excursions with the same nonchalance that a belle of the ball-room enters an additional waltz on her card of engagements.[39]

One day I had fished along the Moose without success. Nothing could give a better idea of a mountain stream than this one, fed by snows and gushing from the breached side of Mount Adams. But either the water was too cold or the trout too wary. They persistently refused my fly. I tried red and brown hackle, then a white moth-miller; all to no purpose. Feeling downright hungry, I determined to seek a dinner elsewhere. Unjointing my rod, I returned, rather crestfallen, down the mountain into the road.

I knocked at the first house. Pretty soon the curtain of the first window at my left hand was partly drawn aside. I felt that I was under the fire of a pair of very black eyes. An instant after the door was half-opened by a woman past middle life, who examined me with a scared look while wiping her hands on a corner of her apron. Two or three white heads peeped out from the folds of her dress like young chickens from the old hen’s wing, and as many pairs of widely-opened eyes surveyed me with innocent surprise.

Perceiving her confusion, I was on the point of asking some indifferent question, about the distance, the road—I knew not what—but my stomach gave me a twinge of disdain, and I stood my ground. Hunger has no conscience: honor was at stake. In two words I made known my wants, I confess with confidence oozing away at my fingers’ ends.

Her confusion became still greater—so evident, indeed, that I took a backward step and stammered, quite humbly, “A hunch of bread-and-cheese or a cup of milk—” when the good-wife nailed me to the threshold.

Quoth she, “The men folks have all et their dinners, and there hain’t no more meat; but if you could put up with a few trout?”

Put up with trout! Did I hear aright? The word made my mouth water. I softly repeated it to myself—“Trout!”—would I put up with trout? Not to lower myself in this woman’s estimation, I replied that, seeing there was nothing else in the house, I would put up with trout. Let it suffice that I made a repast fit for a prince, and, like a prince, being served by a bashful maiden with cheeks like the arbutus, which everybody knows shows its most delicate pink only in the seclusion of its native woods.

My hours of leisure in Jefferson being numbered, having now made the circuit of the great range by all the avenues penetrating or environing it, the reader’s further indulgence is craved while his faithful guide points his well-worn alpenstock to the last stage of our mountain journeys.

Behold us at last, after many capricious wanderings, after calculated avoidance, approaching the inevitable end. We are en route for Fabyan’s by the road over Cherry Mountain. This road is twelve miles long. As we mount with it the side of Cherry Mountain the beautiful vistas continually detain us. We are now climbing the eastern wall of the valley, so long the prominent figure from the heights of Jefferson. We now look back upon the finely-traced slopes of Starr King, with the village luxuriously extended in the sun. For some time we are like two travellers going in opposite directions, but who turn again and again for a last adieu. Now the forest closes over us and we see each other no more.

Noonday found me descending that side of the mountain overlooking the Ammonoosuc Valley. Where the Cherry Mountain road joins the valley highway the White Mountain House, an old-time tavern, stands. The railway passes close to its door. A mile more over the level brings us to Fabyan’s, so called from one of the old mountain landlords, whose immortality is thus assured. Now that mammoth caravansary, which seems all eyes, is reached just as the doors opening upon the great hall disclose a long array of tables, while permitting a delicious odor to assail our nostrils.

To speak to the purpose, the Fabyan House really commands a superb front view of Mount Washington, from which it is not six miles in a bee-line. All the southern peaks, among which Mount Pleasant is undoubtedly the most conspicuous for its form and its mass, and for being thrown so boldly out from the rest, are before the admiring spectator; but the northern peaks, with the exception of Clay and Jefferson, are cut off partly by the slopes of Mount Deception, which rises directly before the hotel, partly by the trend of the great range itself to the north-east. The view is superior from the neighborhood of the Mount Pleasant House, half a mile beyond Fabyan’s, where Mount Jefferson is fully and finely brought into the picture.

The railway is seen mounting a foot-hill, crossing a second and higher elevation, then dimly carved upon the massive flanks of Mount Washington itself, as far as the long ridge which ascends from the north in one unbroken slope. It is then lost. We see the houses upon the summit, and from the Mount Pleasant House the little cluster of roofs at the base. A long and well-defined gully, exactly dividing the mountain, is frequently taken to be the railway, which is really much farther to the left. The smoke of a train ascending or descending still further indicates the line of iron, which we admit to the category of established facts only under protest.

Sylvester Marsh, of Littleton, New Hampshire, was the man who dreamed of setting aside the laws of gravitation with a puff of steam. Like all really great inventions, his had to run the gauntlet of ridicule. When the charter for a railway to the summit of Mount Washington was before the Legislature a member moved that Mr. Marsh also have leave to build one to the moon. Had the motion prevailed, I am persuaded Mr. Marsh would have built it. Really, the project seemed only a little more audacious. But in three years from the time work was begun (April, 1866) the track was laid and the mountain in irons.[40] The summit which the superstitious Indian dared not approach, nor the most intrepid white hunter ascend, is now annually visited by thousands, without more fatigue than would follow any other excursion occupying the same time. The excitement of a first passage, the strain upon the nerves, is quite another thing.

In a little grass-grown enclosure, on the other side of the Ammonoosuc, is a headstone bearing the following inscription:

IN MEMORY OF
CAP ELIEZER ROSBROOK
WHO DIED SEP. 25
1817
In the 70 Year
Of His Age.
When I lie buried deep in dust,
My flesh shall be thy care
These withering limbs to thee I trust
To raise them strong and fair.
WIDOW
HANNAH ROSEBROOK
Died May 4, 1829
Aged 84
Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. For they rest from their labors
And their works do follow them.

So far as is known Rosebrook was the first white settler on this spot. One account[41] says he came here in 1788, another fixes his settlement in 1792.[42] His military title appears to have been derived from services rendered on the Canadian frontier during the Revolutionary War. Rosebrook was a true pioneer, restless, adventurous, and fearless. He was a man of large and athletic frame. From his home in Massachusetts he had first removed to what is now Colebrook, then to Guildhall, Vt., and lastly here, to Nash and Sawyer’s Location, exchanging the comforts which years of toil had surrounded him with, abandoning the rich and fertile meadow-lands of the Connecticut, for a log-cabin far from any human habitation, and with no other neighbors than the bears and wolves that prowled unharmed the shaggy wilderness at his door. With his axe this sturdy yeoman attacked the forest closely investing his lonely cabin. Year by year, foot by foot, he wrested from it a little land for tillage. With his gun he kept the beast of prey from his little enclosure, or provided venison or bear’s meat for the wife and little ones who anxiously awaited his return from the hunt. Hunger and they were no strangers. For years the strokes of Rosebrook’s axe, or the crack of his rifle, were the only sounds that disturbed the silences of ages. Little by little the circle was enlarged. One after another the giants of the forest fell beneath his blows. But years of resolute conflict with nature and with privation found him at last in the enjoyment of a dearly-earned prosperity. Travellers began to pass his doors. The Great White Mountain Notch soon became a thoroughfare, which could never have been safely travelled but for Rosebrook’s intrepidity and Rosebrook’s hospitality. In this way began the feeble tide of travel through these wilds. In this way the splendidly equipped hotel, with its thousands of guests the locomotive every hour brings to its door, traces its descent from the rude and humble cabin of Eleazer Rosebrook.

X.
THE GREAT NORTHERN PEAKS.

Cradled and rocked by wind and cloud,
Safe pillowed on the summit proud,
Steadied by that encircling arm
Which holds the Universe from harm,
I knew the Lord my soul would keep,
Upon His mountain-tops asleep!
Lucy Larcom.

THUS I found myself again at the base of Mount Washington, but on the reverse, opposed to the Glen. Before the completion of the railway from Fabyan’s to the foot of the mountain I had passed over the intervening six miles by stage—a delightful experience; but one now steps on board an open car, which in less than half the time formerly occupied leaves him at the point where the mountain car and engine wait for him. The route lies along the foaming Ammonoosuc, and its justly admired falls, cut deep through solid granite, into the uncouth and bristling wilderness which surrounds the base of the mountain. The peculiarity of these falls does not consist in long, abrupt descents of perturbed water, but in the neatly excavated caves, rock-niches, and smoothly rounded cliffs and basins through which for some distance the impatient stream rears and plunges like a courser feeling the curb. Imperfect glimpses hardly give an idea of the curious and interesting processes of rock-cutting to one who merely looks down from the high banks above while the train is in rapid motion. It is better, therefore, to visit these falls by way of the old turnpike.

The advance up the valley which has first given us an outlook through the great Notch, on our right, presents for some time the huge green hemisphere of Mount Pleasant as the conspicuous object. The track then swerves to the left, bringing Mount Washington into view, and in a few minutes more we are at the ill-favored clump of houses and sheds at its base.

The mechanism of the road-way is very simple. The track is formed of three iron rails, firmly clamped to stout timbers, laid lengthwise upon transverse pieces, or sleepers. These are securely embedded, where the surface will allow, or raised upon trestles, where its inequalities would compel a serious deflection from a smooth or regular inclination. One of these, about half-way up the mountain, is called Jacob’s Ladder. Here the train achieves the most difficult part of the ascent. After traversing the whole line on foot, and inspecting it minutely and thoroughly, I can candidly pronounce it not only a marvel of mechanical skill, but bear witness to the scrupulous care taken to keep every timber and every bolt in its place. In two words, the structure is nothing but a ladder of wood and iron laid upon the side of the mountain.[43]

The propelling force employed is equally simple. The engine and car merely rest upon and are kept in place by the two outer rails, while the power is applied to the middle one, which we have just called a rail, but is, more properly speaking, a little ladder of steel cogs, into which the corresponding teeth of the locomotive’s driving-wheel play—a firm hold being thus secured. The question now merely is, how much power is necessary to overcome gravity and lift the weight of the machine into the air? This cogged-rail is the fulcrum, and steam the lever. Mr. Sylvester Marsh has not precisely lifted the mountain, but he has, nevertheless, with the aid of Mr. Walter Aiken, reduced it, to all intents, to a level.

The boiler of the locomotive, inclined forward so as to preserve a horizontal position when the engine is ascending, the smoke-stack also pitched forward, give the idea of a machine that has been in a collision. Everything seems knocked out of place. But this queer-looking thing, that with bull-dog tenacity literally hangs on to the mountain with its teeth, is capable of performing a feat such as Watt never dreamed of, or Stephenson imagined. It goes up the mountain as easily as a bear climbs a tree, and like a bear.

I had often watched the last ascension of the train, which usually reaches the summit at sunset, and I had as often pleased myself with considering whether it then most resembled a big, shining beetle crawling up the mountain side, or some fiery dragon of the fabulous times, dragging his prey after him to his den, after ravaging the valley. My own turn was now come to make the trial. It was a cold afternoon in September when I entered the little carriage, not much larger than a street-car, and felt the premonitory jerk with which the ascent begins. The first hill is so steep that you look up to see the track always mounting high above your head; but one soon gets used to the novelty, and to the clatter which accompanies the incessant dropping of a pawl into the indentures of the cogged-rail, and in which he recognizes an element of safety. The train did not move faster than one could walk, but it moved steadily, except when it now and then stopped at a water-tank, standing solitary and alone upon the waste of rocks.

By the time we emerged above the forest into the chill and wind-swept desolation above it—a first sight of which is so amazing—the sun had set behind the Green Mountain summits, showing a long, serrated line of crimson peaks, above which clouds of lake floated in a sea of amber. It grew very cold. Great-coats and shawls were quickly put on. Thick darkness enveloped the mountain as we approached the head of the profound gulf separating us from Mount Clay, which is the most remarkable object seen at any time either during the ascent or descent. Into this pitchy ravine, into its midnight blackness, a long and brilliant train of sparks trailed downward from the locomotive, so that we seemed being transported heavenward in a chariot of fire. This flaming torch, lighting us on, now disclosed snow and ice on all sides. We had successfully attained the last slope which conceals the railway from the valley. Up this the locomotive toiled and panted, while we watched the stars come out and emit cold gleams around, above, beneath. The light of the Summit House twinkled small, then grew large, as, surmounting the last and steepest pitch of the pinnacle, we were pushed before a long row of lighted windows crusted thick with hoar-frost. Stiffened with cold, the passengers rushed for the open door without ceremony. In an instant the car was empty; while the locomotive, dripping with its unheard-of efforts, seemed to regard this desertion with reproachful glances.

Reader, have you ever sat beside Mrs. Dodge’s fire after such a passive ascension as that just described? After a two hours’ combat with the instinct of self-preservation, did you dream of such comforts, luxuries even, awaiting you on the bleak mountain-top, where nothing grows, and where water even congeals and refuses to run? Could you, in the highest flights of fancy, imagine that you would one day sit in the courts of heaven, or feast sumptuously amid the stars? All this you either have done or may do. And now, while the smartly-dressed waiter-girl, who seems to have donned her white apron as a personal favor, brings you the best the larder affords, pinch yourself to see if you are awake.

In several ascensions by the railway I have always remarked the same symptoms of uneasiness among the passengers, betrayed by pale faces, compressed lips, hands tightening their grasp of the chairs, or subdued and startled exclamations, quickly repressed. To escape the influence of such weird surroundings one should be absolutely stolid—a stock or a stone. So for all it is an experience more or less acute, according to his sensibility, strength of nerve, and power of self-control. However well it may be disguised, the strong equally with the weak, and more deeply than the weak, feel the strain which ninety minutes’ combat with gravitation, attraction, ponderosity, engenders. The mind does not for a single instant quit its hold of this defiance of Nature’s laws. As long as iron and steel hold fast, there is no danger; but you think iron and steel are iron and steel, and no more. An anecdote will illustrate this feeling.

After pointing out to a lady-passenger the skilful devices for stopping the engine—the pawl, the steam, and the atmospheric brakes—and after patiently explaining their mechanism and uses, the listener asked the conductor, with much interest,

“Then, if the pawl breaks while we are going up?”

“The engine will be stopped by means of these powerful brakes, applied directly to the axles, which will, of course, render the train motionless. As the locomotive has two driving-wheels, the engineer can bring a double power to bear, as you see. Each is independent of the other, so that if one gives way the other is still more than sufficient to keep the engine stationary.”

“Thank you; but the car?”

“Oh, the car is not attached to the engine at all; and should the engineer lose the control of his machine, which is not at all likely, the car can be brought to a stand-still by independent brakes of its own. You see the engine goes up behind, and in front, down; and the car is simply pushed forward, or follows it.”

“So that you consider it—.”

“Perfectly safe, madam, perfectly safe.”

“Thank you. One question more. Suppose all these things break at once. What then? Where would we go?”

“That, madam, would depend on what sort of a life you had led.”

I have still a consolation for the timid. Ten years’ trial has confirmed the declaration of its projectors, that they would make the road as safe or safer than the ordinary railway. No life has been lost by an injury to a passenger during that time. Besides, what is the difference? After its day, the railway will pass like the stage-coach—that is, unless you believe, as you do not, that the world and all progress are to stop with ourselves.

The affable lady hostess told me that she paid an annual rental of ten thousand dollars for her palace of ice; nominally for a year, but really for a term of only seventy-six days, this being the limit of the season upon the summit. During the remaining two hundred and eighty-nine days the house is closed. During four or five months it is buried, or half-buried, in a snow-drift. Of this large sum, three thousand dollars go to the Pingree heirs. These facts may tend to modify the views of those who think the charges exorbitant, if such there are.

Raising my eyes to look out of the window, the light from within fell upon a bank of snow. A man was stooping over it as if in search of something. Going out, I found him feeling it with his hands, and examining it with childish wonder and curiosity. I approached this eccentric person very softly; but he, seeing my shadow on the snow beside him, looked up.

“Can I assist you in recovering what you have lost?” I inquired.

“Thank you; no. I have lost nothing. Ah! I see,” he continued, laughing quietly, “you think I have lost my wits. But it is not so. I am a native of the East Indies, and I assure you this is the first time in my life I have ever seen snow near enough to handle it. Imagine what an experience the ascent of Mount Washington is for me!”

We took a turn down the hard-frozen Glen road together in order to see the moon come up. The telegraph-poles, fantastically crusted with ice to the thickness of a foot, stretched a line of white-hooded phantoms down the dark side of the mountain. From successive coatings of frozen mist the wires were as thick as cables. Couches of snow lay along the rocks, and fresh snow had apparently been rubbed into all the inequalties of the cliffs rising out of the Great Gulf. The scene was supremely weird, supremely desolate.

From here we crossed over to the railway, and, ascending by it, shortly came upon the heap of stones, surmounted by its tablet, erected on the spot where Miss Bourne perished while ascending the mountain, in September, 1855. The party, of which she was one, setting out in high spirits in the afternoon from the Glen House, was overtaken near the summit by clouds, which hid the house from view, and among which they became bewildered. It was here Miss Bourne declared she could go no farther. Overcome by her exertions, she sunk exhausted and fainting upon the rocks. Her friends were scarcely awakened to her true condition when, amid the surrounding darkness and gloom, this young and lovely maiden of only twenty expired in the arms of her uncle. The mourners wrapped the body in their own cloaks, and, ignorant that a few rods only separated them from the summit, kept a vigil throughout the long and weary night. We hasten over this night of dread. In the morning, discovering their destination a few rods above them, they bore the lifeless form of their companion to it with feelings not to be described. A rude bier was made, and she who had started up the mountain full of life now descended it a corpse.

The evening treated us to a magnificent spectacle. The moon, in full-orbed splendor, moved majestically up the heavens, attended by her glittering retinue of stars. Frozen peaks, reflecting the mild radiance, shone like beaten silver. But the immense hollows between, the deep valleys that had been open to view, were now inundated with a white and luminous vapor, from which the multitude of icy summits emerged like a vast archipelago—a sea of islands. This spectral ocean seemed on the point of ingulfing the mountains. This motionless sea, these austere peaks, uprising, were inconceivably weird and solemnizing. An awful hush pervaded the inanimate but threatening host of cloud-girt mountains. Upon them, upon the sea of frozen vapor, absorbing its light, the clear moon poured its radiance. The stars seemed nearer and brighter than ever before. The planets shone with piercing brilliancy; they emitted a sensible light. The Milky Way, erecting its glittering nebula to the zenith, to which it was pinned by a dazzling star, floated, a glorious, star-spangled veil, amid this vast sea of gems. One could vaguely catch the idea of an unpeopled desolation rising from the fathomless void of a primeval ocean. The peaks, incased in snow and ice, seemed stamped with the traces of its subsidence. Pale and haggard, they lifted their antique heads in silent adoration.

Going to my room and extinguishing the light, I stood for some time at the window, unable to reconcile the unwonted appearance of the stars shining far below, with the fixed idea that they ought not to be there. Yet there they were. To tell the truth, my head was filled with the surpassing pomp I had just witnessed, of which I had not before the faintest conception. I felt as if I was silently conversing with all those stars, looking at me and my petty aspirations with such inflexible, disdainful immobility. When one feels that he is nothing, self-assurance is no great thing. The conceit is taken out of him. On a mountain the man stands naked before his Maker. He is nothing. That is why I leave him there.

That night I did not sleep a wink. Twenty times I jumped out of bed and ran to the window to convince myself that it was not all a dream. No; moon and stars were still bright. Over the Great Gulf, all ghastly in the moonlight, stood Mount Jefferson in his winding-sheet. I dressed myself, and from the embrasure of my window kept a vigil.

Sunrise did not produce the startling effect I had anticipated. The morning was fine and cloudless. A gong summoned the inmates of the hotel to the spectacle. Without dressing themselves, they ran to their windows, where, wrapped in bed-blankets, they stood eagerly watching the east. To the pale emerald of early dawn a ruddy glow succeeded. Before we were aware, the rocky waste around us grew dusky red. The crimsoned air glided swiftly over the neighboring summits. Now the brightness was upon Adams and Jefferson and Clay, and now it rolled its purpled flood into the Great Gulf, to mingle with the intense blackness at the bottom. For some moments the mountain-tops held the color, then it was transfused into the clear sunshine of open day; while the vapors, heavy and compact, stretched along the valleys, still smothering the land, retained their leaden hue.

It was still early when I descended the carriage-road on my way to Mount Adams. The usual way is to keep the railway as far as the old Gulf Tank, near which is a house of refuge, provided with a cooking-stove, fuel, and beds. I continued, however, to coast the upper crags of the Great Gulf, until compelled to make directly for the southern peak of Mount Clay. The view from this col is imposing, embracing at once, and without turning the head, all the southern summits of the chain. Here I was joined by two travellers fresh from Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn.

Each choosing a route for himself, we pushed on to the high summit of Clay, from which we looked down into the deep gap dividing this mountain from Jefferson. Arrived there, we resolutely attacked the eastern slopes of this fine peak, whose notched summit rose more than seven hundred and fifty feet above our heads. Patches of Alpine grasses, of reindeer-moss, interspersed with irregular ridges of stones, extended quite up to the summit, which was a mere elongated stone-heap crowning the apex of its cone. Those undulating masses encircling its bulk, half hid among the grass, were like an immense python crushing the mountain in its deadly folds. We picked our way carefully among this chaotic débris, which the Swiss aptly call “cemeteries of the devil,” tripping now and then in the long, wiry grass, or burying our feet among the hummocks of dry moss, which were so many impediments to rapid progress. This appearance and this experience were common to the whole route.

At each summit we threw ourselves upon the ground, to feast upon the landscape while regaining breath. Each halt developed more and more the grand and stupendous mass of Washington receding from the depths of the Great Gulf, along whose edge the carriage-road serpentined and finally disappeared. We saw, a little softened by distance, the horribly mutilated crags of the head wall stripped bare of all verdure, presenting on its knobbed agglomerates of tempest-gnawed granite a thousand eye-catching points and detaining as many shadows. Nothing—not even the glittering leagues of mountains and valleys shooting or slumbering above, beneath—so riveted the attention as this apparently bottomless pit of the five mountains. It was a continued wonder. It drew us by a strange magnetism to its dizzy brink, chained us there, and then abandoned us to a physical and moral vertigo, in which the power of critical investigation was lost. An invisible force seemed always dragging us toward it. Whence comes this horrible, this uncontrollable desire to throw ourselves in?

Out of the death-like torpor which eternally shrouds the ravine the smiling valley seems escaping. The crystal air of the heights grows thick in its depths. Beasts and birds of prey haunt its gloomy solitudes. An immense grave seems yawning to receive the mountains. The aged mountains seem standing with one foot in the grave.

This gulf makes an impression altogether different from the others. It is an immense ravine. Each of the five mountains pushes down into it massive buttresses of granite, forming lesser ravines between of considerable extent. Through these streams trickle down from invisible sources. But these buttresses, which fall lightly and gracefully as folds of velvet from summit to base of the highest mountains, these ravines, are hardly noticed. The insatiable maw of the gulf swallows them as easily as an anaconda a rabbit. In immensity, which you do not easily grasp, in grandeur, which you do not know how to measure, this has no partakers here. Even the great Carter Mountain, rising from the Peabody Valley, seems no more than a stone rolled away from the entrance of this enormous sepulchre.

Our first difficulties were encountered upon the reverse of Mount Jefferson, from whose side rocky spurs detached themselves, and, jutting out from the side of the mountain, formed an irregular line of cliffs of varying height, in the way we had selected for the descent. But these were no great affair. We now had the Ravine of the Castles upon our left, the stately pyramid of Adams in front, and, beneath, the deep hollow between this mountain and the one we were descending. We had the little hamlet of East Jefferson at the mouth of the ravine, and that crowd of peaks, tightly wedged between the waters of the Connecticut and the Androscoggin, looming above it.

A deviation to the left enabled us to approach the Castellated Ridge, which is, beyond dispute, the most extraordinary rock-formation the whole extent of the range can show. As it is then fully before you, it is seen to much better advantage when approached from Mount Adams. I do not know who gave it this name, but none could be more felicitous or expressive. It is a sloping ridge of red-brown granite, broken at its summit into a long line of picturesque towers and battlements, rising threateningly over an escarpment of débris. Such an illusion is too rarely encountered to be easily forgotten. It is hardly possible to doubt you are really looking at an antique ruin. One would like to wander among these pre-Adamite fortifications, which curiously remind him of the old Spanish fortresses among the Pyrenees. From the opposite side of the ravine—for I had not the time requisite for a closer examination—the rock composing the most elevated portion of the ridge appears to have been split perpendicularly down, probably by frost, allowing these broken columns and shafts to stand erect upon the verge of the abyss. In the warm afternoon light, when the shadows fall, it is hardly possible to conceive a finer picture of a crumbling but still formidable mountain fortress. Bastions and turrets stand boldly out. Each broken shaft sends a long shadow streaming down into the ravine, whose high and deeply-furrowed sides are thus beautifully striped with dusk-purple, while the sunlit parts retain a greenish-gray.

At the foot of Jefferson we found, concealed among rushes, a spring, which refreshed us like wells of the desert the parched and fainting Arab. From here two routes offered themselves. One was by keeping the curved ridge, rising gradually to a subordinate peak (Samuel Adams),[44] and to the foot of the summit itself; a second was by crossing the ground sloping downward from this ridge into the Great Gulf. We chose the latter, notwithstanding the dwarf-spruce, advancing well up to the foot of the ridge, promised a warm reception.

At last, after sustaining a vigorous tussle with the scrub-firs, and stopping to unearth a brook whose waters purred underneath stones, I stood at the foot of the pointed shaft I had so often seen wedged into the sky. Five hundred feet or more of the apex of this pyramid is apparently formed of broken rocks, dropped one by one into place. Nothing like a ledge or a cliff is to be seen: only these ponderous, sharp-edged masses of cold gray stone, lifted one above another to the tapering point. Up this mutilated pyramid we began a slow advance. It was necessary to carefully choose one step before taking another, in order to avoid plunging into the deep crevasses traversing the peak in every direction. At last I placed my foot upon the topmost crag.

No one can help regarding this peak with the open admiration which is its due. You conceive that every mountain ought to have a pinnacle. Well, here it is. We could easily have stood astride the culminating point. But how came these rocks here? and what was the primitive structure, if these fragments we see are its relics? One hardly believes that an ice-raft could have first transported and then deposited such misshapen masses in their present symmetrical form. Still less does he admit that the original shaft, crushed in a thousand pieces by the glacier itself, fell with such grace as to rise again, as he now sees it, from its own ruins. If, again, it proceeds from the eternal hammering of King Frost, what was the antique edifice that first rose so proudly above the frozen seas of the great primeval void? But to science the things which belong to science. We have a book describing heaven, but not one that resolves the problems of earth. The “Veni, vidi, vici,” of the Book of Genesis leaves us at the beginning. We are still staring, still questioning, still vacillating between this theory and that hypothesis.[45]

We had from the summit an inspiring though not an extensive view. A bank of dun-colored smoke smirched the fair western sky as high as the summits of the Green Mountains. At fifty miles mountains and valleys melted confusedly into each other. Water emitted only a dull glimmer. Here a peak and there a summit surveyed us from afar. All else was intangible; almost imaginary. At twenty-five miles the land, resuming its ordinary appearance, was bathed in the soft brilliance caused by the sun shining through an atmosphere only half transparent.

Upon this obscure mass we traced once more the well-known objects environing the great mountain. To the south Mount Washington divided the landscape in two. For some time we stood admiring its magnificent torso, its amplitude of rock-land, its easy preponderance over every other summit. Again we followed the road down the great north-east spur. Once more we caught the white specks which denote the line of the railway. We plunged our eyes down into the Great Gulf, and lifted them to the shattered protuberances of Clay, which seemed to mark the route where the glacier crushed and ground its way through the very centre of the chain. A second time we descended Jefferson to the deep dip, opening like a trough between two enormous sea-waves, where we first saw the little Storm Lake glistening. Following now the long, rocky ridge, rolling downward toward the hamlets of Jefferson and Randolph, the mountains yawned wide at our feet. We were looking over into King’s Ravine—to its very bottom. We peered curiously into its remotest depths, traced the difficult and breathless ascent through the remarkable natural gateway at its head out upon a second ridge, on which a little pond (Star Lake) lies hid. We then crossed the gap communicating with Mount Madison, whose summit, last and lowest of the great northern peaks, dominates the Androscoggin Valley with undisputed sway. To-day it made on us scarcely an impression. Its peak, which from the valley holds a rough similitude with that of Adams, is dwarfed here. You look down upon it.

More applicable to Adams than to any other, for our eyes grow dazzled with the glitter and sparkle of countless mica-flakes incrusting the hard granite with clear brilliancy as from the facets of a diamond; more applicable, again, from the stern, unconquerable attitude of the great gray shaft itself, lifted in such conscious pride beyond the confines of the vast ethereal vault of blue—a tower of darkness invading the bright realms of light; a defiance flung by earth in the face of high heaven—is the magnificent description of the Matterhorn from the pen of Ruskin:

“If one of these little flakes of mica-sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth’s atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen—what would it have thought had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower;—that against it—poor, helpless mica-flake!—the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it—weak, wave-drifted mica-flake!—the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one, as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire!”

Myself and my companions set out on our return to the Summit House early in the afternoon, choosing this time the ridge in preference to the scrubby slope. From this we turned away, at the end of half an hour, by an obscure path leading to a boggy pool, sunk in a mossy hollow underneath it, crossed the area of scattered bowlders, strewn all around like the relics of a petrified tempest, and, filling our cups at the spring, drank to Mount Adams, the paragon of mountain peaks.

As we again approached the brow of Mount Washington the sun resembled a red-hot globe of iron flying through the west and spreading a conflagration through the heavens. Again the colossal shadow of the mountain began its stately ascension in the east. One moment the burning eye of the great luminary interrogated this phantom, sprung from the loins of the hoary peak. Then it dropped heavily down behind the Green Mountains, as it has done for thousands of years, the landscape fading, fading into one vast, shadowy abyss, out of which arose the star-lit dome of the august summit.

TOURIST’S APPENDIX.
PREPARED FOR “THE HEART OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.”

GEOGRAPHY.—The White Mountains are in the northern central part of the State of New Hampshire. They occupy the whole area of the State between Maine and Vermont, and between Lake Winnipiseogee and the head-streams of the Connecticut and Androscoggin rivers.

Two principal chains, having a general direction from south-west to north-east, constitute this great water-shed of New England. These are the Franconia and the White Mountains proper, sometimes called the “Presidential Range.”

Grouped on all sides of the higher summits are a great number of inferior ridges, among which, as in the Sandwich Range, rise some very fine peaks, widely extending the mountainous area, and diversifying it with numerous valleys, lakes, and streams.

Two principal rivers, the Saco and Merrimack, flowing from these two chief clusters, form the two great valleys of the White Mountain system; and by these valleys the railways enter the mountains from the seaboard. Lake Winnipiseogee, which washes the southern foot of the mountains, is also a thoroughfare, as are the valleys of the Connecticut and Androscoggin rivers.

DISTANCES.—It is 430 miles from Philadelphia to Fabyan’s; 340 from New York, via Springfield; 190 from Montreal, via Newport; 208 via Groveton; 169 from Boston, via North Conway (Eastern R.R.); 208 via Concord (B., C., & M. R.R.); 91 from Portland, via North Conway (P. & O. R.R.); 91 from Portland to Gorham (G. T. R.); 199 from Boston to Gorham, via Eastern and Grand Trunk roads; and 206 via Boston and Maine and Grand Trunk roads.

ROUTES.—Procure, before starting, the official time-tables of the railroads running to the mountains or making direct connection with them, by application to local agents, by writing to the ticket-agents of the roads, or by consulting a railway guide-book. The roads reaching the mountains are—

From Washington: The Pennsylvania, and New York & New England.

From Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania, and New York & New England.

From Montreal: The Grand Trunk, and The South-eastern.

From Quebec: The Grand Trunk Railway.

From Saratoga: The Delaware & Hudson Canal Co.

From New York: New York, New Haven, & Hartford (all rail via Springfield, White River Junction, and Wells River to Fabyan’s; or all rail via Springfield, Worcester, Nashua, and Concord, N. H.; or all rail via “Shore Line,” Boston & Albany, or New York & New England roads to Boston); or by Fall River, Norwich, or Stonington “Sound Lines” to Boston; thence by either of the following railroads:

From Boston: Eastern R.R., via Beverly (18 miles, branch to Cape Ann); Hampton (46 miles, Boar’s Head and Rye Beaches); Portsmouth (56 miles, Newcastle and Isles of Shoals and York Beach); Kittery (57 miles); Wolfborough Junction (98 miles, branch to Lake Winnipiseogee); North Conway (138 miles; connects with Portland and Ogdensburg); Intervale (139 miles); Glen Station (144 miles, for Jackson and Glen House); Crawford’s (165 miles); Fabyan’s (169 miles; connects with B., C., & M. for Summit of Mount Washington, Bethlehem, Profile House, and Jefferson; or by same route to Portland, thence by P. & O. R.R. to North Conway, or Grand Trunk Railway to Gorham).

Boston, Lowell & Concord, and Boston, Concord & Montreal Railroads, via Lowell (26 miles); Nashua, Manchester, Concord (75 miles); Plymouth (123 miles); Woodsville (166 miles, Wells River); Littleton (185 miles, for Sugar Hill); Wing Road (192 miles, branch to Jefferson); Bethlehem (196 miles, branch road to Profile House, also to “Maplewood,” and Bethlehem Street); Twin Mountain House, Fabyan’s (208 miles, branch to Summit of Mount Washington, 217 miles); connects at Fabyan’s with P. & O. and Eastern roads for North Conway, Portland, and Boston.

Boston & Maine R.R. via Lawrence (26 miles); Haverhill, Exeter (50 miles); Dover (68 miles); Rochester (78 miles); Alton Bay (96 miles), connecting with steamer for Wolfborough and Centre Harbor, on Lake Winnipiseogee; or by the same road to Portland, thence by P. & O. to North Conway and Fabyan’s, or Grand Trunk to Gorham and Glen House.

From Portland: Portland & Ogdensburg R.R. via Sebago Lake (17 miles); Fryeburg (49 miles); Conway Centre, North Conway (60 miles); Glen Station (66 miles, Jackson and Glen House); Bartlett (72 miles); Crawford’s (87 miles); Fabyan’s (91 miles; connects with B., C., & M. R.R. for Summit of Mount Washington, Bethlehem, Profile House, Sugar Hill, Jefferson, etc.).

Grand Trunk Railway: Danville Junction (27 miles); Bethel (70 miles); Shelburne (86 miles); Gorham (91 miles, for Glen House).

A good way to do the mountains by rail is to buy an excursion-ticket over the route entering on the west, and, passing through, leave them by the roads on the east side via Boston or Portland, or vice versa. At Fabyan’s, where the two great routes meet, the traveller coming from either direction may pursue his journey without delay. From Boston to Boston, Portland to Portland, there is continuous rail without going twice over the same line.

Lake Winnipiseogee.—At Alton Bay, Wolfborough, and Weirs steamer is taken for Centre Harbor, at the head of the lake. Here the traveller may either take the daily stages for West Ossipee (E. R.R.) or steamer to Weirs (B., C., & M.), and thus be again on the direct rail routes.

HOW TO CHOOSE A LOCATION.—Do you wish a quiet retreat, off the travelled routes, where you may have rest and seclusion, or do you desire to fix yourself in a position favorable to exploring the whole mountain region?

In either case consult (1) some friend who has visited the mountains; (2), consult the maps in this volume; (3), consult the landlord in any place you may fancy for a limited or a lengthened residence; (4), apply to the agents of the Eastern, Portland, & Ogdensburg, Boston, Concord, & Montreal, Boston & Maine, or Grand Trunk Railways, for books or folders containing a list of the mountain hotels reached by their lines, and the charge for board by the day and week. (The Eastern, and B., C., & M. print revised lists every year, for gratuitous distribution.)

Wolfborough, Weirs, Centre Harbor, and Sandwich (all on or near Lake Winnipiseogee); Blair’s, Sanborn’s, Campton Village, Thornton, and Woodstock, in the Pemigewasset Valley; Tamworth, Conway Corner, Fryeburg, the Intervale (North Conway), Jackson, the Glen House, Bethel (Me.), Shelburne, Randolph, East Jefferson, Jefferson Hill, Lancaster, Littleton, Franconia, Sugar Hill, Haverhill, and Newbury (Vt.)—all come within the category first named; while the second want will be supplied at such points as North Conway, Crawford’s, Fabyan’s, Twin Mountain House, Bethlehem, and the Profile House. North Conway and Bethlehem are the keys to the whole mountain region. Fabyan’s and the Glen House are the proper points from which to ascend Mount Washington.

To aid in locating these places on the map, refer constantly to the Index at the end of the volume.

Leaving Boston or Portland in the morning, any of the points named may be reached in from four to eight hours.

HINTS FOR TOURISTS.—Select your destination, if possible, in advance; and if you require apartments, telegraph to the hotel where you mean to stop, giving the number of persons in your party, thus avoiding the disappointment of arriving, at the end of a long journey, at an over-crowded hotel.

Should you fix upon a particular locality for a long or short stay, write to one (or more) of the landlords for terms, etc.; and if his house is off the line of railway, inform him of the day and train you mean to take, so that he may meet you with a carriage at the nearest station. But if you do not go upon the day named, remember to notify the landlord.

Always take some warm woollen clothing (inside and outside) for mountain ascensions. It is unsafe to be without it in any season, as the nights are usually cool even in midsummer.

From the middle of June to the middle of October is the season of mountain travel. The best views are obtained in June, September, and October. From the middle of September to the middle of October the air is pure and invigorating, the mountain forests are then in a blaze of autumnal splendor, the cascades are finer, and out-of-door jaunts are less fatiguing than in July and August.

Should you wish merely to make a rapid tour of the mountain region, it will be best so to arrange your route before starting that the first day will bring you where there is something to be seen, to a comfortable hotel, and from which your journey may be continued with an economy of time and money.

The three journeys described in this volume will enable you to see all that is most desirable to be seen; but the excellent facilities for traversing the mountains render it immaterial whether these routes are precisely followed, taken in their reverse order, or adopted as a general plan, with such modifications as the tourist’s time or inclination may suggest.

Upon arriving at his destination the traveller naturally desires to use his time to the best advantage possible. But he is ignorant how to do this. “What shall I do?” “Where shall I go?” are the two questions that confront him. Let us suppose him arrived, first, at North Conway.

As he stands gazing up the Saco Valley, Moat Mountain is on his left, Kearsarge at his right, and Mount Washington in front. (Refer to the Chapter and Index articles on North Conway.) The high cliffs on the side of Moat are called the Ledges. This glorious view may be improved by going a mile up the railroad, or highway, to the Intervale. The Ledges contain the local celebrities. Taking a carriage, or walking, one may visit them in an afternoon, seeing in turn Echo Lake, the Devil’s Den, the Cathedral, and Diana’s Baths. The picturesque bits of river, meadow, and mountain seen going and returning will make the way seem short, and are certain to detain the artistic traveller. Artists’ Falls, on the opposite side of the valley, will repay a visit, if the stream is in good condition. Artists’ Brook, on which these falls are, runs from the hills east of the village. A carriage-road leads to the Artists’ Falls House, from which a short walk brings one to the falls. This excursion will require not more than two hours. Then there are the drives to Kearsarge village, under the mountain, and back by the Intervale; to Jackson, over Thorn Hill, and back by Goodrich Falls (three to four hours each); to Bartlett Bowlder, by the west, and back by the east side of the valley; to Fryeburg and Mount Chocorua—the last two requiring each half a day at least. The ascent of Kearsarge (from Kearsarge village) or of the Moats (from Diana’s Baths) each demands a day to itself. But by starting early in the morning a good climber may ascend and descend Kearsarge, getting back to the village by two o’clock in the afternoon.

At the Intervale he can easily repeat all these experiences, as this is a suburb of North Conway. Let him take his first stroll over the meadows to the river, or among the grand old pines in the forest near the railway station, while preparing for more extended excursions.

At Glen Station.—While waiting for the luggage to be put on, if the day is perfectly clear, the traveller, by going up the track a few rods, to the bridge over the Ellis, may get a glimpse of the summit of Mount Washington, with the hotel upon the apex; also of Carter Notch. On the way to Jackson he will pass over Goodrich Falls by a bridge. He should not fail to remark the fine cliffs of Iron Mountain, at his left hand, before entering the village. Should he be en route for the Glen House, let him be on the lookout for the Giant’s Stairs, on the left, after leaving Jackson, and then for the grand view of Pinkham Notch, with Mount Washington at the left, about four miles beyond Jackson. The summit of Spruce Hill—the scene of the highway robbery in 1881—is the top of the long rise beyond the bridge over Ellis River.

At Jackson we have moved eight miles nearer Mount Washington, in the direction of the Glen House (12 miles) and Gorham (20 miles), and also toward the Carter Notch, distant from the village 9 miles. The excursions back to North Conway are similar to those described from that place. The first thing to do here is to stroll up the Wildcat, and pass an hour or two among the falls on this stream, which begin at the village. A walk or drive up this valley to Fernald’s Farm, and back by the opposite side, or over Thorn Hill, are two tempting half-day excursions. In an hour one may walk to Goodrich Falls (road to Glen Station) and back to the village. He may start after breakfast, and drive to Glen Ellis Falls (road to Glen House), eight miles, returning to the hotel for dinner; or, lunching at Glen Ellis, go on one mile farther to the Crystal Cascade; then, dining at the Glen House (3 miles), return at leisure. But it is a mistake to take two such pieces of water in one day. The pedestrian whose base is Jackson, and who makes this trip, should pass the night at the Glen House and return by the Carter Notch, the distance being about the same as by the highway. But he should never try this alone, for fear of a disabling accident. Or he may take the Glen House stage at Jackson early in the afternoon, and, letting it drop him at Glen Ellis, make his own way to the hotel (4 miles) on foot, after a visit to the falls. Apply to Mr. Osgood, the veteran guide, at the Glen House, for services, or directions how to enter the Carter Notch from the Glen House side; and to Jock Davis, who lives at the head of the Wildcat Valley, if going in from the Jackson side.

Ladies who are accustomed to walking can reach Carter Notch with a little help now and then from the gentlemen. But the fatigue of going and returning on the same day would be too great. A party could enter the Notch in the afternoon, pass the night in Davis’s comfortable cabin, and return the next morning. The path in is much easier and plainer from the Jackson than from the Glen House side; but there is no difficulty about keeping either. Davis will take up everything necessary for camping out, except food, which may be procured at your hotel before starting. There is plenty of water in the Notch.

At the Glen House one may finish the afternoon by walking back a mile on the Jackson road to the Emerald Pool; or, if he is in the vein, go one mile farther on to Thompson’s Falls, and, ascending to the top, look over the forest into Tuckerman’s Ravine. The Crystal Cascade (3 miles) and Glen Ellis (4 miles) from the hotel, ought to occupy half a day, but three hours (driving) will suffice, if one is in a hurry. The drive to Jackson, or march into the Notch, are just noted under Jackson. To go into Tuckerman’s Ravine by the Crystal Cascade, or by Thompson’s Path (Mount Washington carriage-road), will take a whole day. Ladies have been into Tuckerman’s; but the trial cannot be recommended except for the most vigorous and courageous. The Appalachian Club has a camp near Hermit Lake, where a party going into the ravine in the afternoon may pass a comfortable night, ascend to the Snow Arch in the morning, and return to the hotel for dinner.

A three-mile walk on the Gorham road, crossing the Peabody River to the Copp Farmhouse, gives a view of the celebrated “Imp” profile, on the top of the opposite mountain. This walk is an affair of two hours and a half. (See art. “Imp” in Index.) The Garnet Pool (one mile from the hotel) may be taken on the way. Or, for a short and interesting stroll, go down this road a half-mile to where the Great Gulf opens wide before you its immense wall of mountains. The carriage-road to the summit requires four hours for the ascent by stage; a good climber can do it on foot in about the same time. Should a storm overtake him above the woods, he can find shelter in the Half-way House, just at the edge of the forest.

At Crawford’s one can saunter into the woods at the left of the hotel, and enjoy himself in the sylvan retreat, “Idlewild;” or, going down the road, ascend the Elephant’s Head by a path turning in at the left (sign-board), obtaining the view down the Notch; or, continuing on a short distance, enter and examine the Gate of the Notch. All these objects are in full view from the hotel. Other rambles of an hour are to Gibbs’ Falls, entering the woods at the left of the hotel (guide-board), or, crossing the bridge over the railroad track on the right, to Beecher’s Cascades. The ascent of Mount Willard (3 miles) should on no account be omitted. Good carriage-road all the way, and vehicles from the hotel. The celebrated Crawford Trail to the Summit of Mount Washington, the scene of many exploits, begins in the grove at the left of this hotel. The distance is fully nine miles, and six or seven hours will be none too many for the jaunt. Four intervening mountains, Clinton, Pleasant, Franklin, and Monroe, are crossed. There is a shelter-hut in the woods near the summit of Clinton.

At Fabyan’s.—Three or four hours may be profitably spent on Mount Deception, opposite the hotel. The first summit is as much as one would care to undertake in an afternoon, to get the extended and magnificent view of the great range at sunset. Opposite the hotel is a cosy little cottage, kept open by the railroads for the use of travellers, and to give them information respecting routes, hotels, distances, fares, etc. The Upper Ammonoosuc Falls (3½ miles) are well worth a visit. They are on the Old Turnpike to the base of Mount Washington. The traveller has now at command all the important points in the mountains.

He is 9 miles from the Summit, 4 from Crawford’s, 29 from North Conway, 13 from Bethlehem, 22 from the Profile, and 18 from Jefferson—all reached by rail in one or two hours.

At Bethlehem.—If the tourist locates himself at the “Maplewood,” the walk up the mountain to the Observatory, or to Cruft’s Ledge, at sunset, or to the village (1½ miles), or down the Whitefield road to The Hollow, is a good introduction. At “The Street” he will find the busiest thoroughfare in the mountains, leading him on to a beautiful panorama of the Ammonoosuc Valley, with Littleton in its lap; or, ascending the old Profile House road above the Sinclair House for a mile, will see the great Franconia mountains from the best view-point. Bethlehem is 9 miles from the Profile House, 13 from Fabyan’s, 17 from Crawford’s, 42 from North Conway, 15 from Jefferson, and 22 from the Summit.

At Profile House.—If you arrive by rail via Bethlehem, you have crossed the broad flank and great ravine of Mount Lafayette to the shores of Echo Lake, a mile from the hotel. But the opposite side of this lake is a more eligible site for views of the surrounding mountains; and the summit of Bald Mountain, at its north end, is still better. From the long piazza of the Profile House the great Notch mountains close in toward the south. Cannon Mountain is on your right, with the peculiar rocks giving it this name thrust out from the highest ridge in full view. The woods at the foot of this mountain, filling the pass in front of you, conceal the beautiful Profile Lake, the twin-sister of Echo Lake. The enormous rock at your left is Eagle Cliff, a spur of Mount Lafayette, the mountain being ascended on the south side of this cliff. Improve the first hour of leisure by walking directly down the road to Profile Lake. In a few minutes you will reach the shore near a rustic arbor (guide-board), furnished with seats, and here you command the best view of the renowned “Old Man of the Mountain.” Boats may be had here for a sail upon the lake. Return to the hotel by the path through the woods. Walk next up the pass one mile to Echo Lake (boats and fishing-gear at the boat-house); or, extending your jaunt as far as Bald Mountain, obtain, by following the old path through the woods at the right, the best observation of the pass from the north. The trip to the Flume House (including the Basin, Pool, and Flume) is next in order, and will occupy a half day, although the distance is only six miles, and the road excellent. If the forenoon is taken, a party can either return to the hotel for dinner or dine well at the Flume House. The Pool is reached by a path half a mile long, entering the woods opposite the Flume House. It will take an hour to drive to the Flume; and an hour to go into the chasm itself and return is little enough; allowing another hour for the Pool makes four hours for the excursion.

The ascent of Mount Lafayette (3¾ miles) demands three to four hours. Saddle-horses can be procured at the hotel. Those unwilling to undertake the whole climb may, by ascending Eagle Cliff (1 mile on same path), secure a grand view of the Notch and lakes, the Profile, the ravines, and the Pemigewasset Valley. A stage leaves the Profile House every morning for Plymouth, connecting with trains for Boston and New York, and permitting the tourist to enjoy the beauties of the Pemigewasset Valley. But it is better to ascend this valley.

At the Flume House (refer to the preceding article).—It is a comparatively easy climb of an hour and a half to the top of Mount Pemigewasset, behind the hotel. See, from the hotel, the outline of the mountain ridge opposite, called Washington Lying in State.

At Jefferson.—The branch railway from Whitefield (B., C., & M. R.R.) leaves its passengers about three miles from the cluster of hotels and boarding-houses called Jefferson Hill, or five from East Jefferson (E. A. Crawford’s, Highland, or Mount Adams House); but carriages are usually in waiting for all these houses. The walks and drives up and down this valley are numerous and interesting, especially so in the direction of Mount Adams and Randolph Hill, Cherry Mountain and Lancaster. The trip over Cherry Mountain, reaching Fabyan’s (13 miles) by sunset, or from Fabyan’s, reaching Jefferson at this hour, is a memorable experience of mountain beauty. Excursions to Mount Washington, Profile House, Glen House, or Gorham, demand a day. The ascent of Starr King, Owl’s Head, Ravine of the Cascades, King’s Ravine, or Mount Adams are the pièces de résistance for this locality.

ITINERARY OF A WALKING TOUR.—Two weeks of fine weather will enable a good pedestrian to traverse the mountains from Plymouth to North Conway, or vice versa, following the great highways throughout the whole journey, and giving time to see what is on the route. Good hotel accommodation will be found at the end of each day. Should bad weather unsettle his plans, he will nearly always be able to avail himself of regular stage or railway conveyance for a less or greater distance. Thus: First day, Plymouth to Woodstock (dine at Sanborn’s, West Campton), 16 miles; second day, Flume House (visiting Flume and Pool), 8 miles; third day, Profile House (visiting Basin and “Old Man”), 5½ miles; fourth day, Bethlehem (via Echo Lake and Franconia), 9 miles; fifth day, Whitefield, 8 miles; sixth day, East Jefferson, 13 miles; seventh day, Glen House, 14 miles; eighth day, for vicinity of Glen House; ninth day, Summit of Mount Washington by carriage-road, 8 miles; tenth day, descent by mountain railway to Crawford’s, 13 miles; eleventh day, through the Notch to Bartlett, 13 miles; twelfth day, Jackson and vicinity, 9 miles; thirteenth day, North Conway, 8 miles. Total, 124 miles.

Advice for Climbers.—Don’t hurry when on a level road—keep your strength for the ascent. Always take the long route up a mountain, if it be the easier one. Be careful where you plant the foot in gullied trails or on icy ledges—a sprain is a serious matter if you are alone. Carry in your pocket a flask, fitted with a tumbler or cup; matches that will ignite in the wind, half a dozen cakes of pitch-kindling, a good glass, and a luncheon; in your hand a stout walking-stick; and upon your feet shoes that can be trusted—none of your gimcracks—but broad-soled ones, shod with steel nails. On a long march a rubber overcoat, a haversack, and an umbrella will be needed. Cold tea slakes thirst more effectually than water; but when you are exposed to wet and cold something stronger will be found useful. Should you have a palpitation of the heart, or an inclination to vertigo, do not climb at all. Take quiet rambles instead. My word for it, they are better for you than scaling breathless ascents or looking down over dizzy precipices. If you feel nausea, stop at once until you recover from it. If caught on the Crawford trail between Mounts Clinton and Washington, go back to the hut on the first-named mountain.

Newspapers for Tourists, at Bethlehem (The Echo) and on the Summit (Among the Clouds) are published during the season of travel, giving hotel arrivals, information concerning rail and stage routes, excursions, and whatever may be of interest to the summer population in general.

Telegraphic and telephone communication may be had at all the principal hotels and railway-stations.

The Appalachian Mountain Club prints every year a periodical made up of scientific and literary contributions from its members. Address the club at Boston.

Trout, pickerel, and black bass are found in all the mountain waters. The State stocks the ponds and streams with trout, bass, and salmon from its breeding-houses at Plymouth. Fishing legally begins May 1. There is good trout-fishing on Swift River (Albany), with Conway for head-quarters. From Jackson, or Glen House, the Wildcat and Ellis are both good trout streams; so are Nineteen-Mile Brook and the West Branch of Peabody; but the Wild River region (from Shelburne, Glen House, or Jackson) affords better sport, because less visited. To go in from Jackson or Glen House a guide will be necessary, and Davis, of Jackson, is a good one. From Jefferson and Randolph the upper waters of the Moose, and Israel’s River (especially in the Mount Jefferson ravine), are fished with good success. E. A. Crawford, of East Jefferson, knows the best spots. From Bartlett there should be good fishing on Sawyer’s River, above the Livermore mills. Consult Frank George, the veteran landlord of the Bartlett House. From Crawford’s the best fishing-ground is Ethan’s Pond, behind Mount Willey. At Franconia the writer has seen some fine strings brought from the Copper-mine Brook (back of Mount Kinsman). Fair fishing may also be had on Lafayette Brook—ask Charles Edson, of the Edson House. Profile Lake is stocked with trout for the benefit of guests of the hotel. The upper streams of the Pemigewasset are all good fishing-ground. Apply to Mr. D. P. Pollard, North Woodstock, or Merrill Greeley, Waterville. The houses of both are resorted to by experienced fishermen who track the East Branch or Mad River tributaries. Pickerel and bass are caught in Lakes Winnipiseogee, Squam, Chocorua, Ossipee, and Silver, besides scores of ponds lying chiefly in the lake region.

N.B.—Those going exclusively to fish should go early in the season for the best sport.

Guides.—The landlords will either accompany you or procure a suitable person.

Camping Out.—A wall tent is preferable, but two persons get along comfortably in one of the “A” pattern. Get one with the fly, which can be spread behind the tent, thus giving an additional room, in which the cooking and eating may be done under cover. Set up your tent where there is natural drainage—where the surface water will run off during wet weather. Dig a shallow trench around it, on the outside, for this purpose, and if you can obtain them, lay boards for a floor. A kerosene-oil stove, with its utensils, folding cot-bed, camp-chairs, and mess-chest, containing dishes (tin is best), constitute a complete outfit, to be reduced according to convenience or pleasure. To make a woods-man’s camp, first set up two crotched posts five feet high, and six or eight apart (according to number). On these lay a pole. From this pole three or four others extend to the ground. Then cut brush or bark for the roof and sides, and build your fire in front. For a camp of this sort a hatchet and packet of matches only are necessary. But always pitch your encampment in the vicinity of wood and water.

Mount Washington Railway.—Length, from base to summit, 3 miles. Rise in the three miles, 3,625 feet. Steepest grade, 13½ inches in three feet, or 1980 feet to the mile. Begun in 1866; completed in 1869.

Mount Washington Carriage-road.—Length, 8 miles. Average grade, one foot in eight. Steepest grade, one foot in six. Begun in 1855; finished in 1861.

Mount Washington Signal Station.—The Summit was first occupied for scientific purposes in the winter of 1870-’71. Since then it has been attached to the Weather Bureau at Washington, and occupied by men detailed from the United States Signal Corps, the men volunteering for the service.

ALTITUDES.—The following list of altitudes of the more important and well-known points has been compiled from the publications of the Geological Survey of New Hampshire and of the Appalachian Mountain Club. The figures in heavy-face type are the results either of actual levelling or of trigonometrical survey, while the remainder depend upon barometrical measurement. Where the mean of two not widely-differing authorities is given, the fact is denoted by the letter “m” preceding the figures:

MOUNTAIN SUMMITS.
Adams	m 5785
Ascutney (Vermont)	3186
Black (Sandwich Dome)	3999
Boott’s Spur	5524
Cannon	3850
Carrigain	m 4651
Carter Dome	m 4827
Chocorua	3540
Clay	5553
Clinton	m 4315
Crawford	3134
Giant’s Stairs	3500
Gunstock	2394
Iron	about 2000
Jefferson	5714
Kearsarge, S. (Merrimack County)	2943
Kearsarge, N. (Carroll County)	3251
Lafayette	5259
Madison	m 5350
Moat (North peak)	3200
Monadnock	m 3177
Monroe	m 5375
Moosilauke	4811
Moriah	4653
Osceola	m 4408
Passaconnaway	4200
Percy (North peak)	3336
Pleasant (Great range)	m 4768
Pleasant (Maine)	2021
Starr King	m 3872
Twin	about 5000
Washington	6293
Webster	4000
Whiteface	4007
Willey	4300
VILLAGES AND HOTELS.
Bartlett (Upper)	660
Bethlehem (Sinclair House)	m 1454
Franconia	921
Crawford House	1899
Fabyan “	1571
Flume “	1431
Glen “	1632
Gorham	812
Jackson	759
Jefferson Hill	1440
Jefferson Highlands (Mt. Adams House)	1648
Lancaster	870
North Conway	521
Plymouth	473
Profile House	1974
Sugar Hill (Post Office)	1351
Waterville (Greeley’s Hotel)	m 1544
Willey House	1323
NOTCHES.
Carter Notch	3240
Cherry Mt. Road (summit)	m 2180
Crawford or White Mt. Notch	1914
Dixville Notch	1831
Franconia Notch	m 2015
Pinkham Notch (south of Glen House)	2018
Carrigain Notch	2465
MISCELLANEOUS.
Ammonoosuc Sta. (base of Mt. Washington)	2668
Camp of Appalachian Mountain Club, on the Mt. Adams path	3307
Echo Lake (Franconia)	m 1928
Lake of the Clouds	5053
Lake Winnipiseogee	500

Distant Points Visible from Mount Washington (taken from “Appalachia”).—Mount Megantic (Canada), 86 miles, seen between Jefferson and Adams; Mount Carmel, 65 miles, just over Mount Adams; Saddleback, 60 miles, head of Rangely Lakes; Mount Abraham, 68 miles, N., 47° E.; Ebene Mountain, 135 miles, vicinity of Moosehead Lake (rarely seen, even with a telescope); Mount Blue, 57 miles, near Farmington, Me.; Sebago Lake, 43 miles, over Mount Doublehead; Portland, 67 miles, over Lake Sebago; Mount Agamenticus, 79 miles, between Kearsarge and Moat Mountains; Isles of Shoals, 96 miles, to the right of Agamenticus (rarely seen); Mount Monadnock, 104 miles, between Carrigain and Sandwich Dome; Mount Ascutney (Vt.), 81 miles, S., 45° W.; Killington Peaks (near Rutland, Vt.), 88 miles, on the horizon between Moosilauk and Lincoln; Camel’s Hump (Vt), 78 miles, over Bethlehem Street; Mount Whiteface (Adirondack chain, N.Y.), 130 miles, over the right slope of Camel’s Hump; Mount Mansfield (highest of Green Mountains), 77 miles, between Twin Mountain House and Mount Deception; Mount Wachusett (Mass.), 126 miles, is also visible under favorable conditions, just to the right of Whiteface (N. H.).

MOUNTAIN PATHS. [Those with an asterisk (*) were built by the Appalachian Mountain Club.] Chocorua.—There are three or four paths. The best leads from the Hammond Farm, 2½ miles from the Chocorua Lake House, and 14 miles from North Conway. The ascent, as far as the foot of the final peak, is feasible for ladies. From this point the easiest way is to flank the peak to the left until an old watercourse is reached, which may be followed nearly to the summit.

*Moat.—An old path leads from the Swift River road to the summit of the South Peak. Another, from the clearings on an old road which extends along the base of the South Peak, leads to the top of the middle ridge; but the best path for tourists is the one from Diana’s Baths, on Cedar Brook, following the stream to the foot of the ridge, thence over the ridge to the summit of the North Peak. Path well made, and plainly marked with signs and cairns; about 3½ miles in length.

*Middle Mountain, North Conway.—Beginning at the ice-ponds near Artists’ Falls House, the path extends around the base of Peaked Mountain, thence to the bare ledges which reach to the summit. Distance, 1⅝ miles. Path well marked, and the view very beautiful.

Kearsarge, North Conway.—A bridle-path starts from a farm-house near Kearsarge Village, and extends to the summit. Distance, nearly 3 miles. Route plain, and not difficult.

*Mount Bartlett.—The path starts near the Pequawket House, Lower Bartlett, follows old logging roads for some distance, runs thence directly to the summit. From the summit the path extends along the ridge until it joins the bridle-path to Kearsarge.

*Carrigain.—The route leads from the mills at Livermore, which are reached by a road leaving the P. & O. R.R. at Livermore Station. From the mills, logging roads are followed—crossing Duck Pond and Carrigain Brooks—to the base; thence by a plain path through a fine forest to “Burnt Hat Ridge,” from which it is only a short distance to the summit.

From mills to summit is about 5 miles. Station to mills, 2 miles.

*Livermore-Waterville Path.—This is intended for a bridle-path. Starting from the mills at Livermore, a logging-road is followed nearly two miles on the southerly side of Sawyer’s River. Here the path begins and runs along the north-west base of Green’s Cliff, crosses Swift River at a beautiful fall, thence through the Notch south of Mount Kancamagus to Greeley’s, in Waterville. The path is well marked by painted signs. Distance from Livermore to Swift River, 5 miles; to Greeley’s, 12 miles.

*Mount Willey.—Path leaves the P. & O. R.R. a little south of Willey Station. The rise is rapid until the Brook Kedron is reached; this brook is then followed to its source, thence the path leads direct to the summit. Distance, 1½ miles. The climb is steep; but the view unsurpassed.

Crawford Bridle-path leads from the Crawford House to the summit of Washington. Path is plain, and the travelling along the ridge is easy; but it is not in condition for horses. See pp. 325, 326.

*Carter Notch.—Path begins near the end of the Wildcat Valley road, about 5½ miles from Jackson; thence it follows the valley of the brook to the ponds in the Notch. From the ponds it follows Nineteen Mile Brook to the clearing back of the Glen House. The travelling is easy; the view in the Notch grand.

Distance from the road to the ponds, about 4 miles; from the ponds to the Glen House, about the same.

*Carter Dome.—The path starts from the larger pond in the Notch, and is well marked to the summit. It is very steep, and about 1½ miles in length.

Great Gulf.—A path beginning near the Glen House goes through this gorge. From the end of the path the carriage-road or railroad on Mount Washington may be reached by a severe climb up the side of the ravine.

Tuckerman’s Ravine.—The Glen House path leaves the Mount Washington carriage-road about 2 miles up, then crosses through the forest to Hermit Lake.

*Via Crystal Cascade.—The Mountain Club path begins about 3 miles from the Glen House, on the Jackson road, ascending the stream until it joins the Glen House path near Hermit Lake. Here the Club has a good camp for the use of travellers. Beyond, a single path extends to the Snow-field; and a feasible route has been marked with white paint on the rocks—up the head wall of the ravine, and thence to the summit.

*Mount Adams.—This path starts opposite the residence of Charles E. Lowe, on the road from Jefferson Hill to Gorham, about 8½ miles from either town, and climbs the steep spur forming one wall of King’s Ravine, following over the ledges to the westerly peak, thence to the summit. Distance, about 4 miles. Nearly half way up the spur a good camp has been built for the use of climbers. The way over the ledges is marked by cairns. Mount Jefferson may be reached by turning to the right before reaching the summit of the westerly peak; Madison by turning to the left.

*King’s Ravine.—The path branches from the Mount Adams path about 1½ miles from Lowe’s. The bowlders in the Ravine are reached without great difficulty. From the bowlders up the head-wall, and through the gate-way, the climb is arduous; and the way is not very distinctly marked. From the gate-way, Madison and the several peaks of Adams may be reached.

Mount Madison.—There are several routes up Madison, but the best is probably that leading up the ridge from “Dolly” Copp’s, on the Old Pinkham Road. The climb is tedious, and the path somewhat overgrown. The Mountain Club will probably clear and keep this path in good condition.

*Bridal Veil Falls.—Path starts from Horace Brooks’s, on the road from Franconia to Easton—2 to 3 miles from Sugar Hill and Franconia Village. It follows an old road across the clearings to Copper-mine Brook, thence by the brook to the foot of the Falls. Distance, 2½ miles from Brooks’s. Walking easy.

The path to the Flume on Mount Kinsman leads from the same highway about a mile beyond Brooks’s.

Mount Lafayette.—The bridle-path begins near the Profile House, turning Eagle Cliff, and crossing over to the main ridge. It leads nearly to the summit of the ridge, thence across the col by the lakes, and up the main peak. Distance, 3½ to 3¾ miles.

Mount Cannon.—The path enters the forest near the cottages in front of the Profile House. The summit is reached by a steep climb of 1½ miles. The Cannon Rock is a short distance down the mountain-side, to the left of the path as it emerges from the forest; the forehead rock of the Profile can be reached by bearing down the mountain diagonally to the right from Cannon Rock until the edge of the cliff is reached. It is a hard scramble to the latter.

Black Mountain, Waterville.—The new path leaves the highway 2 miles below Greeley’s, near Drake’s Brook. It runs near the edge of the ravine of Drake’s Brook, crosses the ridge between Noon and Jennings’ Peaks—to each of which a branch path leads—thence up the northerly slope of the main summit. Distance from the road to the summit is 3¼ miles. The views are very fine, and the climb easy for ordinary walkers.

Osceola.—Path leaves the Greeley-pond path beyond the saw-mill above Greeley’s, bearing to the left. Ascent easy. Distance, about 4 miles.

Tecumseh.—Path branches from the Osceola path at the crossing of the west branch of Mad River, ⅞ of a mile from Greeley’s. The grade is easy, except for a short distance near the summit. Distance from Greeley’s, 3 miles.

Tri-Pyramid.—The great slide on Tri-Pyramid may be reached from Greeley’s by a path across the pasture to the right from the rear of the house, thence about 1½ miles through fine old woods to a deserted clearing known as Beckytown. From here the stream may be followed by clambering over the débris of the slide nearly 2 miles to the base of the South Peak. The summit is reached by climbing to the apex of the slide, thence bearing up to the right a short distance through low woods.

*Thornton-Warren Path.—This path was built to enable visitors in the Upper Pemigewasset Valley or in Warren to cross from one locality to the other, avoiding the long détour via Plymouth. It starts from the Profile House stage-road at the junction of the Tannery road, in West Thornton, crosses Hubbard Brook at this point, and passes over a long stretch of pasture until the woods are reached. At this point, and at all doubtful points, signs have been placed. For much of the distance the path follows Hubbard Brook, and passes out through the Notch between Mounts Kineo and Cushman to an old road-way leading to clearings on Baker’s River, near the mountain-houses at the foot of Mount Moosilauke.

Distance from the stage-road to the road-way in Warren, 8 miles. A permanent camp has been built half-way on Hubbard Brook.

A trail has been spotted from a point in the path about 1 mile north of the camp to the summit of Kineo.

INDEX.

Refer to a mountain, lake, or river, under its proper name, thus: Washington (Mount); Squam (Lake); Saco (River).

The abbreviations in parentheses show that the town or village is on the line of a railway: (E. R.R.) stands for Eastern; (P. & O.), Portland and Ogdensburg; (B., C., & M.), Boston, Concord, and Montreal; (G. T. R.), Grand Trunk; (Pass.), Passumpsic.

[A], [B], [C], [D], [E], [F], [G], [H], [I], [J], [K], [L], [M], [N], [O], [P], [R], [S], [T], [V], [W].

Adams, Mount, from North Conway, [55];
from Thorn Hill, [122];
from Wildcat Valley, [133];
from Carter Dome, [142];
from the Glen House, [145];
from Mount Washington carriage-road, [181];
ascent by King’s Ravine, [298];
ascent from Mount Washington, [312-315];
the apex, [315];
view from, [316].
Adirondacks, from Moosehillock, [273].
Agassiz, Mount, from Profile House Road, [249], [276].
Agiochook, or Agiockochook (Indian name for the White Mountains), [120].
Amherst, Sir Jeffrey (Gen.), in the French War, [259].
Ammonoosuc, Falls of, [304].
Ammonoosuc River, source of, [179].
Ammonoosuc Valley, from Mount Clinton, [98];
at Bethlehem, [277];
at Fabyan’s, [300].
Androscoggin River, at Gorham, [170];
at Berlin, [174];
at Shelburne, [176];
at Bethel, [177].
Appalachian Mountain Club, [62], [221].
Artists’ Falls (North Conway), [46], [47].
Autumn foliage, [66], [67].
[B]aker’s River (branch of Pemigewasset, branch of the Merrimack), [210];
falls on, [269].
Bald Mountain, an inferior summit of Chocorua, [26].
Ball, B. L., lost on Mount Washington, [186].
Bartlett Bowlder, [58].
Bartlett (P. & O. R.R.), mountains surrounding, [61], [62];
ascent of Mount Carrigain from, [62-65].
Basin (Franconia Pass), [231].
Beecher’s Cascade (near Crawford House), [89].
Belknap, Jeremy, D.D. (historian of New Hampshire), quoted, [69].
Belknap, Mount (Lake Winnipiseogee), [8].
Bemis, Dr. Samuel A., home of, [69], [70].
Berlin (G. T. R.), [172];
the Falls, [174], [175].
Bethel, Maine (G. T. R.), [177].
Bethlehem (B., C., & M. R.R.), [276];
admirable position of as a centre, [277];
Bethlehem Street, [278], [279];
fine views from, [280], [281];
a sunset from the “Maplewood,” [282-284];
White Mountains from, [284];
the Hermit, [286];
the peddler, [288].
Bigelow’s Lawn (Mount Washington), [198].
Black Mountain (Sandwich Dome), from West Campton, [216];
Noon Peak, [220];
from Waterville (Greeley’s), [221].
Boott’s Spur (Mount Washington), [146];
from the plateau, [198].
Bourne, Lizzie, death of, on Mount Washington, [310].
Bridal Veil Falls (Mount Kinsman), [255].
Brown, George L. (painter), referred to, [253].
Buck-board wagon described, [273].
[C]ampton, [211];
Campton Hollow, [214];
West Campton, and view from, [215];
Sanborn’s, [216];
annals of Campton, [216].
Campton Village (Pemigewasset Valley), [218].
Cannon (or Profile) Mountain, from West Campton, [215];
from the clearing below the Profile, [231];
remarkable profile on, [232];
from Franconia, [252].
Carrigain, Mount, from Chocorua, [30];
from Bartlett, [62];
ascent from Bartlett, [62-64];
view from summit, [64], [65].
Carrigain Notch, from Mount Chocorua, [30];
from Mount Carrigain, [64].
Carter Dome, [133];
the Pulpit, [136];
ascent of, and view from, [140], [141].
Carter Mountains, from Gorham, [170].
Carter Notch, from Chocorua, [31];
from North Conway, [40];
from Thorn Hill, [122], [132];
way into, from Jackson, [132];
impressive desolation of the interior, [137];
the Giants’ Barricade, [137], [138];
the lakes, [139];
way out to Glen House, [143].
Castellated Ridge (Mount Jefferson), [314].
Cathedral (North Conway), [46].
Cathedral Ledge (North Conway), [41], [42].
Cathedral Woods (North Conway), [55].
Centre Harbor, approach to, by Lake Winnipiseogee, [8-10];
settled, [10];
route by stage to West Ossipee via Sandwich and Tamworth, [18-21].
Chandler, Benjamin, lost on Mount Washington, [186].
Cherry Mountain (Valley of Israel’s River), [291];
Owl’s Head, [292];
road to Fabyan’s, [300].
Chocorua, Lake, from the mountain, [29], [31], [32].
Chocorua (Sho’kor’ua), Mount, from Lake Winnipiseogee, [9];
from Red Hill, [16];
legend of, [21];
ascent from Tamworth, [25-28];
landscapes from, [29-31];
from Mount Willard, [92].
Clay, Mount (next north of Washington), [169];
ascent of, [312].
Clinton, Mount (near Crawford House), [97];
view from summit, [100]. (First mountain ascended by Crawford Path.)
Connecticut Ox-Bow, [256-258].
Conway, or Conway Corner (E. R.R.), superb view of the great chain from, [33].
Copp Farm (view-point for seeing “The Imp”), [165].
Copp, Nathaniel, his adventurous deer-hunt, [167].
Copper-mine Brook (branch of Gale River), [255].
Crawford, Abel, described, [70-72].
Crawford, Ethan Allen, [71], [72];
his burial-place, [302].
Crawford bridle-path, opened, [89];
march to the summit (see Chapter X.);
Mount Clinton first, [117];
the crystal forests, [98];
Liliputian wood, [99];
fine view from summit, [100];
frost-work, [100];
Mount Pleasant next, [102];
in a snow-storm, [102];
crossing the ridge, [103];
Oakes’s Gulf, [103];
Mount Franklin next, [103];
(water here) weird objects by the way, [104];
Mount Monroe next (two peaks, with shallow ponds near the path);
the plateau, [105];
base of the cone reached, [105];
ascent of the cone, [107];
the stone corral, [107];
the summit, [108].
Crawford Glen (Saco Valley), [69].
Crawford House (summit of Crawford Notch), its surroundings, [87-94].
Crawford, Mount (Saco Valley, east side), [69];
Davis Path to Mount Washington, [73];
view of from Frankenstein Bridge, [74].
Crawford Notch (see Great Notch of the White Mountains).
Crawford, T. J., opens a bridle-path to the summit, [89].
Crystal Cascade (Pinkham Notch), [149], [150].
[D]artmouth, see Jefferson.
Davis Path (to Mount Washington), [73];
junction with Crawford Path, [198].
Deception, Mount (near Fabyan’s), [300].
Destruction of mountain forests, [172].
Devil’s Den (North Conway), [45], [46].
Diana’s Baths (North Conway ), [46].
Douglass, William, M.D., quoted, on the origin of the name White Mountains, [121], note.
Dwight, Timothy, L.L.D., 71 (see his “Travels in New England,” and journeys through the mountains).
[E]agle Cliff (Franconia Pass), from Flume House, [225];
from Profile House, [238], [239];
ascent by the bridle-path, [243];
from Franconia, [254].
Eagle Lakes (Mount Lafayette), [244]. (Also called Cloud Lakes.)
Eagle Mountain (Eagle Mountain House), Wildcat Valley, Jackson, [133].
Early settlements by white people, [216], [217], [293].
Echo Lake (Franconia Pass), [239].
Echo Lake (North Conway), [45].
Elephant’s Head (Crawford Notch), [87].
Ellis River (branch of the Saco; rises in Pinkham Notch), see Goodrich Falls, [125];
Glen Ellis Falls, [151];
incident connected with, [153].
Emerald Pool (near Glen House, Pinkham Notch), [147], [148].
Endicott Rock, a surveyor’s monument at the outlet of Lake Winnipiseogee, [10].
[F]abyan’s (B., C., & M. and P. & O. R.R.), view at, [300];
Mount Washington Railway, [301];
Eleazer Rosebrook and E. A. Crawford, [302], [303].
Fall of a Thousand Streams, [162].
Farmer, John (historian), quoted, [210].
Field, Darby, makes the first ascent of Mount Washington, [116-119];
second ascent, [119], see note.
Flume (Franconia Pass), way to and description of, [226-228].
Flume Cascade, see description by Dr. T. Dwight, in his “Travels in New England.”
Flume House (Franconia Pass), [224].
Franconia Mountains, from West Campton, [215];
from Bethlehem, [280];
from Jefferson, [292].
Franconia Pass (Chapters II. and III., Third Journey), Flume House, [224];
the Pool, [225];
the Flume, [226];
the Basin, [231];
Mounts Cannon and Lafayette, [231], [232];
the “Old Man,” [232];
Profile Lake, [232];
Profile House, [237];
Eagle Cliff, [238];
Echo Lake, [239];
sunset in the pass, [240];
from Bethlehem heights, [279].
Franconia village (Iron Works), from Mount Lafayette, [243];
general view of, [251];
fine views in, [253], [254].
Frankenstein Cliff (Saco Valley), named, [73];
appearance of, from the valley, [73], [74];
the bridge, [74].
Fryeburg, Maine (P. & O. R.R.), [33-38].
[G]ale River (branch of the Ammonoosuc, branch of the Connecticut), [243].
Garfield, Mount (see Haystack), [284].
Giant’s Stairs (Saco Valley, east side), [73];
from Jackson, [123], [129].
Gibbs’s Falls (near Crawford House), [97].
Glen Ellis Falls, [151], [152]; legend of, [152].
Glen House, way to, by Jackson and Carter Notch, [131];
its surroundings, [144];
carriage-road to the summit, [144];
Mount Washington from, [144], [145];
Emerald Pool, [147], [148];
Thompson’s Falls, [146];
Crystal Cascade, [149];
Glen Ellis Falls, [151];
Tuckerman’s Ravine, [155];
The Imp, [165];
to or from Gorham, [165], [170];
from Mount Washington carriage-road, [181].
Goodenow’s, see Sugar Hill.
Goodrich Falls (Ellis River), [125].
Gorham (G. T. R.), its situation, [169].
Grand Monadnock, from Red Hill, [17];
from Mount Washington, [192].
Great Gulf, from Glen House, [165];
from Mount Washington carriage-road, [181], [185];
from Mount Clay, [313].
Great Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch), from Mount Chocorua, [31];
from Mount Carrigain, [64], [65];
approach to, by the Saco Valley, [76];
the mountains forming it, [77];
Willey, or Notch House, [77];
landslip of 1826, [79], [80];
the Cascades, [84], [85], [89], [97];
Gate of the Notch, [86];
summit of the Notch (Crawford House), [86];
Elephant’s Head, [87];
discovery of the Pass, [88], [89];
the Notch from Mount Willard, [91];
from Mount Clinton, [100].
Greeley’s, see Waterville.
Green Mountains, from Mount Washington, [190];
from Moosehillock, [273].
Gyles, John (Capt.), quoted on the Indian name for the White Mountains, [120].
Hancock, Mount, from the Ellsworth road (Campton), [216];
from Moosehillock, [272].
Hart’s Ledge (Saco Valley, east side, near Bartlett), [62].
Haverhill (B., C., & M. R.R.), [257].
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, origin of his story of “The Great Carbuncle,” [119];
death of, [209];
legend of “The Great Stone Face,” [235].
Hayes, Mount (Gorham, New Hampshire), [169-171].
Haystack, Mount (now Mount Garfield), [254].
Hermit Lake (Tuckerman’s Ravine, Mount Washington), [159].
Hitchcock, C. H. (geologist), [197].
Humphrey’s Ledge (near Glen Station), [41].
Hunter, Harry W., lost on Mount Washington, [199], note.
Huntington’s Ravine, from Carter Dome, [142].
Idlewild (near Crawford House), [89].
Imp, The (rock profile near Glen House), [166].
Indians, customs of mountain tribes, [10];
Sokokis, or Pigwackets, or Pequawkets, destruction of by Love-well, [34-38];
Indian names, [24], [25], note;
superstitions regarding the high summits, traditions, etc. (see Chapter I., Second Journey);
attack Shelburne, [177];
at Plymouth, [210];
attack Dartmouth (Jefferson), [294].
Intervale (North Conway, E. R.R. and P. & O. R.R.), superb panorama from, [55-57];
see art. North Conway.
Israel’s River (branch of the Connecticut), [291].
Jackson (see Chapters II. and III., Second Journey), [122-143];
how to get there from North Conway, [122];
its topography, [123];
Jackson Falls (on Wildcat River), [124];
Fernald’s Farm, [130];
Wildcat Valley, [133];
to Carter Notch, [133-140].
Jackson, C. T. (geologist), quoted, [197], note.
Jackson Falls (Wildcat River), [124].
Jefferson, Mount, from Jefferson Hill, [293];
Ravine of the Cascades, [297];
ascent from Mount Washington, [312];
Ravine of the Castles, [313];
Castellated Ridge, [314].
Jefferson (branch R.R. from Whitefield), [291];
Jefferson Hill, [292];
antecedents of, [293];
Indian attack on, [294];
East Jefferson, [295];
to Randolph Hill, [297];
to Fabyan’s, [300].
Jockey Cap (Fryeburg, Maine), [34].
Josselyn, John (author of “New England’s Rarities”), ascends Mount Washington, [119].
Kearsarge, Mount, from North Conway, [39], [40], [41];
winter ascent of, [47-54];
view from summit, [51], [52];
from Bartlett, [62];
from Carter Dome, [141].
King, Thomas Starr, tribute to, [294], [295].
King’s Ravine (Mount Adams), from Randolph Hill, [298];
from Mount Adams, [317].
Kinsman, Mount (next south of Cannon, Franconia group), [244], [252].
Lafayette, Mount, from West Campton, [215];
see Chapter III., Third Journey;
Eagle Cliff, [238], [239];
from Echo Lake, [240];
ascent from the Profile House, [243-247];
the Notch, [243];
the ravines, [243-254];
Eagle Lakes, [244];
summit and view, [246], [247];
from Franconia Iron Works, [252];
from Newbury, Vermont, [258];
from Bethlehem heights, [279].
Lake of the Clouds (Mount Washington), [198].
Lary’s (Gorham, New Hampshire), [171].
Lead Mine Bridge (Shelburne, G. T. R.), grand view from, [175], [176].
Legends of General Hampton and the Devil, [11-14];
of Mount Chocorua, [21-24];
of Passaconnaway, [24], [25], note;
Indian tradition of the Deluge, [114];
the Indian’s heaven, [115];
the Great Carbuncle, [115];
the war party and its prisoners, [127], [128];
the youthful lovers, [128];
of Glen Ellis Falls, [152];
of the Silver Image, [263].
Lion’s Head (Tuckerman’s Ravine), [142], [146], [159].
Lisbon (B., C., & M. R.R.), discovery of gold ores in, [251].
Littleton (B., C., & M. R.R.), from Bethlehem, [279].
Livermore (P. & O. R.R.), Saco Valley, logging hamlet of, [63];
way to the Pemigewasset, [221].
Livermore Falls (Pemigewasset River), [212].
Logging on the Androscoggin, [173], [174].
Lonesome Lake (Mount Kinsman), [244].
Long Island, Lake Winnipiseogee, east shore, [9].
Lovewell, John (captain of colonial rangers), battle with the Sokokis, [34-38].
Lovewell’s Pond (scene of Lovewell’s fight), [34].
Lowell, Mount (Saco Valley), slide on, [64].
[M]ad River and Valley (branch of Pemigewasset), [218].
Madison, Mount (next north of Adams), [165].
Marsh, Sylvester, projector of Mount Washington railway, [301].
Merrimack River, source of, [65].
Moat Range, position of, [39];
cliffs of, [40], [41], [44];
the ascent, [47];
from Jackson Falls, [124].
Monroe, Mount, from Tuckerman’s Ravine, [160].
Moose River (branch of Androscoggin), [171].
Moosehillock, or Moosilauke, from Lake Winnipiseogee, [10];
from Chocorua, [30];
from Pemigewasset Valley, [223];
from Newbury, Vermont, [258];
see Chapter VII., Third Journey, [269-275];
how to reach the mountain, [269];
the mountain’s top, [271];
view from, [273];
from Bethlehem, [279].
Moriah, Mount (Carter Chain, near Gorham), [169].
Mountain Butterfly, [202].
[N]ancy’s Brook (Saco Valley), story of, [67-69].
Newbury, Vermont (Pass. R.R.), [257].
Nineteen Mile Brook (branch of the Peabody River, a branch of the Androscoggin; rises in Carter Notch), [143].
North Conway (E. R.R. and P. & O. R.R.), topographical features of, [39-41];
excursions from, [57];
see Intervale, White Horse Ledge, Cathedral Ledge, Humphrey’s Ledge, Echo Lake, Diana’s Baths, Artists’ Falls, Kearsarge and Moat Mountains, etc.
[O]ake’s Gulf (in great range), [103].
Old Man of the Mountain (Franconia Pass), [231-236];
legends of, [235].
Ossipee Mountains, from Lake Winnipiseogee, [8].
Owl’s Head (Lake Memphremagog), from Moosehillock, [273];
Cherry Mountain, [292].
[P]eabody River (branch of the Androscoggin; rises in Pinkham Notch), [144], [154], note.
Pemigewasset River, branch of Merrimack, [210];
Livermore Falls, [211];
East Branch, [223].
Pemigewasset, Mount (near Flume House), ascent and view, [229].
Pemigewasset Valley (Chapter I., Third Journey), [210-223];

villages of, [212].
Pemigewasset Wilderness, way through, [221], [229].
Percy Peaks, [280], note.
Perkins Notch, position of, [133].
Pilot Mountains from Gorham, [170];
origin of name, [170], [171].
Pine Mountain (Gorham, New Hampshire), [170].
Pinkham Notch from Thorn Hill, [122];
from the road between Jackson and Glen House, [129];
from Glen House, [144];
see Thompson’s Falls, Emerald Pool, Crystal Cascade, Tuckerman’s Ravine, Glen Ellis Falls, etc., [144-164].
Pleasant, Mount, from Fabyan’s, [300].
Plymouth (B., C., & M. R.R.), [209];
routes through the mountains, [211].
Pool, The (Franconia Pass), [225].
Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad, passage of the White Mountains Notch, [93].
Prime, W. C., referred to, [244].
Profile House (Franconia Pass), its attractions, [237-240];
see Old Man, Profile Lake, Mounts Cannon and Lafayette, Eagle Cliff, Echo Lake, etc.;
to Bethlehem by the old highway via Franconia, [248];
by rail, [248].
Profile Lake (Franconia Pass), [232].
Prospect, Mount (Holderness), [214].
[R]andolph Hill, drive to, and view from, [297], [298].
Ravine of the Castles (Mount Jefferson), [313].
Raymond’s Cataract, from Carter Dome, [142];
from Pinkham Notch, [147];
see Tuckerman’s Ravine.
Red Hill from Lake Winnipiseogee, [10];
ascent of, from Centre Harbor, and view from summit, [14-17].
Ripley Falls (on Cow Brook, Saco Valley), [89].
Rogers’s, Robert (Major), account of the White Mountains, [119], [121], note;
destroys St. Francis, [259];
see Chapter VI., Third Journey.
Rosebrook, Eleazer, sketch of, [302], [303].
[S]aco Valley (Chapters IV. to IX., inclusive), from Mount Chocorua, [31];
at Fryeburg (Maine), [33];
at North Conway, [39];
at Bartlett, [61-65];
from Mount Carrigain, [64], [65];
source of the Saco, [88];
historical incident, [153].
Sandwich Mountains from Lake Winnipiseogee, [8];
from Sandwich Centre, [19];
from Tamworth (Nickerson’s), [24].
Sandwich (town of), mountains near, [19].
Sandwich Notch, position of, [218].
Sawyer’s River (branch of the Saco), valley of, [62], [63].
Sawyer’s Rock (Saco Valley, west side, near Bartlett), [62].
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, quoted on the Indian name for the White Mountains, [120].
Silver Cascade (Crawford Notch), [85].
Snow Arch (Tuckerman’s Ravine), [161], [162].
Spencer, Jabez (General), settles Campton, [216].
Squam Lake from Red Hill, [16].
St. Francis de Sales, sacked by Rogers, [259];
see Chapter VI., Third Journey.
Star Lake (Mount Adams), [317].
Stark, John (General), captured by Indians, [210], [211].
Stark, William, [210], [211].
Starr King Mountain, [291].
Storm Lake (between Madison and Adams), [317].
Sugar Hill, from Profile House road, [249];
view from, [252], [253].
Sullivan, James (Governor of Massachusetts), his authority for the story of “The Great Carbuncle,” [116];
quoted, [153].
Swift River (branch of the Saco), from Mount Chocorua, [30].
[T]amworth Iron Works (point from which Chocorua is usually ascended), [21], [25].
Thompson’s Falls (near Glen House), [146].
Thorn Mountain, from North Conway, [40];
walk over Thorn Hill (lower spur of Thorn Mountain) to Jackson, [122], [132].
Tripyramid Mountain, from Mad River Valley, [219];
slide on, [221].
Trout-breeding, State establishment at Plymouth, [212].
Trout-fishing begins in New Hampshire May [1], [213].
Trumbull, J. Hammond, LL.D., quoted on the Indian names for the White Mountains, [120], note.
Tuckerman’s Ravine from Mount Kearsarge, [51];
from Carter Dome, [142];
from Thompson’s Falls, [146];
way into from Glen House, [156];
appearance from Glen House, [156];
Hermit Lake and Lion’s Head Crag, [159];
Snow Arch, [161];
head wall, [162];
out by the path to Crystal Cascade, [164].
[V]iews, from Red Hill, [14-17];
from Chocorua, [29-31];
from Jockey Cap, [34];
from Conway Corner, [33];
from North Conway, [40];
from Mount Kearsarge, [51];
from the Intervale (North Conway), [55-57];
from Mount Carrigain, [64], [65];
from above Bemis’s, [74];
from Mount Willard, [91];
from Mount Clinton, [100];
from Carter Dome, [141];
from Glen House, [145];
from Gorham, [169];
from Berlin, [172], [175];
from Shelburne (Lead Mine Bridge), [176];
from Mount Washington carriage-road, [181], [185];
from the summit, [189-192];
from West Campton, [215];
from the Ellsworth road (Pemigewasset valley), [216];
from Mount Pemigewasset (Flume House), [229];
from Mount Lafayette, [246];
from Sugar Hill, [252];
from the foot of Bethlehem heights (Gale River valley), [254];
from Moosehillock, [272];
from Bethlehem, [280], [281];
from Jefferson Hill, [292];
from East Jefferson, [295];
from Randolph Hill, [297];
from Mount Adams, [316].
[W]arren (B., C., & M. R.R.), point from which to ascend Moosehillock, [269].
Washington, Mount, River (formerly Dry River), grand view of the high summits up this valley from P. & O. R.R., [74];
the valley from Mount Clinton, [100].
Washington, Mount, carriage-road, [178];
Half-way House and the Ledge, [180];
Great Gulf, [181];
accident on, [183];
Willis’s Seat, and the view [185];
Cow Pasture, [186];
Dr. Ball’s adventure, [186];
fate of a climber, [186];
up the pinnacle, [186];
United States Meteorological Station, [187];
the summit, [188].
Washington, Mount, from Lake Winnipiseogee, [9];
from Mount Chocorua, [31];
from Conway, [33];
from North Conway, [40];
from Mount Kearsarge, [51];
from Mount Carrigain, [65];
first path to, [71];
Davis path, [73];
view near Bemis’s (P. & O. R.R.), [74];
Crawford bridle-path opened, [89];
from Mount Willard, [93];
from Mount Clinton, [100];
first ascension, [116-119];
Indian traditions of, see Chapter I., Second Journey;
from Thorn Hill, [122];
from the Wildcat Valley, [133];
from Carter Dome, [142];
from Glen House, [144];
from the Glen House and Gorham road, [168];
carriage-road, see Chapter VII., Second Journey;
the Signal Station, [187], [196];
a winter tornado on the summit, [192-194];
shadow of the mountain, [195];
the plateau—its floral and entomological treasures, [197], [198];
transported bowlders on, [197];
Lake of the Clouds, [198];
from Mount Lafayette, [246];
travellers lost on, [186], [199], [310];
from Moosehillock, [270];
from Bethlehem, [281], [282];
from Fabyan’s, [300];
railway to summit, [301-306];
moonlight on the summit, [311];
sunrise, [312];
sunset, [318].
Washington, Mount, Railway, from Fabyan’s, [301];
to the base, [304];
its mechanism, [305];
Jacob’s Ladder, [305];
up the mountain, [306], [307];
the Summit Hotel, [307].
Waterville (Mad River valley), the neighborhood, [219];
path to Livermore, [221].
Webster, Daniel, at Fryeburg, Maine, [33].
Webster, Mount, approach to, [75];
from Mount Willard, [92].
Weirs (B., C., & M. R.R.), Lake Winnipiseogee, west shore, [10], see note.
Welch Mountain (Pemigewasset valley), [218].
Whipple, Joseph (Colonel), settles at Jefferson, [294].
White Horse Ledge (North Conway), [41].
White Mountains, general view of, from Conway, [33];
from North Conway, [40];
from Mount Carrigain (in mass), [65];
legends of, see Chapter [1]., Second Journey;
first ascensions, [116-119];
how named, [119], [120];
appearance from the coast, [120], [121];
from Mount Lafayette, [246];
from Bethlehem, [281];
from Fabyan’s, [300].
Wildcat River (branch of the Ellis, a branch of the Saco; rises in Carter Notch), Jackson Falls on, [124];
disappearance of, [136].
Wildcat Mountain (one of Carter Notch and Pinkham Notch Mountains), position of, [123];
avalanche of bowlders, [136];
appearance from Carter Notch, [141];
from Glen House, [145].
Wildcat Valley (Jackson to Carter Notch), [133-140].
Willard, Mount, [77];
ascent of, from Crawford House, [91].
Willey family, burial-place of, [55];
destruction of, by a landslip, [77-80].
Willey, Mount, from Carrigain, [65];
approach to by the valley, [75];
from Mount Willard, [92].
Winnipiseogee, Lake, sail up, from Wolfborough to Centre Harbor, [8-10];
Indian occupation and customs, [10];
sunset view of, from Red Hill. [16], [17].
Winnipiseogee River (outlet of the lake), Indian remains on, [10];
Endicott Rock in, [10], note.
Wolfborough ( E. R.R. branch ), Lake Winnipiseogee, [8].

THE END

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HARPER’S CYCLOPEDIA

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We commend it highly. It contains so many of the notable poems of our language, and so much that is sound poetry, if not notable, that it will make itself a pleasure wherever it is found.—N.Y. Herald.

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NOOKS AND CORNERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND COAST. By Samuel Adams Drake. With numerous Illustrations. Square 8vo, Cloth, $3 50; Half Calf, $5 75.

#/ My dear Sir,—I laid out your new and beautiful book to take with me to-day to my summer home, but before I go I wish to thank you for preparing a volume which is every way so delightful. All summer I shall have it at hand, and many a pleasant hour I anticipate in the enjoyment of it. I have read far enough in it already to feel how admirably you have done your part of it, and I have seen, in turning over the delectable pages, what a panorama of lovely nooks and rocky coast your artist has prepared for the pleasure of your readers. May they be a good many thousand this year, and continue to increase time onward. If I am not greatly out in my judgment, edition after edition will be called for. Truly yours,

James T. Fields.

Thy “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast” is a delightful book, and one of most frequent reference in my library. Thy friend,

John G. Whittier.

I take this opportunity of acknowledging the pleasure I have received from your interesting book on our New England coast. It was my companion last summer on the coast of Maine. Yours truly,

F. Parkman.

Mr. Samuel Adams Drake does for the New England coast such service as Mr. Nordhoff has done for the Pacific. His “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast”—a volume of 459 pages—is an admirable guide both to the lover of the picturesque and the searcher for historic lore, as well as to stay-at-home travellers. The “Preface” tells the story of the book; it is a sketch-map of the coast, with the motto, “On this line, if it takes all summer.” “Summer” began with Mr. Drake one Christmas-day at Mount Desert, whence he went South, touching at Castine, Pemaquid, and Monhegan; Wells and “Agamenticus, the ancient city” of York; Kittery Point; “The Shoals;” Newcastle; Salem and Marblehead; Plymouth and Duxbury; Nantucket; Newport; Mount Hope; New London, Norwich, and Saybrook. What nature has to show and history to tell at each of these places, who were the heroes and worthies—all this Mr. Drake gives in pleasant talk—N.Y Tribune.

My dear Mr. Drake,—I have given your beautiful book, “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast,” a pretty general perusal. It is one “after my own heart,” and I thank you very much for it. Your Preface is an admirable “hit” in more ways than one. Like Grant, whom you have quoted, it took you, I imagine, all winter as well as all summer to accomplish your victory, for you speak of experiences with snow and sleet.

You have gathered into your volume, in the most attractive form, a vast amount of historical and descriptive matter that is exceedingly useful. I hope your pen will not be stayed. Your friend and brother of the pen,

Benson J. Lossing.

To-morrow I leave home for a week or two in Maine, and shall take your beautiful volume, “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast,” with me to read and enjoy at leisure. I am sure it cannot fail to be very interesting.

Yours faithfully,
Henry W. Longfellow.

I need not tell you with how much interest both my husband and myself—lovers of the valley—look forward to your work, nor how much pleasure your “Nooks and Corners” has already afforded us.

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Harriet P. Spofford.

His style is at once simple and graphic, and his work as conscientious and faithful to fact as if he were the dullest of annalists instead of one of the liveliest of essayists and historians. The legitimate charm of variety—characteristic of a work of this kind—makes the book more entertaining than any volume of similar size devoted exclusively to chronology, biography, essays, or anecdotes.—John G. Saxe, in the Brooklyn Argus.

Mr. Drake’s “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast” ought to be in the hands of every one who visits our sea-side resorts. The artistic features serve to embellish a very interesting description of our New England watering-places, enlivened with anecdotes, bits of history connected with the various places, and pleasant gossip about people and things in general.—Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston.

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FROM “THE TIMES,” LONDON.

The title of this very beautifully illustrated book conveys but a very faint idea of its merits, which lie, not in the descriptions of the varied beauties of the fields and fens of New England, but in the admirable wood-engravings, which on every page picture far more than could be given in words. The author has the rare gift of feeling for the exquisitely graceful forms of plant life and the fine touch of an expert draughtsman, which enables him both to select and to draw with a refinement which few artists in this direction have ever shown. Besides these essential qualities in a painter from nature, Mr. Gibson has a fine sense of the poetic and picturesque in landscape, of which there are many charming pieces in this volume, interesting in themselves as pictures, and singularly so in their resemblance to the scenery of Old England. Most of the little vignette-like views might be mistaken for Birket Foster’s thoroughly English pictures, and some are like Old Crome’s vigorous idyls. One of the most striking—a wild forest scene with a storm passing, called “The Line Storm”—is quite remarkable in the excellent drawing of the trees swept by the gale and in the general composition of the picture, which is full of the true poetic conception of grandeur in landscape beauty. But all Mr. Gibsons’s good drawing would have been nothing unless he had been so ably aided by the artist engravers, who have throughout worked with such sympathy with his taste, and so much regard for the native grace of wild flowers, grasses, ferns, insects, and all the infinite beauties of the fields, down to the mysterious spider and his silky net spread over the brambles. These cuts are exceptional examples of beautiful work. Nothing in the whole round of wood-engraving can surpass, if it has even equalled, these in delicacy as well as breadth of effect. Much as our English cutters pride themselves on belonging to the school which Bewick and Jackson founded, they must certainly come to these American artists to learn the something more which is to be found in their works. In point of printing, too, there is much to be learned in the extremely fine ink and paper, which, although subjected to “hot-pressing,” are evidently adapted in some special condition for wood-printing. The printing is obviously by hand-press,[46] and in the arrangement of the type with the cuts on each page the greatest ingenuity and invention are displayed. This, too, has been designed with a sort of a Japanesque fancy; here is a tangled mass of grasses and weeds, with a party of ants stealing out of the shade, and there the dragon-flies flit across among the blossoms of the reeds, or the feathery seeds of the dandelion float on the page. Each section of the seasons has its suggestive picture: Springtime, with a flight of birds under a may-flower branch that hangs across the brook: Summer, a host of butterflies sporting round the wild rose: Autumn, with the swallows flying south and falling leaves that strew the page; while for Winter the chrysalis hangs in the leafless bough, and the snow-clad graves in the village church-yard tell the same story of sleep and awakening. As many as thirty different artists, besides the author and designer, have assisted in producing this very tastefully illustrated volume, which commends itself by its genuine artistic merits to all lovers of the picturesque and the natural.

FROM “THE SATURDAY REVIEW,” LONDON.

This pleasant American book has brought to our remembrance, though without any sense of imitation, two old-fashioned favorites. In the first place, its descriptions of rural humanity, its rustic sweetness and humor, have a certain analogy with the delicately pencilled studies of life in Miss Mitford’s “Our Village;” but the relation it bears to the second book is much closer. It is more than forty years since Mr. P. H. Gosse published the first of those delightful sketches of animal life at home which have led so many of us with a wholesome purpose into the woods and lanes. It was in the Canadian Naturalist that he broke this new ground; and though we do not think this has ever been one of his best-known books, we cannot but believe that there are still many readers who will be reminded of it as they glance down Mr. Gibson’s pages.

People must be strangely constituted who do not enjoy such pages as Mr. Gibson has presented to us here. It is not merely that he writes well, but the subject itself is irresistibly fascinating. We plunge with him into the silence of a New England village in a clearing of the woods. The spring is awakening in a flush of tender green, in a fever of warm days and shivering nights, and we hasten with our companion through all the bustle and stir of the few busy hours of light so swiftly that the darkness is on us before we are aware. Then falls on the ear a pathetic, an intolerable silence; a deep mist covers the ground, a few lights twinkle in scattered farms and cottages, and all seems brooding, melting, in the deep and throbbing hush of the darkness. * * * The wailing of the great owl upon the maple-tree takes our author back in memory to the scenes of his youth, where the owl was looked upon as a creature of most sinister omen, and his own partiality to it, as a proof that there was something uncanny or even “fey” about him. All this is described with great sympathy and delicacy; but perhaps Mr. Gibson is most felicitous in his little touches of floral painting. He has a few words about the earthy, spicy fragrance of the arbutus that might have been said in verse by the late Mr. Bryant; his description of the effect of biting the bulbs of the Indian turnip, or “Jack-in-the-pulpit,” is inimitable in its quiet way; while the phrase about the fading dandelions—“the golden stars upon the lawn are nearly all burned out; we see their downy ashes in the grass”—is perhaps the best thing ever said about a humble flower, whose vulgarity, in the literal sense, blinds us to the beauty of its evolution and decay.

In his studies of life and country manners Mr. Gibson is a very agreeable and amusing, if not quite so novel, a companion. Not seldom he reminds us not merely of Miss Mitford, but sometimes of Thoreau and of Hawthorne. The story of Aunt Huldy, the village crone who sustained herself upon simples to the age of a hundred and three, is one of those little vignettes, half humorous, half pathetic, and altogether picturesque, in which the Americans excel. Aunt Huldy was an old witch in a scarlet hood, whose long white hair flowing behind her was wont to frighten the village children who came upon her in the woods; but she was absolutely harmless, a crazy old valetudinarian, who was always searching for the elixir of life in strange herbs and decoctions. At last she thought she had found it in sweet-fern, and she spent her last years in grubbing up every specimen she could find, smoking it, chewing it, drinking it, and sleeping with a little bag of it tied round her neck.

But although Mr. Gibson writes so well, he modestly disclaims all pretension as a writer, and lets us know that he is an artist by profession. His book is illustrated by more than seventy designs from his pencil, engraved in that beautiful American manner to which we have often called attention. The scenes designed are closely analogous to those described in the text. We have an apple-orchard in full blossom, with a group of idlers lounging underneath the boughs; scenes in the fields so full of mystery and stillness that we are reminded of Millet, or of our own Mason; clusters of flowers drawn with all the knowledge of a botanist and the sympathy of a poet. It is hard to define the peculiar pleasure that such illustrations give to the eye. It is something that includes and yet transcends the mere enjoyment of whatever artistic excellence the designs may possess. We are directly reminded by them of such similar scenes as have been either the rule or the still more fascinating exception of every childish life, and at their suggestion the past comes back; in the familiar Wordsworthian phrase, “a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.”

We know so little over here of the best American art that it may chance that Mr. Gibson is very well known in New York. We confess, however, that we never heard of him before; but his drawings are so full of delicate fancy and feeling, and his writing so skilful and graceful, that, in calling attention to his book, we cannot but express the hope that we soon may hear of him again, in either function, or in both.

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Take “Harper’s Hand-Book,” and read it carefully through; then return to the parts relating to the places you have resolved to visit; follow the route on the maps, and particularly study the plans of cities. So you will start with sound pre-knowledge, which will smoothen the entire course of travel.—Philadelphia Press.

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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
griping his arm=> gripping his arm {pg 103}
more and more drouth=> more and more drought {pg 173}
turned to looked back=> turned to look back {pg 243}
Moosilauk 4881=> Moosilauke 4881 {pg 330}

FOOTNOTES:

[1] So called from the fishing-weirs of the Indians. The Indian name was Aquedahtan. Here is the Endicott Rock, with an inscription made by Massachusetts surveyors in 1652.

[2] No tradition attaches to the last three peaks. Passaconnaway was a great chieftain and conjurer of the Pennacooks. It is of him the poet Whittier writes:

Burned for him the drifted snow,
Bade through ice fresh lilies blow,
And the leaves of summer glow
Over winter’s wood.

This noted patriarch and necromancer, in whose arts not only the Indians but the English seemed to have put entire faith, after living to a great age, was, according to the tradition, translated to heaven from the summit of Mount Washington, after the manner of Elias, in a chariot of fire, surrounded by a tempest of flame. Wonnalancet was the son and successor of Passaconnaway. Paugus, an under chief of the Pigwackets, or Sokokis, killed in the battle with Lovewell, related in the next chapter.

[3] Something has since been done by the Appalachian Club to render this part of the ascent less hazardous than it formerly was.

[4] The Saco has since been bridged, and is traversed with all ease.

[5] The sequel to this strange but true story is in keeping with the rest of its horrible details. Perpetually haunted by the ghost of his victim, the murderer became a prey to remorse. Life became insupportable. He felt that he was both shunned and abhorred. Gradually he fell into a decline, and within a few years from the time the deed was committed he died.

[6] Dr. Jeremy Belknap relates that, on his journey through this region in 1784, he was besought by the superstitious villagers to lay the spirits which were still believed to haunt the fastnesses of the mountains.

[7] This house stood just within the entrance to the Notch, from the north, or Fabyan side. It was for some time kept by Thomas J., one of the famous Crawfords. Travellers who are a good deal puzzled by the frequent recurrence of the name “Crawford’s” will recollect that the present hotel is now the only one in this valley bearing the name.

[8] A portion of the slide touching the house, even moved it a little from its foundations before being stopped by the resistance it opposed to the progress of the débris.

[9] I have since passed over the same route without finding those sensations to which our inexperience, and the tempest which surrounded us, rendered us peculiarly liable. In reality, the ridge connecting Mount Pleasant with Mount Franklin is passed without hesitation, in good weather, by the most timid; but when a rod of the way cannot be seen the case is different, and caution necessary. The view of this natural bridge from the summit of Mount Franklin is one of the imposing sights of the day’s march.

[10] The remains of this ill-fated climber have since been found at the foot of the pinnacle. See chapter on Mount Washington.

[11] This analogy of belief may be carried farther still, to the populations of Asia, which surround the great “Abode of Snow”—the Himalayas. It would be interesting to see in this similarity of religious worship a link between the Asiatic, the primitive man, and the American—the most recent, and the most unfortunate. Our province is simply to recount a fact to which the brothers Schlaginweit (“Exploration de la Haute Asie”) bear witness:

“It is in spite of himself, under the enticement of a great reward, that the superstitious Hindoo decides to accompany the traveller into the mountains, which he dreads less for the unknown dangers of the ascent than for the sacrilege he believes he is committing in approaching the holy asylum, the inviolable sanctuary of the gods he reveres; his trouble becomes extreme when he sees in the peak to be climbed not the mountain, but the god whose name it bears. Henceforth it is by sacrifice and prayer alone that he may appease the profoundly offended deity.”

[12] Sullivan: “History of Maine.”

[13] Field’s second ascension (July, 1642) was followed in the same year by that of Vines and Gorges, two magistrates of Sir F. Gorges’s province of Maine, within which the mountains were believed to lie. Their visit contributed little to the knowledge of the region, as they erroneously reported the high plateau of the great chain to be the source of the Kennebec, as well as of the Androscoggin and Connecticut rivers.

[14] It also occurs, reduced to Agiochook, in the ballad, of unknown origin, on the death of Captain Lovewell. One of these was, doubtless, the authority of Belknap. Touching the signification of Agiochook, it is the opinion of Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull that the word which Captain Gyles imperfectly translated from sound into English syllables is Algonquin for “at the mountains on that side,” or “over yonder.” “As to the generally received interpretations of Agiockochook, such as ‘the abode of the Great Spirit,’ ‘the place of the Spirit of the Great Forest,’ or, as one writer prefers, ‘the place of the Storm Spirit,’” says Dr. Trumbull, “it is enough to say that no element of any Algonkin word meaning ‘great,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘forest,’ ‘storm,’ or ‘abode,’ or combining the meaning of any two of these words, occurs in ‘Agiockochook.’ The only Indian name for the White Hills that bears internal evidence of genuineness is one given on the authority of President Alden, as used ‘by one of the eastern tribes,’ that is, Waumbekketmethna, which easily resolves itself into the Kennebec-Abnaki waubeghiket-amadinar, ‘white greatest mountain.’ It is very probable, however, that this synthesis is a mere translation, by an Indian, of the English ‘White Mountains.’ I have never, myself, succeeded in obtaining this name from the modern Abnakis.”

[15] Here is what Douglass says in his “Summary” (1748-’53): “The White Hills, or rather mountains, inland about seventy miles north from the mouth of Piscataqua Harbor, about seven miles west by north from the head of the Pigwoket branch of Saco River; they are called white not from their being continually covered with snow, but because they are bald atop, producing no trees or brush, and covered with a whitish stone or shingle: these hills may be observed at a great distance, and are a considerable guide or direction to the Indians in travelling that country.”

And Robert Rogers (“Account of America,” London, 1765) remarks that the White Mountains were “so called from that appearance which is like snow, consisting, as is generally supposed, of a white flint, from which the reflection is very brilliant and dazzling.”

[16] Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson, taken at Dover, New Hampshire, 1724.

[17] No Yankee girl need be told for what purpose spruce gum is procured; but it will doubtless be news to many that the best quality is worth a dollar the pound. Davis told me he had gathered enough in a single season to fetch ninety dollars.

[18] I use the name, as usually applied, to the whole mountain. In point of fact, the Dome is not visible from the Notch.

[19] The guide knew no other name for the larger bird than meat-hawk; but its size, plumage, and utter fearlessness are characteristic of the Canada jay, occasionally encountered in these high latitudes. I cannot refrain from reminding the reader that the cross-bill is the subject of a beautiful German legend, translated by Longfellow. The dying and forsaken Saviour sees a little bird striving to draw the nail from his bleeding palm with his beak:

“And the Saviour spoke in mildness:
‘Blest be thou of all the good!
Bear, as token of this moment,
Marks of blood and holy rood!”

“And the bird is called the cross-bill;
Covered all with blood so clear.
In the groves of pine it singeth
Songs like legends, strange to hear.”

[20] Peabody River is said to have originated in the same manner, and in a single night. It is probable, however, that as long as there has been a valley there has also been a stream.

[21] Since the above was written, a deplorable accident has given melancholy emphasis to these words of warning. I leave them as they are, because they were employed by the very person to whom the disaster was due: “The first accident by which any passengers were ever injured on the carriage-road, from the Glen House to the summit of Mount Washington, occurred July 3d, 1880, about a mile below the Half-Way House. One of the six-horse mountain wagons, containing a party of nine persons—the last load of the excursionists from Michigan to make the descent of the mountain—was tipped over, and one lady was killed and five others injured. Soon after starting from the summit the passengers discovered that the driver had been drinking while waiting for the party to descend. They left this wagon a short distance from the summit and walked to the Half-Way House, four miles below, where one of the employés of the Carriage-road Company assured them that there was no bad place below that, and that he thought it would be safe for them to resume their seats with the driver, who was with them. Soon after passing the Half-Way House, in driving around a curve too rapidly, the carriage was overset, throwing the occupants into the woods and on the rocks. Mrs. Ira Chichester, of Allegan, Michigan, was instantly killed, her husband, who was sitting at her side, being only slightly bruised. Of the other occupants, several were more or less injured. The injured were brought at once to the Glen House, and received every possible care and attention. Lindsey, the driver, was taken up insensible. He had been on the road ten years, and was considered one of the safest and most reliable drivers in the mountains.”

[22] A stone bench, known as Willis’s Seat, has been fixed in the parapet wall at the extreme southern angle of the road, between the sixth and seventh miles. It is a fine lookout, but will need to be carefully searched for.

[23] Benjamin Chandler, of Delaware, in August, 1856.

[24] Dr. B. L. Ball’s “Three Days on the White Mountains,” in October, 1855.

[25] Considering the pinnacle of Mount Washington as the centre of a circle of vision, the greatest distance I have been able to see with the naked eye, in nine ascensions, did not probably much exceed one hundred miles. This being half the diameter, the circumference would surpass six hundred miles. It is now considered settled that Katahdin, one hundred and sixty miles distant, is not visible from Mount Washington.

[26] The highest point, formerly indicated by a cairn and a beacon, is now occupied by an observatory, built of planks, and, of course, commanding the whole horizon. It is desirable to examine this vast landscape in detail, or so much of it as the eye embraces at once, and no more.

[27] One poor fellow (Private Stevens) did die here in 1872. His comrade remained one day and two nights alone with the dead body before help could be summoned from below.

[28] It was for a long time believed that the summit of Mount Washington bore no marks of the great Glacial Period, which the lamented Agassiz was the first to present in his great work on the glaciers of the Alps. Such was the opinion of Dr. C. T. Jackson, State Geologist of New Hampshire. It is now announced that Professor C. H. Hitchcock has detected the presence of transported bowlders not identical with the rocks in place.

[29] In going to and returning from the ravine, I must have walked over the very spot which has since derived a tragical interest from the discovery, in July, 1880, of a human skeleton among the rocks. Three students, who had climbed up through the ravine on the way to the summit, stumbled upon the remains. Some fragments of clothing remained, and in a pocket were articles identifying the lost man as Harry W. Hunter, of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. This was the same person whom I had seen placarded as missing, in 1875, and who is referred to in the chapter on the ascent from Crawford’s. A cairn and tablet, similar to those erected on the spot where Miss Bourne perished, had already been placed here when I last visited the locality, where the remains had so long lain undiscovered in their solitary tomb. An inscription upon the tablet gives the following details: “Henry W. Hunter, aged twenty-two years, perished in a storm, September 3d, 1874, while walking from the Willey House to the summit. Remains found July 14th, 1880, by a party of Amherst students.” The place is conspicuous from the plain, and is between the Crawford Path and Tuckerman’s. By going a few rods to the left, the Summit House, one mile distant, is in full view. This makes the third person known to have perished on or near the summit of Mount Washington. Young Hunter died without a witness to the agony of his last moments. No search was made until nearly a year had elapsed. It proved ineffectual, and was abandoned. Thus, strangely and by chance, was brought to light the fact that he sunk exhausted and lifeless at the foot of the cone itself. I can fully appreciate the nature of the situation in which this too adventurous but truly unfortunate climber was placed.

[30] A log-hut has been built near the summit of Mount Clinton since this was written. It is a good deed. But the long miles over the summits remain as yet neglected. Had one existed at the base of Monroe, it is probable that one life, at least, might have been saved. It is on the plain that danger and difficulties thicken.

[31] Kancamagus, the Pennacook sachem, led the Indian assault on Dover, in 1689.

[32] This name was given to his picture of the great range, in possession of the Prince of Wales, by Mr. George L. Brown, the eminent landscape-painter. The canvas represents the summits in the sumptuous garb of autumn.

[33] The true source of the Connecticut remained so long in doubt that it passed into a by-word. Cotton Mather, speaking of an ecclesiastical quarrel in Hartford, says that it was almost as obscure as the rise of the Connecticut River.

[34] This orthography is of recent adoption. By recent I mean within thirty years. Before that time it was always Moosehillock. Nothing is easier than to unsettle a name. So far as known, I believe there is not a single summit of the White Mountain group having a name given to it by the Indians. On the contrary, the Indian names have all come from the white people. That these are sometimes far-fetched is seen in Osceola and Tecumseh; that they are often puerile, it is needless to point out. Moosehillock is probably no exception. It is not unlikely to be an English nickname. The result of these changes is that the people inhabiting the region contiguous to the mountain do not know how to spell the name on their guide-boards.

[35] Speaking of legends, that of Rubenzal, of the Silesian mountains, is not unlike Irving’s legend of Rip Van Winkle and the Catskills. Both were Dutch legends. The Indian legends of Moosehillock are very like to those of high mountains, everywhere.

[36] In the valley of the Aar, at the head of the Aar glacier, in Switzerland, is a peak named for Agassiz, who thus has two enduring monuments, one in his native, the other in his adopted land. The eminent Swiss scientist spent much time among the White Mountains.

[37] Such, for example, as the Hon. J. G. Sinclair, Isaac Cruft, Esq., and ex-Governor Howard of Rhode Island.

[38] The twin Percy Peaks, which we saw in the north, rise in the south-east corner of Stratford. Their name was probably derived from the township now called Stark, and formerly Percy. The township was named by Governor Wentworth in honor of Hugh, Earl of Northumberland, who figured in the early days of the American Revolution. The adjoining township of Northumberland is also commemorative of the same princely house.

[39] The greater part of the ascent so nearly coincides, in its main features, with that into Tuckerman’s, that a description would be, in effect, a repetition. To my mind Tuckerman’s is the grander of the two; it is only when the upper section of King’s is reached that it begins to be either grand or interesting by comparison.

[40] The road up the Rigi, in Switzerland, was modelled upon the plans of Mr. Marsh.

[41] Dr. Timothy Dwight.

[42] Rev. Benjamin G. Willey.

[43] The greatest angle of inclination is twelve feet in one hundred.

[44] Samuel Adams at the feet of John Adams is not the exact order that we have been accustomed to seeing these men. Better leave Samuel Adams where he stands in history—alone.

[45] It is only forty years since Agassiz advanced his now generally adopted theory of the Glacial Period. The Indians believed that the world was originally covered with water, and that their god created the dry land from a grain of sand.

[46] The English reviewer is in error here. The letterpress and illustrations were printed together on an Adams press.

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