Still I must practice patience. Time—indispensable Time—is a servant that cannot be hurried, nor can his share of any work be done by the cleverest substitute. “Beautiful!” I said, and felt the word; but the beauty did not come home to the spirit, filling and satisfying it. I wonder at people who scramble to such a peak, stare about them for a quarter of an hour, and run down again contented. Either the plate is preternaturally sensitive, or the picture cannot have been taken.
For myself, I have learned to wait; and so I did now. A few birds flitted about the summit: two or three snowbirds, to whom the unusual presence of a man was plainly a trouble (“Why can’t he stay up in the observatory, like the rest of his kind?”); a myrtle warbler, chirping softly as he passed; a white-throat, whistling now and then from somewhere down the cliffs; an alder flycatcher, calling quay-queer (a surprising place this dry mountain-top seemed for a lover of swampy thickets); an occasional barn swallow or chimney swift, shooting to and fro under the sky; and once a sparrow hawk, welcome for his rarity, sailing away from me down the valley, showing a rusty tail.
By and by, seeing that the crowd had gone, I clambered up the rocks, eating blueberries by the way, and mounted the stairs to the observatory, where the keeper of the place was talking with two men (a musician and a commercial traveler, if my practice as an “observer” counted for anything), who had lingered to survey the panorama. The conversation turned upon the usual topics, especially the Mount Washington Railway. Four or five trains were descending the track, one close behind the other, and it became a matter of absorbing interest to make them out through the small telescope and a field glass. Why be at the trouble to climb so high, at the cost of so much wind, unless you do your best to take in whatever is visible? “Yes, I can see one—two—three— Oh, yes, there’s the fourth, just leaving the summit.” So the talk ran on, with minor variations which may easily be imagined. One important question related to the name of a certain small sheet of water; another to a road that curved invitingly over a grassy hilltop; another to the exact whereabouts of a rich man’s fine estate (questions about rich men are always pertinent), the red roofs of which could be found by searching for them.
I took my full share of the discussion, but half an hour of it sufficed, and I went back again to commune with myself upon the rocks. The sunshine was warm, but the breeze tempered it till I found it good. And the familiar scene was lovelier than ever, I began to think. Here at my feet stood the little house, down upon which I had looked with such rememberable pleasure on my first visit to Agassiz, I know not how many years ago. Then a man was cutting wood before the door. Now there is nobody to be seen; but the place must still be inhabited, for I hear the tinkle of a cowbell somewhere in the woods, and a horse is pasturing nearer by. Only three or four other houses are in sight—not reckoning the big hotel and a few far-away roofs in Franconia—and very inviting they look, neatly painted, with smooth, level fields about them. It is my own elevation that levels the fields, I am quite aware (when I stop to think of it), as it is distance that softens the contours of the mountains, and the lapse of time that smooths the rough places out of past years; but for the hour I take things as the eye sees them. We come to these visionary altitudes, not to look at realities but at pictures. Distance is a famous hand with the brush. To omit details and to fill the canvas with atmosphere, these are the secrets of his art. A comfortable thing it is to lie here at my ease and yield myself to the great painter’s enchantments.
My eye wanders over the landscape, but not uneasily; nay, it can hardly be said to wander at all; it rests here and there, not trying to see, but seeing. Now it is upon the road, spaces of which show at intervals, while I imagine the rest—a sentimental journey; now upon a far-off grassy clearing among woods (Mears’s or Chase’s), homely enough, and lonely enough—and familiar enough—to fit the mood of the hour; now upon the distant level reaches of the Landaff Valley. But the beauty of the scene is not so much in this or that as in all together. I say now, as I said twenty years ago, “This is the kind of prospect for me:” a broken valley, fields and woods intermingled, with mountains circumscribing it all; a splendid panorama seen from above, but not from too far above; from a hill, that is to say, rather than from a mountain.
An hour of this luxury and I return to the tower, where the musician and the keeper are still in conference. The keeper, especially, is a man much after my own mind. He knows the people who live in the three houses below us, and speaks of them racily, yet in a tone of brotherly kindness. I call his attention to two women whom I have descried in the nearest pasture, a bushy place, yellow with goldenrod and pointed with young larches and firs. They wear men’s wide-brimmed straw hats (a black-and-tan collie is with them), and one carries a broad tin dish, which she holds in one hand, while she picks berries with the other. Pretty awkward business, an old berry-picker thinks.
Yes, the keeper of the tower says, they are Mrs. —— and Miss ——; one lives in the first house, the other in the second. Now they are leaving the pasture, stopping once in a while to strip an uncommonly inviting bush (so I interpret their movements), and we follow them with our eyes. The older one, a portly body, walks halfway across a broad field with her companion, seeing her so far homeward,—and perhaps finishing a savory dish of gossip,—and then returns to her own house, still accompanied by the dog. Scarcity of neighbors conduces to neighborliness.
The men who live in such houses, the keeper tells me, are very wide-awake and well informed, reading their weekly newspaper with thoroughness, and always ready for rational talk on current topics. They are not rich, of course, in the down-country sense of the word, and see very little money, subsisting mainly upon the produce of the farm; a matter of twenty-five dollars a year may cover all their expenditures; but they are better fed, and really live in more comfort, than a great part of the folks who live in cities. I am glad to believe it; and I like the man’s way of standing by his neighbors. In fact, I think highly of him as a person of a good heart and no small discrimination; and therefore I am all the gladder when, having left the summit and stopped for a minute in the shade of a tree, I overhear him say to the musician, “That old man enjoys himself; he’s a nice old man.” “Thank you,” say I, not aloud, but with deep inward sincerity; “that’s one of the best compliments I’ve had for many a day.” Blessings on this mountain air, that makes human speech unintentionally audible. An old man that enjoys himself is pretty near to my ideal of respectable senility. “Thank you,” I repeat; “that’s praise, and faith, I’ll print it.” And so I will, pleasing myself, let the ungentle reader—if I have one—think what he may. A good name is more to brag of than a million of money.
Yes, I am enjoying myself (why not?), and I loiter down the road with a light heart (an old man should be used to going downhill), pausing by the way to notice a little group—a family party, it is reasonable to guess—of golden-crowned kinglets. One of them, the only one I see fully, has a plain crown, showing neither black stripes nor central orange patch. But for his unmistakable zee-zee-zee, which he is considerate enough to utter while I am looking at him, he might be taken for a ruby-crown. So the lover of beauty and the hobbyist descend the hill together, keeping step like inseparable friends. And so may it be to the end of the chapter.