Two heifers are of a more confiding disposition, coming close to look at the stranger as he sits on the doorsill of the old barn. Their curiosity concerning me is perhaps about as lively as mine was touching the supposed liverworts. Like me they stand and consider, but betray no unmannerly eagerness. “Who is he, I wonder?” they might be saying; “I never saw him before.” But their jaws still move mechanically, and their beautiful eyes are full of a peaceful satisfaction. A cud must be a great alleviation to the temper. With such a perennial sedative, how could any one ever be fretted into nervous prostration? As a matter of fact, I am told, cows rarely or never suffer from that most distressing ailment. I have seen chewers of gum before now who, by all signs, should have enjoyed a similar immunity.
While the heifers are still making up their minds about their unexpected visitor, I turn to examine a couple of white-crowned sparrows, male and female,—I wonder if they really are a couple?—feeding before the house. I hope the species is to prove common here. Three birds were behind the hotel before breakfast, and one of them sang. The quaint little medley, sparrow song and warbler song together, is still something of an event with me, I have heard it so seldom and like it so well; and whether the birds sing or not, they are musical to look at.
When I approach the painted house, on my way homeward, the fat old collie comes running out again, barking. This time, however, he takes but one sniff. He has made a mistake, and realizes it at once. “Oh, excuse me,” he says quite plainly. “I didn’t recognize you. You’re the same old codger. I ought to have known.” And he is so confused and ashamed that he hurries away without waiting to make up.
It is a great mortification to a gentlemanly dog to find himself at fault in this manner. I remember another collie, much younger than this one, with whom I once had a minute or two of friendly intercourse. Then, months afterward, I went again by the house where he lived, and he came dashing out with all fierceness, as if he would rend me in pieces. I let him come (there was nothing else to do, or nothing else worth doing), but the instant his nose struck me he saw his error. Then, in a flash, he dropped flat on the ground, and literally licked my shoes. There was no attitude abject enough to express the depth of his humiliation. And then, like the dog of this morning, he jumped up, and ran with all speed back to his doorstep.
Another descent into the gorge of Baker’s River, and another stop on the bridge (how gloriously the water comes down!), and I am again in the pretty, broken woods below the hotel. Here my attention is attracted by an almost prostrate but still vigorous yellow birch, like the one that stood for so many years by the road below the Profile House, in the Franconia Notch. Somehow the tree got an awkward slant in its youth, and has always kept it, while the larger branches have grown straight upward, at right angles with the trunk, as if each were trying to be a tree on its own account. The Franconia Notch specimen became a landmark, and was really of no inconsiderable service; a convenience to the hotel proprietors, and a means of health to idle boarders, who needed an incentive to exercise. “Come, let’s walk down as far as the bent tree,” one would say to another. The average American cannot stroll; he has never learned; if he puts his legs in motion, he must go to some fixed point, though it be only a milestone or a huckleberry bush. The infirmity is most likely congenital, a taint in the blood. The fathers worked,—all honor to them,—having to earn their bread under hard conditions; and the children, though they may dress like the descendants of princes, cannot help turning even their amusements into a stint.
And the sapient critic? Well, instead of carrying a fishing rod or walking to a bent tree, he had come out with an opera-glass, and had made of his morning jaunt a bird-cataloguing expedition. Considered in that light, the trip had not been a brilliant success. In my whole forenoon I had seen and heard but twenty-eight species. If I had stayed in my low-country village, and walked half as far, I should have counted twice as many. But I should not have enjoyed myself one quarter as well.
The next day and the next were rainy, with Moosilauke still invisible. Then came a morning of sunshine and clear atmosphere. So far it was ideal mountain weather; but the cold wind was so strong at our level that it was certain to be nothing less than a hurricane at the top. I waited, therefore, twenty-four hours longer. Then, at quarter before seven on the morning of May 23, I set out. I am as careful of my dates, it seems, as if I had been starting for the North Pole. And why not? The importance of an expedition depends upon the spirit in which it is undertaken. Nothing is of serious consequence in this world except as subjective considerations make it so. Even the North Pole is only an imaginary point, the end of an imaginary line, as old geographies used to inform us, pleonastically,—as if “position without dimensions,” a something without length, breadth, or thickness, could be other than imaginary. I started, then, at quarter before seven. Many years ago I had been taken up the mountain road in a carriage; now I would travel it on foot, spending at least an hour upon each of its five miles, and so see something of the mountain itself, as well as of the prospect from the summit.
The miles, some longer, some shorter, as I thought (a not unpleasant variety, though the fourth stage was excessively spun out, it seemed to me, perhaps to make it end at the spring), are marked off by guideboards, so that the newcomer need not fall into the usual disheartening mistake of supposing himself almost at the top before he has gone halfway. As for the first mile, which must measure near a mile and a half, and which ends just above the “second brook” (every mountain path has its natural waymarks), I had been over it twice within the last few days, so that the edge of my curiosity was dulled; but, with one excuse and another, I managed easily enough to give it its allotted hour. For one thing, a hairy woodpecker detained me five or ten minutes, putting such tremendous vigor into his hammering that I was positively certain (with a shade of uncertainty, nevertheless, such as all “observers” will understand; there is nothing so true as a paradox) that he must be a pileatus, till at last he showed himself. “Well, well,” said I, “guesswork is a poor dependence.” It was well I had stayed by. The forest was so nearly deserted, so little animated, that I felt under obligation to the fellow for every stroke of his mallet. Though a man goes to the wood for silence, his ear craves some natural noises,—enough, at least, to make the stillness audible.
The second mile is of steeper grade than the first, and toward the close brought me suddenly to a place unlike anything that had gone before. I named it at once the Flower Garden. For an acre, or, more likely, for two or three acres, the ground—a steep southern exposure, held up to face the sun—was covered with plants in bloom: Dutchman’s-breeches (Dicentra cucullaria),—bunches of heart-shaped, cream-white flowers with yellow facings, looking for all the world as if they had been planted there; round-leaved violets in profusion; white violets (blanda); spring-beauties; adder’s-tongue (dog’s-tooth violet); and painted trillium. A pretty show; pretty in itself, and a thousand times prettier for being happened upon thus unexpectedly, after two hours of woods that were almost as dead as winter.
Only a little way above this point were the first beds of snow; and henceforward, till I came out upon the ridge, two miles above, the woods were mostly filled with it, though there was little in the road. About this time, also, I began to notice a deer’s track. He had descended the road within a few hours, as I judged, or since the last rainfall, and might have been a two-legged, or even a one-legged animal,—biped or uniped,—so far as his footsteps showed. I should rather have seen him, but the hoofprints were a deal better than nothing; and undoubtedly I saw them much longer than I could possibly have seen the maker of them, and so, perhaps, got out of them more of companionship. They were with me for two hours,—clean up to the ridge, and part way across it.