Once off the ridge, I can loosen my hat and sit down in comfort. The sun is good. How incredible it seems that the air is so furiously in motion only fifty rods back! Here it is like Elysium. And almost I believe that this limited prospect is better than the grander sweep from the summit itself,—less distracting and more restful. So half a loaf may be better than a whole one, if a man cannot be contented without trying to eat the whole one. A white-throat and a myrtle warbler sing to me as I nibble my sandwich. They are the loftiest spirits, it appears. I take off my hat to them.
Already I am down far enough to catch the sound of running water; and every rod brings a new mountain into view from behind the long East Peak. One of the best of them all is cone-shaped Kearsarge, topped with its house. Now the white crest of Washington rises upon me,—snow with the sun on it; and here, by the fourth mileboard, are a few pale-bright spring-beauties,—five or six blossoms only. They have found a bit of earth from which the snow melted early, and here they are, true to their name, with the world on every side nothing but a desolation. If it is time for myrtle warblers, why not for them? Now I see not only Washington, but the mountains with it, all strangely foreshortened, so as to give the highest peak a most surprising preëminence. No wonder I was in doubt what to call it. In days past I have walked that whole ridge, from Clinton to Adams; and glad I am to remember it. A man should do such things while he can, teaching his feet to feel the ground, and letting his heart cheer him.
A turn in the road, and straight below me lies my deserted farmhouse. Another turn, and I lose it. In ascending a mountain we face the path; in descending we face the world. I speak thus because at this moment I am looking down a charming vista,—forest-covered mountains, row beyond row. But for the gravel under my feet I might be a thousand miles from any human habitation. Presently a Swainson thrush whistles. By that token I am getting away from the summit, though things are still wintry enough, with no sign of bud or blossom.
And look! What is that far below me, facing up the road? A four-footed beast of some kind. A bear? No; I raise my glass, and see a porcupine. He has his mobile, sensitive nose to the ground, and continues to smell, and perhaps to feed, as I draw nearer and nearer. By and by, being very near, and still unworthy of the creature’s notice, I roll a stone toward him. At this he shows a gleam of interest. He sits up, folds his hands,—puts his fore paws together over his breast,—looks at me, and then waddles a few steps toward the upper side of the road. “I must be getting out of this,” he seems to think. But he reconsiders his purpose, comes back, sits on end again and folds his hands; and then, the reconnoissance being satisfactory, falls to smelling the ground as before. I can see the tips of his nostrils twitching as in a kind of ecstasy. There must be something savory under them. Meantime, still with my glass lifted, I come closer and closer, till I am right upon him. If porcupines can shoot, I must be in danger of a quill. Another step or two, and he waddles to the lower side of the road. He is a vacillating body, however; and once more he turns to sit up and fold his hands. This time I hear him rattling his teeth, but not very fiercely,—nothing to compare with the gnashings of an angry woodchuck; and at last, when I cluck to him, he hastens his steps a little, as much, perhaps, as a porcupine can, and disappears in the brush, dragging his ridiculous, sloping, straw-thatched hinder parts—a combination of lean-to and L—after him. He has never cultivated speed or decision of character, having a better defense. So far as appearances go, he is certainly an odd one.
There are no blossoms yet, nor visible promise of any, but once in a while a bright Atalanta (red admiral) butterfly flits before me. I wonder if I could capture one by the old schoolboy method? I am moved to try; but my best effort—not very determined, it must be confessed—ends in failure. Perhaps I should have had some golden apples.
At last I come to a few adder’s-tongues, the first flowers since the five or six spring-beauties a mile and a half back. Yes, I am approaching the Flower Garden; for here is a most lovely bank of yellow violets, a hundred or two together, a real bed of them. Nobody ever saw anything prettier. Here, also, is the showy purple trillium, not so unhandsomely overgrown as it sometimes is, in addition to all the flowers that I noticed on the ascent. A garden indeed. I pull up a root of Dutchman’s-breeches, and sit down to examine the cluster of rice-like pink kernels at the base of the stem. Excellent fodder they must make for animals of some kind. “Squirrel-corn” is an apt name, I think, though I believe it is applied, not to this species, but to its relative, Dicentra Canadensis.
The whole plant is uncommonly clean-looking and attractive, with its pale, finely dissected leaves and its delicate, waxy bloom; but looking at it, and then at a bank of round-leaved violets opposite, I say once more, “Those are my flowers.” Something in the shade of color is most exactly to my taste. The very sight of them gladdens me like sunshine. But before I get out of the garden, as I am in no haste to do (if it was attractive this morning, it is doubly so now, after those miles of snowbanks), I am near to changing my mind; for suddenly, as my eye follows the border of the road, it falls upon a small blue violet, the first of that color that I have noticed since my arrival at Moosilauke. It must be my long-desired Selkirkii, I say to myself, and down I go to look at it. Yes, it is not leafy-stemmed, the petals are not bearded, and the leaves are unlike any I have ever seen. I take it up, root and all, and search carefully till I find one more. If it is Selkirkii, as I feel sure it is,[4] then I am happy. This is the one species of our eastern North American violets that I have never picked. It completes my set. And it is especially good to find it here, where I was not in the least expecting it. With the two specimens in my pocket I trudge the remaining two miles in high spirits. The violets are no newer to me than the liverwort specimens on Mount Cushman were, but they have the incomparable advantage of things long looked for,—things for the lack of which, so to speak, a pigeonhole in the mind has stood consciously vacant. Blessed are they who want something, for when they get it they will be glad.
The weather below had been warm and still, a touch of real summer. So said the people at the hotel; and I knew it already; for, as I came through the cattle pasture, I saw below me a new, strange-looking, brightly illuminated grove of young birches. “Were those trees there this morning?” I thought. A single day had covered them with sunny, yellow-green leaves, till the change was like a miracle. Indeed, it was a miracle. May the spring never come when I shall fail to feel it so. Then I looked back at the summit. Was it there, no farther away than that, that so icy a wind had chased me about?—or had I been in Greenland?
A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON
I went up Mount Washington in the afternoon of August 22d, and came down again in the afternoon of the 29th. Ten years before I had spent a week there, in early July, and had not visited the place since. In some respects, of course, the summit is badly damaged (I have heard it spoken of as utterly ruined) by the presence of the hotel and other buildings, not to mention the railway trains, with their daily freight of bustling lunch-box tourists. Still the railway and the hotel are indisputable conveniences; I should hardly have stayed there so long without them; and in this imperfect world we must not expect to find all the good things in one basket.