There were not less than a dozen persons remaining at the Profile, who had the ascent of Mount Washington yet to make at an early day, and who intended to make it in the good old traditional way of horseback from the Crawford instead of acknowledging modern utility and bowing to the destruction of all romance by going up in carriages from the Glen. Some of these, beginning to be pressed for time, saw the steady rain and mist with impatience and found very little comfort in the assurances of the hotel-keepers, guides and stage-drivers, that the clouds were not likely to break away under a week, at least.
Monday brought this feeling to a culmination, and that morning, spite of all predictions, the impatient dozen ordered a stage and determined to drive over to the Crawford; bespeaking clear weather on the morrow, or on the next day at farthest, for their especial accommodation. Horace Townsend, whether wearied by circumstances which placed him "so near and yet so far" in his acquaintance with Margaret Hayley, or really touched with the prevailing madness for forcing Mount Washington to smile when that great mountain wished to be sullen,—Horace Townsend joined the malcontents and formed one of the closely-packed stage-load that on Monday morning rolled off from the Profile on their way to the Crawford.
The voyagers were pursued by no small number of jokes and jeers from the piazza, as they drove away, on the folly of plunging out into a storm to accomplish an impossibility. But if any one of the number felt for a moment sore in mind and faint-hearted, they were soon consoled. Most of them (mixed male and female, though the former predominating) were true Nature-lovers who had recognized that however Fame and Fortune sometimes play cruel tricks upon their most ardent votaries, the kind Mother seldom failed to unveil her bosom at the coming of one of her true children. They had faith in the future, and that faith was at once repaid in the glory of the present.
For those who have only made the twenty-five miles of stage-ride between the two places, in fair weather, can have no idea of the peculiar charms of that day of capricious rain and floating mist. Closely shut in the lumbering coach, and well enveloped in shawls and dread-noughts and blankets, but with the windows open to allow looking back on the Franconia range they were leaving,—they enjoyed at intervals, during all the earlier portions of the ride, such splendid glimpses of cloud-land as never fall to the lot of mere fair-weather travellers.
At times the shroud of mist which had enveloped them would roll away, as they ascended the high land rising from Franconia towards Bethlehem; and then they would have the peaks of the Franconia range flecked and dotted with swales and waves and crests of transparent white that seemed alternately to be thousands of colossal sheep lying in the mountain pastures,—and again great masses of the purest and softest eider-down which had floated there and rested, from millions of birds filling the whole air above. Mount Lafayette at one moment, as some of the voyagers of that lucky morning will well remember, seemed to be capped and crowned with a wreath of untrodden snow, miles in extent and hundreds of feet in depth—such as no mountain ever wore upon its brow as a coronet, from the first morning of creation.
Exclamations of pleasure filled the coach, and jest and appreciative remark blended in pleasant proximity. "I shall always remember the air of this morning," said one, "as an atmosphere of bridal veils," and more than he treasured up the comparison as one worth remembering. "See here, Cora!" said another, to the only child in the coach, who nestled half asleep on the shoulder of her mother, pointing her attention meanwhile to a little pyramidal hill separate from the mountain range and at that point relieved against it: "See here, Cora! There is a little baby mountain!" "So there is!" answered Cora, with a world of drollery in her young eyes, "I wonder how long before it will grow to be as big as the rest of them!" Whereupon Cora was voted to have the best of the argument, and manhood once more worshipped childhood.
Away past Bethlehem and along the Ammonoosuc, an exaggeration, in its rocks, upon all the other mountain streams, with its few inches of water finding way among a perfect bed of boulders, and making the mere word "navigation" suggest so droll an image in that connection as to draw a loud laugh from the whole coach-load. Then past a couple of fishermen, heedless of the rain, rod in hand and creel at side, standing on the boulders in the middle of the river and practising the mysteries of the Waltonian art, report alleged with more "flies" assisting than those which they carried in their pocket-books! Then on, with the mist again closed down heavily, past the White Mountain House, that once, before the days of glory of the Glen, supplied the only so-called "carriage-road" to the top of Washington.
A mile or two more, and there was a space clear from trees on the left. As the coach swept up to it the mists seemed to shrink low for a moment. A heavy, dark line loomed on the sky, with almost the true sweep of a wide Gothic arch, a little sharpened at the top. "How graceful!" was the exclamation of one. "How high!—look!—why that is higher than any of the others that we have seen!" exclaimed a second. "Mount Washington," calmly said a habitue who caught a glimpse through the curtain from the back corner of the coach; and every voice joined in the cry.
The habitue was right—cloud and mist had rolled away for an instant, just at the opportune moment, and they had caught that magnificent first near view of the monarch, throned amid his clouds, glorious in the grace of form and the awe of majesty—seeming to bridge the very space between earth and heaven! Some of those favored gazers will dream of that first glance, years hence, when they have been straining the mental vision upward, in waking hours, to that unattainable and dim which rises above the mists of common life. Some of them will throne the great mountain in their hearts, and stretch out pleading arms to it in remembrance, in the dark days of shame and sorrow,—as if the treading of their feet upon its rocky pinnacle would be indeed an escape from the world—as if they might become sharers, indeed, in the majesty of its great solitude. Some of the travellers felt the solemnity of the hour and the scene, that day; and there was not even a sneer or a word of misappreciation for the adventurous genius who quoted, heedless of all that made it inappropriate:
"Mount Blanc is the monarch of mountains:
They crowned him long ago,
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
With a diadem of snow!"