There was a brief ride remaining, then, till they rolled in over a level road, through thick overhanging woods, to the Crawford House in the White Mountain Notch. The mist had closed almost hopelessly down for the time, and they could only see occasional glimmers through it of the rough sides of old Mount Webster, dark-browed and massive as its namesake. It was only in the brighter air of morning that they were to take in the whole location and see in front, to the right, Mount Willard, wooded on the side exposed to view, but bald and rugged farther down the Notch, like the Cannon at Franconia; with Mount Jackson to the left in front, beyond it the still higher peaks of Mount Webster, and rising at the left in the immediate foreground the long wooded slopes of Mount Clinton, over which the foot of every pilgrim to Mount Washington from the Crawford must make its first ascent.
The dull weather had driven almost all the visitors within doors, at the Crawford as at the Profile; but as the splashed coach rolled up there was at least one recognition—that of Halstead Rowan by Horace Townsend, the former, without any apparent reference to the humidity of the atmosphere, lying at lazy length on three chairs on the piazza and occupied with a cigar and a cheap novel. He had "shed" (that word seems to express the fact better than any other) his over-sized glove from his wounded hand, and seemed entirely to have recovered the use of that important member.
New acquaintances become old and ripen into friendships, very soon when all other surroundings are totally strange; and the two men, each so odd in his way, greeted each other as if they had been friends for a decade instead of intimates of less than a week. There may have been some bond in common, in the guess which each could make of the thoughts and entanglements of the other, calculated to force that friendship forward, even if it would have progressed more slowly under other circumstances.
The first inquiry of Townsend, as they shook each other warmly by the hand, was:
"Been up Mount Washington yet?"
"Not this time!" answered the other, significantly. "The fog has been nearly thick enough to swim in, ever since I have been here, and I do not know, if I had been as good a swimmer as you, Townsend, whether I should not have tried going up by water, as our friend Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame went up the Alps; but by land the thing has been impossible."
"Many waiting to go up?—or do they nearly all go around to the Glen, this season?" was the next inquiry.
"No, there are a good many sensible people left," was the reply, in the same tone of vivacious rattle. "Think of going up Mount Washington in a carriage! It is worse than making a mill-race out of Niagara, or approaching Jerusalem, as they will do one of these days, I suppose, amid the rumble and whistle of a railroad-train."
"Don't undervalue your own employment!" said Townsend.
"Oh, I do not," was the reply. "Railroad trains, as well as mills, are very good things in their places; but I suppose that a prejudice will always exist in favor of the fiery chariot instead of the balloon, as a means of making ascents into the celestial regions."