MR. BARNES DISCOVERS A VALUABLE CLUE.
Immediately after the wedding Mr. Mitchel and his bride started west, intending to spend their honeymoon in the Yosemite Valley, having promised Mrs. Remsen and Dora, however, to join them in the White Mountains before the end of the season. About the first of July the Remsens and the Van Rawlstons went to Jefferson, New Hampshire, a small town along the base of the Pliny Range of mountains, from which a magnificent view of the Presidential Range, only ten miles away, is to be obtained. About the middle of the month Mr. Randolph determined to visit the same place, and was intensely disgusted on alighting from the stage, which reaches the Waumbeck Hotel about eight o'clock at night, to be greeted familiarly by Mr. Alphonse Thauret. It was evident that his rival did not intend to lose any chance to win the hand of Dora Remsen.
If one has anything of the artistic in his nature he could scarcely fail to enjoy himself at Jefferson. The town is practically a single road, well up the side of the mountain range. Thus the hotels all look out over a long and beautiful valley. From the piazza of the Waumbeck, on a clear day, no less than thirty-five mountain peaks can be easily counted, the Green Mountains over in Vermont being visible as a distant line of blue, and not in the total.
Of course the most conspicuous and most admired peak is Mount Washington. One who has not visited the region might suppose that he would soon become sated with the sight of the same mountains day after day. This is a great error. All the mountains, and especially Mount Washington, are ever presenting new aspects. All changes of atmosphere produce corresponding variations. The shadows of passing clouds, the effects at sunrise or at sunset, the moonlight, the partly cloudy weather when the top of the mountain is hidden, the mists, and the rain, all offer such totally different coloring and picturesque effects that the artistic eye is never tired.
Dora was an artist in every fibre of her being, as one would know who listened to her talking to Mr. Randolph half an hour after his arrival, as they sat together on the piazza. In his delight to be with her and to hear her, he would have forgotten the very existence of Mr. Thauret were it not that he sat near them in the rotunda at the end of the piazza, and so shared the entertainment that she offered.
"What a pity," she was saying, "that you did not come up yesterday. You have missed the grandest sights that mortal ever beheld. I suppose on your trip up you saw nothing beautiful in the rain-storm that we had this afternoon?"
"Nothing whatever," said Mr. Randolph. "However it may have been here among the mountains, the rain did not make the valleys more attractive. Indeed I thought it simply a beastly day."
"What a mistake that you were not here instead of in the horrid cars. Why, I tell you that I haven't words with which to describe the magnificent pictures that I have enjoyed. Yet I am about to try. You must not lose it all, you know. May I tell you about it?"
"Assuredly; I shall be delighted."
"Well, then, to begin; look out over the valley. What do you see?"