“I will. When the votes were counted, at sundown, it was found that our precinct had elected two representatives to the General Court. But when the successful candidates presented their certificates at Concord, some meddlesome city fellow questioned the validity of the election. The upshot of it was that the two nitro-glycerites came back with a flea in each ear.”
“And the five hundred were disfranchised,” said George.
“Why, as to that, half were French Canadians, half Irish, and the devil knows what the rest were; I don’t.”
“Never mind the rest. You see,” said George, rising, “how, with the railway, the blessings of civilization penetrate into the dark corners of the earth.”
The colonel began his sacramental, “That beats—” when he was interrupted by a second explosion, which shook the building. We paid our reckoning, George saying, as he threw his money on the table, “A heavy charge.”
“No more than the regular price,” said the landlord, stiffly.
“I referred, my dear sir, to the explosion,” replied George, with the sardonic grin habitual to him on certain occasions.
“Oh!” said the host, resuming his pipe and his fireplace.
We spent the remaining hours of this memorable afternoon sauntering through the Notch, which is dripping with cascades, and noisy with mountain torrents. The Saco, here nothing but a brook, crawls languidly along its bed of broken rock. From dizzy summit to where they meet the river, the old wasted mountains sit warming their scarred sides in the sun. Looking up at the passage of the railway around Mount Willey, it impressed us as a single fractured stone might have done on the Great Pyramid, or a pin’s scratch on the face of a giant. The locomotive, which groped its way along its broken shell, stopped, and stealthily moving again, seemed a mouse that the laboring mountain had brought forth. But when its infernal clamor broke the silence, what demoniacal yells shook the forests! Farewell to our dream of inviolable nature. The demon of progress had forced his way into the very sanctuary. There were no longer any White Mountains.
We passed by the beautiful brook Kedron, flung down from the utmost heights of Willey, between banks mottled with colors. Then, high up on our right, two airy water-falls seemed to hang suspended from the summit of Webster. These, called respectively the Silver Cascade, and the Flume withdrew the attention from every other object, until a sharp turn to the right brought the overhanging precipice of Mount Willard full upon us. This enormous mass of granite, rising seven hundred feet above the road, stands in the very jaws of the gorge, which it commands from end to end.