I had seen more; I had seen, or my mind being prepossessed by one image, I had shaped the reality to the imagination, as ghost-seers do, and in the pedestrian had seen that form that henceforward is to me as if it had passed the bourne whence no traveler returns. It was a mere fancy. Alice—she is a cautious little woman—was continually looking back, from fear; and I—I may as well confess it—from hope; but we saw nothing more of the traveler. He was truly a fugitive from us—or, more probably, in spite of the gentlemanly graces my imagination had lent him, a collier returning to his shanty in the forest. The apparition had spoiled our twilight walk. The brief twilight of October was shortened by the mountains that rise like walls on either side of the road, and Alice hurried forward, so that we had no time to look for the cascades, and forms of animals, and profiles of men, that we had been forewarned we should see on the hill-sides. The stars were coming out, and the full moon—indicated by the floods of silver light it sent up from behind Mount Webster—when we passed through the portal of the 'Notch' and came upon the level area where the 'Crawford House' now stands.

Here we found my father, already seated in a rocking-chair by a broad hearthstone and a roaring, crackling fire. And beside these cheering types of home-contentments, he had found a gentleman from the low-country, with whom he was already in animated discourse. The stranger was a fine, intelligent, genteel-looking person, who proved to be a clergyman whom Alice had once before met at the Flume-House. He is a true lover of nature and explorer of nature's secrets, a geologist, botanist, etc., etc., and he most wisely comes up to the high places at all seasons, whenever he feels the need of refreshment to his bodily and mind's eye. Perhaps he finds here an arcana for his theology; and I am sure that after a study here he may go hence a better as well as a wiser man, and better able, by his communings here, to inform and mold the minds of others. No teachers better understood the sources and means of mental power and preparation than Moses and Mohammed; and their studies were not in theological libraries, but in the deepest of nature's solitudes.

Perhaps our friend has no direct purpose beyond his own edification in his rambles in the mountains. He is familiar with every known resort among them, and most kindly disposed to give us thoroughfare travelers information. He made for us, from memory, a pencil-sketch of the peaks to be seen from Mount Willard, with their names. We verified them to-day, and found the outline as true as if it had been daguerreo-typed. An observation so keen, and a memory so accurate, are to be envied.

This house, at the Mountain Notch, is called the Crawford House. The old Crawford House, familiar to the pioneer travelers in this region, stands a few rods from it, or rather did, till the past winter, when it was burned, and its site is now marked by a few charred timbers. Old Crawford's memory will live, as one of these eternal hills bears his name. He lived to a good old age, and for many years in rather awful solitude here, and at the last with some of the best blessings that wait on age, 'respect, and troops of friends.' His son—whose stature, broad shoulders, and stolid aspect bring to mind the Saxon peasant of the middle ages—is driver, in the season, and sportsman in and out of it. He stood at the door this morning as we were driving off to the Falls of the Ammonoosuck, with his fowling-piece in hand, and asked leave to occupy a vacant seat in the wagon. My father was a sportsman in his youth—some forty years ago; his heart warms at the sight of a gun, and besides, I fancy, he had some slight hope of mending our cheer by a brace of partridges; so he very cheerfully acquiesced in Crawford's request. Alice and I plied him with questions, hoping to get something out of an old denizen of the woods. But he knew nothing, or would tell nothing; the 'tongues in trees' were far more fluent than his. But even so stony a medium had power, afterward, to make my heart beat. I was standing near him at the Falls, and away from the rest, and I asked him (Sue, I confess I have been either thinking or dreaming of that 'fugitive' all night) if he had seen a foot-traveler pass along the road last evening or this morning. 'No; there was few travelers any way in October.' He vouchsafed a few more words, adding: 'It's a pity folks don't know the mountains are never so pretty as in October, and sport never so smart!' Was there ever a sportsman the dullest, the most impassive, but he had some perception of woodland beauty? While we were talking, and I was seemingly measuring with my eye the depth of the water, as transparent as the air, my father and sister had changed their position, and come close to me. 'Oh!' said the man, 'I recollect—I did see a stranger on Mount Willard this morning, when I went out with my gun—he was drawing the mountains; a great many of the young folks try to do it, but they don't make much likeness.'

Perhaps this timely generalization of friend Crawford, prevented my father and Alice's thought following the direction of mine. I know this youth is not Carl Heiner, it is not even possible he should be; and yet, the resemblance that in my one glance I had fancied to perceive to him, and the coincidence of the sketching, had invested him with a power to make my cheeks burn, and my hands cold as ice. I stole off and looked at the deep, smooth cavities the water had welled in the rocks, but I did not escape my sister's woman's eye.

'Mary, dear,' she whispered, when she joined me, 'you are not so strong as you think yourself.'

Dear Susan, if I am not strong, I will be patient; patience, you will say, implies a waiting for something to come; well, let it be so; can a spark of hope live under the ashes I have heaped upon it?

The rocks are very beautiful at these Falls of the Ammonoosuck. The stream which never here can be a river, is now, by the unusual droughts of the summer, shrunken to a mere rill, but even now, and at all seasons, it must be worth the drive to see it. Worth the drive! a drive any where in these hills 'pays'—to borrow the slang of this bank-note world—for itself. It is a pure enjoyment. On our return we repeatedly saw young partridges in our path, nearly as tame as the chickens of the Casse-cour. The whir-r-ing of their wings struck a spark even from our sportsman's eye, and—a far easier achievement—started the blood in my father's veins. The instinct to kill game is, I believe, universal with man, else how should it still live in my father, who, though he blusters like Monkbarns, is very much of an Uncle Toby in disposition. He sprang from the wagon, borrowed Crawford's gun, and reminding Alice and me so much of Mr. Pickwick, that we laughed in spite of our terror lest he should kill, not the partridge, but himself; but, luckily, he escaped unhurt—and so did the bird. Crawford secured two or three brace of them in the course of the morning's drive. I fear we shall relish them at breakfast, to-morrow, in spite of our lamentations over their untimely loss of their pleasant mountain-life. I asked our driver how they survived the winter (if haply they escaped the fowler) in these high latitudes? 'Oh!' he said, 'they had the neatest way of folding their legs under their wings and lying down in the snow.' They subsist on berries and birchen-buds—dainty fare, is it not?

We found a very comfortable dinner awaiting us, which rather surprised us, as our landlord, Mr. Lindsay, a very civil, obliging person, and a new proprietor here, I believe, had promised us but Lenten entertainment; but 'deeds, not words,' seems the motto of these mountaineers.