“That’s what the Old Man of the Mountain is forever looking at, boys,” said Mr. Rogers. “Not a bad view, eh?”
“It’s wonderful!” said Lou.
The Scouts now lay down on the rocks, and Mr. Rogers opened the book to the story of “The Great Stone Face.”
“This story,” he began, “was written in Berkshire County, pretty close to our home—in Lenox, in a little red house at the head of Stockbridge Bowl, in the summer of 1851, when Hawthorne was living there. It isn’t exactly about this particular Old Man of the Mountain, as you will see from the description. It’s really about a sort of ideal great stone face. But of course it was suggested to Hawthorne by this one.”
Then he read the story aloud. I wish all my readers, before they go any further in this book, would get Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales,” and read it, too, right now. If you’ve read it before, read it again. And try to imagine, as you read it, that Rob and Lou and Frank and Art and Peanut were listening to it, not in school, not in a house, but sitting fifteen hundred feet above the Notch, almost on the forehead of the Great Stone Face itself, and looking off at exactly the same view he looks at, fifty miles into the blue distance.
When Mr. Rogers had finished the story, none of the boys spoke for a minute. Then Peanut said, his brows contracted, “I’m not sure I quite get it.”
Lou was gazing off thoughtfully down the valley.
“I think it means that Ernest was the man who fulfilled the prophecy and grew to look like the Great Stone Face because he didn’t try to become rich, or a great fighter, or a politician, or even a poet looking for fame, but just tried to live as good a life as he could. He was a kind of still man, and it makes you want to be still and just sit and think, to look out over the world the way the Great Stone Face does.”
Mr. Rogers nodded his head in approval. “You’ve got the idea, Lou,” he said. “I want all of you to get something of it, too. There is a lot to be learned from mountains as well as fun to be had climbing them. I don’t believe any of you realized that to-day is Sunday, did you?”
“Gee, I hadn’t!” cried Peanut “Tramping this way, you lose track of time.”