In the lake itself grows the tape grass, stretching its straw-yellow ribbons along the surface and curiously ripening its knobby fruit under water. With it in scattered groups was the yellow pond-lily, its broad, ovate leaves floating and turning up their edges to the gusts of the south wind that swung in over the corner of the mountain. Strange indeed these familiar water plants looked in this little tarn swung more than four thousand feet in air on the shoulder of so mighty a mountain. All other mountain lakes at such heights had seemed weird to me in the crystalline barrenness of their purity. This one with its boggy shore, its mud and its homely water weeds was so friendlily familiar that I lingered long on its banks. The southerly wind had massed its clouds high above the Notch, and in their shadow the dusk of early nightfall was on the path and deep in the woods on my way down. Yet in the bottom of the deep defile between Lafayette and Cannon I saw the north wind again pressing on to victory, scattering the clouds above Mount Cannon and letting the sunset light through far over its northerly slopes. The nimbus broke into cumulus clouds, and these to fluffs of cirrus that showed at first an angry red. Then this softened to pink and finally dimpled into miles of gold between which the depths of the sky showed a pure blue of forgiveness such as can be found in heaven only when one looks up into it from the bottom of a deep like that of Profile Notch. Not in flowers or gems or in the pure eyes of children can be found such a blue as the Franconia sky showed, out of which night and deep peace settled like a benediction on the mountains.
XVIII
A MOUNTAIN FARM
One on Wildcat Mountain the Highest Ever Cleared in New England
Last night the north wind died of its own cold among the high peaks and black frost bit deep down in the valley meadows, killing all tender herbage. Then morning broke in a sky of crystal clarity, of a blue as pure and cool as the hope of Heaven in the heart of a Puritan, through miles of which all objects showed as if through a lens. From the ledges of Wildcat Mountain I looked over to the summit of Mount Washington, whose details were so plain that the five trains that came up were visible to the naked eye, and with glass I could see the people flow from them in a slow black stream, its tide flecked with the flotsam of fall millinery. So still was the air upon the summit that from each engine as it came in sight over the ridge stood high and straight a cloudy pillar of mingled smoke and steam. The Israelites who of old were thus led through the wilderness to the promised land could have had no more visible guide. Slowly to the mountain rim sank the frosted fragment of the once round and yellow moon, a wan, gray ghost seeking obliteration in the grayer ledges of the summit cone.
On these gray ledges of the cone the scant herbage of the summer clung in flowing, warm, tan-brown streaks drifting down as snow does from the summit, but coloring only perhaps a twentieth part of the surface. All else was the gray of the rock, softened by distance into a cool delight to the eye. Lower the Alpine Garden slants toward the ravines, black in patches with dwarf firs, soft green in others where in moist hollows the grasses and moss still grow, but for the most part showing the olive yellow of autumn-tinted tundra. Only below this, where the garden drops off steeply to the slope between Tuckerman and Huntington ravines, was the rich yellow of the dwarf birches to be seen, here a clear sweep of color, lower still mottled with the black growth of spruce and fir.
There was never a flame of rock maple in sight on all the visible slope of the big mountain, but below, in the middle distance of a slope up to Slide Peak, below the boulder and from there down into Pinkham Notch, they flared, one after another, ending in a blazing group whose conflagration was stabbed by the points of the firs on the near slope of Wildcat.
Such beauties as these the mountains set daily before the eyes of the man who hewed out the highest farm in New England, a century or less ago, on the high shoulder of a westerly spur of Wildcat Mountain. Few New Englanders are farmers now. In the eighteenth century most of them were, and the tide of young men who had the courage and the brawn to build farms in the wilderness rose high in the New Hampshire hills. The river-bottom lands were taken up, then the lower valleys, then the higher slopes, and finally, as the nineteenth century grew, the ultimate pioneers landed on the very shoulders of the White Mountains. Up the valley of the Wildcat River climbed the Fernalds, the Hayeses, the Wilsons, the Meserves, Wentworths, Johnsons and half a dozen other pioneer families, each hewing out of the terrific timber and grubbing out of the grim rocks with infinite labor the fields that to this day smile up to the sun.
