The pasture ferns climb too, and the pasture birds love the wooded summit as well as they do the slopes far below the pioneer's farm. The June delight which echoes in the bobolink music in the meadows so far below sweeps up the mountain-side in scent and song and color till it blossoms from the Puritan spruces on the very top of Thorn. There one glimpses the rare outpouring of joy that comes from reticent natures. They are in love, these prim black spruces, and they cannot wholly hide it however hard they try. Instead they tremble into bloom at the twig tips, and what were brown and sombre buds become nodding blossoms of gold that thrill to the fondling of wind and sun and scatter incense of yellow pollen all down the mountain-side. In the distance they are prim and black-robed still, but to go among them is to see that they wear this yellow pollen robe in honor of June, a shimmering transparent silk of palest cloth of gold. More than that, their highest plumes blush into pink shells of acceptance of joy, pistillate blooms of translucent rose as dear and wondrous in their colors of dawn as any shells born of crystalline tides, in tropic seas, blossoms whose fulfilment shall be prim brown cones, but each of which is now a fairy Venus, born of the golden foam of June joy which mantles the slender trees. Only with the coming of June to the mountains can one believe this of the spruces, because seeing it he knows it true.
The little god of love has shot his arrow to the hearts of the trembling spruces, and he sings among their branches in many forms. The blackburnian warbler lisps his high-pitched "zwee-zwee-zwee-se-ee-ee" all up the slope of Thorn to the summit and shows his orange throat and breast in vivid color among the dark leaves. The black-throated green, moving nervously about with a black stock over his white waistcoat, sings his six little notes, and the magnolia warbles hurriedly and excitedly his short, rapidly uttered song. The mourning warbler imitates the water-thrush of the misty banks of Jackson Falls, and the Connecticut warbler echoes in some measure the "witchery, witchery" of the Maryland yellow-throats, both birds that have elected to stay behind with the bobolinks.
Thus carolled through cool shadows where the striped moosewood hangs its slender racemes of green blossoms, you come rather suddenly out on the bare ledges which face northerly from the summit. Truly to see the mountains best one should look at the big ones from the little ones. Here is the same view that Gerrish had from his farm, only that you have a wider sweep of horizon. Over the Rocky Branch Ridge to the westward rises the Montalban Range, with the sun swinging low toward Parker and Resolution and getting ready to climb down the Giant's Stairs and vanish behind Jackson and Webster. Everywhere peak answers to peak, and you look over low banks of mist that float upward from unknown glens, forming level clouds on which the summits seem to sit enthroned like deities of a pagan world. There is little of the bleak débris of battle with wind and cold on the summit of Thorn. It is but 2265 feet above sea level, lower than most of the mountains about it, and the trees that climb to its top and shut off the view to the east and south are in no wise dwarfed by the struggle to maintain themselves there. But from it one gets a far better outlook on mountain grandeur than from many a greater height. Washington holds the centre of the stage which one here views from a balcony seat, seeming to rise in splendid dignity from the glen down which the Ellis River flows, and it is no wonder that there is a well-worn path from the Gerrish farm to the point of the Thorn.
It may be that the pioneer who first hewed the mountain farm from the forest also first trod this path to the very summit of the little mountain. It may be that he got a wide enough sweep of the great hills on the horizon to the north and west from his own doorstone. But I like to think that once in a while, of a Sunday afternoon perhaps, he went to the peak and dreamed dreams of greater empire and higher aspirations even than his mountain farm held for him. There is a tonic in the air and an inspiration in the outlook from these summits that should make great and good men of us all. These linger long in the memory after the climb. But longer perhaps even than the hopes the summit gives will linger in the memory of him who climbs Thorn Mountain in early June the recollection of two things, one at least not of the summit. The first is the joy of June in the bobolink meadows far down toward Jackson Falls, the celestial melodies that the bobolinks echo as they flutter upward in the vivid sunshine and sing again to mingle their white and gold with that of the flowers that bloom the meadow through. The other is the bewildering beauty of the once black and sombre spruces in their sudden draperies of golden staminate bloom, looped and crowned with the pistillate shells which so soon will be prim brown cones. The bobolinks will sing in the meadows for many weeks. The mountains will blossom with one color after another till late September brings the miracle of autumn leaves to set vast ranges aflame from glen to summit, but only for a little time are the spruces so filled with the full tide of happiness that they put on their veils of diaphanous gold and their rosy ornaments of new-born cones. It is worth a trip into the hills and a long climb to see these at their best, which is when the bobolinks have eggs in the brown nests in the meadow grass and the blue violets are smiling up from the rock crevices in the midst of the tumult of Jackson Falls.
III
CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN
Some Joys of an Easy Ascent Near Jackson
The dawn lingers long in the depths of the deciduous woods that line the eastern slope of Iron Mountain. You may hear the thrushes singing matins in the green gloom after the sun has peered over Thorn and lighted the grassy levels in the hollow where Jackson wakes to the carols of field-loving birds. The veery is the bellman to this choir, ringing and singing at the same time, unseen in the shadows, the notes of bell and song mingling in his music till the two are one, the very tocsin of a spirit in the high arches of the dim woodland temple, calling all to prayer. The wood thrushes respond, serene in the knowledge of all good, voices of pure and holy calm, rapturous indeed, but only with the pure joy of worship and thoughts of things most high. So it is with the hermit thrushes that sing with them, nor shall you know the voice of the hermit from that of the wood thrush by greater purity of tone or exaltation of spirit, though perhaps it falls to the hermits to voice the more varied passages of the music. Of all bird songs that of these thrushes seems to be most worshipful and to touch the purest responsive chords in the human heart. As they lead the wayfarer's spirit upward, so they seem to lead his feet toward the mountain top, the cool forest shades where they sing alternating with sunny glades as he scales the heights with the mountain road, which climbs prodigiously.
Way up the mountain the sunny glades widen in places to mountain farms, their pastures set on perilous slants, so that one wonders if the cattle do not sometimes roll down till checked by the woodland growth below, but their cultivated fields more nearly level, spots seemingly crushed out of the slopes by the weight of giant footsteps, descending. The wooded growth and ledges of the summit leap upward from the southern and western edges of these clearings, but to the north and east the glance passes into crystal mountain air and penetrates it mile on mile to the blue summits that cut the horizon in these directions. Far below lie the valleys, with the smaller hills that seem so high from the grassy plains about Jackson village smudged and flattened from crested land waves to ripples. Highest of all mountain cots is the Hayes farm-house, its well drawing ice water from frozen caverns deep in the heart of the height and its northern outlook such as should breed heroes and poets through living cheek by jowl with sublimity. Here the mighty swell of the mountain sea has sunk the rippling hills below, but the sweep of crested land waves leaps on, high above them. Looking eastward, one seems to be watching from the lift and roll of an ocean liner's prow as the great ship runs down a gale. Out from far beneath you and beyond roar toppling blue crests, ridge piling over ridge. Thorn Mountain, Tin and Eagle are the nearer waves, their outline rising and falling and showing beyond them Black Mountain and the two summits of Doublehead, and beyond them Shaw and Gemini and Sloop, great billows rising and rolling on. Down upon the forest foam left behind in the hollows of these rides the Carter Moriah Range, a jagged, onrushing ridge, driven by the same gale. The day may be calm to all senses but the eye, yet there is the sea beneath you and beyond, tossed mountain high by the tempest.