To turn from the tumult to things near by is to find the forests of the mountain coming down through the pastures to look in friendly fashion over the walls at the clean mowing fields. On these they do not encroach, and though they continually press in upon the pastures and narrow their boundaries they do it gently and with such patient urbanity that the open spaces hardly know when they cease to be and the woodland occupies them. The flowers of the pasture sunshine grow thus for years in the forest shadows before they realize that they are out of place and hasten back to seek the full sunshine, and the trillium and clintonia and a host of other shade-loving things move out into the open and mingle with the buttercups and blue violets, sure that the trees will follow them. Thus gently does nature repair the ravages that have been wrought by the hand of man. Yet all through the mountain region she moves on, and fewer farms nestle in the giants' footfall on the high ridges than were there fifty or a hundred years ago. In many cases the summer hotel or the summer residence has taken the place of the one-time farm-house, but the dwellers in these encourage the wood rather than hold it at bay. The lumbermen make sad havoc among the big trees, but the forest acreage is greater in the mountains now than it was a century ago, more than making up in breadth what it loses in height.
In this low growth of the pastures about the farms high on Iron Mountain the June sunshine seems to pass into living forms of plant and animal life. Not only do the dandelions and buttercups blossom with their gold in all the moist, rich soil, but out of the green of forest leaves and the deep shadows of the wood it flutters upon quivering wings. The yellow warblers that flit and sing vigorously among the young birches are touched with the olive of the gentler shadows, but as they sing their vigorous "Wee-chee, chee, chee, cher-wee" their plumage is as full of the sunshine gold as are the dandelion blooms. The myrtle warblers of the spiring spruces, the magnolias, Blackburnians, mourning, Canadian and Wilson's, are flecked with it, and the forest shadows that touch them too only seem to bring it out the more clearly. But these are birds of the wood or its edges. In the trees that stand clear of the forest the goldfinches sing as if they were canaries, caged within the limits of the farm, their gold the brightest of all that which the birds show, the black of their wings densest, the color of night in the bottom of the glen, under evergreens. The thrushes that sing in the deep woods far down the mountain chant prayers, even until noon, the warblers in a thousand trees twitter simple ditties that are the mother-goose melodies of the forest world, cosy, fireside refrains hummed over and over again, but the goldfinches are the choristers of the summer sunshine when it floods the open spaces. They seem to be the familiar bird spirits of summer on the little mountain farms.
As the sunshine blossoms from the mountain meadows, as it flits and sings in the forest margins and in the goldfinch-haunted trees of the open farm, so it is born even from the twigs in the deeper wood, far up above the highest farm on the way to the summit of Iron Mountain. Great yellow butterflies, tiger swallowtails, flutter in the dapple of light and shadow, their gold the sunlight that flows across them as they sail by. A few days ago not one of these soaring beauties was in all the woodland; then, of a day, the place was alive with them. Born of chrysalids that have wintered under dry bark and in the shelter of rocks and fallen leaves, passing unharmed through gales and cold that registered forty below and six feet of hardened snow? Nonsense! Watch the play of sunlight on young leaves of transparent green. See it flame with shining gold, stripe them with rippling shadows of twigs, and then see the whole quiver into free life and flutter away, a tiger-swallowtail butterfly, and believe these spirits of the woodland shadows are born in any other way, if you can. Papilio turnus may come out as chrysalids in scientists' insectaries, but these woodland sprites are born of the love of sunshine for young leaves and quiver into June to be the first messengers of the full tide of summer, which neither comes up to the mountains from the south nor falls to them from the sky, but is a miracle of the same desire.
It is for such miracles that the young shoots of the forest undergrowth ask as they come forth each year with their tender leaves clasped like hands in prayer. Through May you shall see this attitude of supplication in the young growth all along the mountain-sides where the shade of the woods is deep, and it lingers with the later-growing shrubs and herbs even until this season. Most devout of these seems the ginseng, its trinity of arms coming from the mould in this prayerful attitude, and now that these have spread wide to receive the good and perfect gifts that they know are coming the trinity of leaflets at their tips are still clasped most humbly. So it is with the bellwort and the Solomon's seal and many another gentle herb of the shadows. Their leaf hands are clasped in prayer as they come forth, and their heads are bowed in humble adoration all summer long. The joy of warmth and the sweetness of summer rain are theirs already, and one might think it was for these creature comforts that the prayer had been. But it was not. It was, and is, for grace of bloom and the dear delight of ripening fruit, the one deep wish of all the world.
The very summit of Iron Mountain, 2725 feet above the sea level, is a plateau of broken rock, scattered over solid ledges which protrude through the débris. Trees and shrubs of the slopes and the lowland have climbed to this plateau, poplar and birch, bird cherry, sumac, dwarf blueberries and alder, that find a footing here and there among the crevices. Spruces, somewhat dwarfed and scattered but spiring primly, are there, too, and the whole concourse makes the bleak rock glade-like and friendly, yet do not altogether obstruct the outlook. The breath of summer has pinked the young cones on the spruce tops and robed them in the gold of pollen-bearing catkins. It has set silver reflections shimmering from the young leaves of poplar and birch, and the dwarf blueberries are pearled with white bloom. Other spirits of summer are among these; alert, frantically hasty skipper butterflies dash about among them, and a big, lank mountain variety of bumblebee drones from clump to clump, showing a broad band of deep orange across the gold and black of his back. He is a big and husky mountaineer of a bee, but buzzing with him comes a clearwing moth, the spring form of the snowberry clearwing. Hæmorrhagia diffinis, if I am not mistaken, though I hardly expected to find this little day-flying moth at so great an elevation so far north. The very spirit of summer, the tiger-swallowtail butterfly, was there, too, hovering confidingly at the tip of my pencil as I wrote about him, and with him the black, gold-banded Eastern swallowtail, Papilio asterias, these two the largest butterflies of the summit. Of all the insect life, large or small, that revelled in the vivid sunlight of the thin air of the little plateau the most numerous were the little bluebottle flies that hummed there in swarms, very busy about their business, whatever it was, filling the air with glints of the deepest, most scintillant azure.
But he who climbs Iron Mountain will not linger too long with the summer denizens of its little rocky plateau. From the cairn which mountaineers have built of its loose rocks the eye has a wide sweep of the mountain world in every direction. To the south the land fades into shadowy mountains far down the Ossipee Valley, mountains that seem to float there in a soft, violet haze as if they were but massed bloom of the Gulf Stream that flows and gives off its wondrous colors half a thousand miles farther on. East the tossing sea is dappled with green and blue as the cloud shadows follow one another over the forest growth. West the peaks against the sun loom blue-black and stern as they climb northward into the Presidential Range, lifting their summits over the rough ridge of the Montalban Range till one wonders what wildernesses lie in the shadowy ravines between the two. But whether to the east or the west the gaze still falls upon a surging sea of forest-clad granite, the very picture of tumultuous motion, till the cairn beneath the gazer takes on the semblance of a mainmast-head on which he stands, and from which the plunge of the ship may at any moment send him whirling into space.
To look northward from this main-truck is to get a further insight into the mystery of the motion. Here, as the clouds blow away from the upper slopes of the highest peak, the semblance of a tossing sea vanishes, and one seems to understand what happened here in an age long gone. Once upon a time this mountain earth must have been fluid, one thinks, and the wind have blown an antediluvian gale from the northwest. It sent great waves of earth tossing and rolling and riding southeast before it, with clouds for crests and the blue haze of distance for the scurrying spindrift. Then uprose from the depths of this awful sea Mount Washington, enthroned on the Presidential Range, "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," and commanded the tumult to cease. There it stands.