NEW HAMPSHIRE

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE

When a man sets forth on an out-of-door pleasure jaunt, his prayer is for weather. If he is going to the mountains, let him double his urgency. In the mountains, if nowhere else, weather is three fifths of life.

My first trip to New Hampshire the present season[1] was made under smooth, high clouds, which left the distance clear, so that the mountains stood up grandly beyond the lake as we ran along its western border. Not a drop of rain fell till I stepped off the car at Warren. At that moment the world grew suddenly dark, and before I could get into the open carriage the clouds burst, and with a rattling of thunder bolts a deluge of rain and hail descended upon us. There was no contending with such an adversary, though a good woman across the way, commiserating our plight, came to the door with proffers of an umbrella. I retreated to the station, while the driver hastened down the street to put his team under shelter. So a half hour passed. Then we tried again, and half frozen, in spite of a winter overcoat and everything that goes with it (the date was May 17), I reached my destination, five miles away, at the foot of Moosilauke.

All this would hardly deserve narration, perhaps (the story of travelers’ discomforts being mostly matter for skipping), only that it marked the setting in of a cold, rainy “spell” that hung upon us for four days. Four sunless days out of seven was a proportion fairly to be complained of. The more I consider it, the truer seems the equation just now stated, that mountain weather is three fifths of life. For those four days I did not even see Moosilauke, though we were living, so to speak, upon its shoulder, and I knew by hearsay that the summit house was visible from the back doorstep.

My first brief walk before supper should reasonably have been in the clearer valley country; but if reason spoke inclination did not hear it, and my feet—which seem to feel that they are old enough by this time to know their master’s business for him—took of their own motion an opposite course. The mountain woods, as I entered them, had the appearance of early March: only the merest sprinkling of new life,—clintonia leaves especially, with here and there a round-leaved violet, both leaves and flowers,—upon a ground still all defaced by the hand of Winter. Dead leaves make an agreeable carpet, as they rustle cheerfully-sadly under one’s feet in autumn; but there was no rustle here; the snow had pressed every leaf flat and left it sodden. One thing consoled me: I had not arrived too late. The “bud-crowned spring,” for all my fears, was yet to “go forth.”

The next morning it was not enough to say that it was cloudy. That impersonal expression would have been quite below the mark. We were cloudy. In short, the cloud was literally around us and upon us. As I stepped out of doors, a rose-breasted grosbeak was singing in one direction, and a white-throated sparrow in another, both far away in the mist. It was strange they should be so happy, I was ready to say. But I bethought myself that their case was no different from my own. It was comparatively clear just about me, while the fog shut down like a curtain a rod or two away, leaving the rest of the world dark. So every bird stood in a ring of light, an illuminated chantry all his own,

Strange had he not been happy. To be blest above one’s fellows is to be blest twice over.

This time I took the downward road, turning to the left, and found myself at once in pleasant woods, with hospitable openings and bypaths; a birdy spot, or I was no prophet, though just now but few voices were to be heard, and those of the commonest. Here stood new-blown anemones, bellworts, and white violets, an early flock, with one painted trillium lording it over them; a small specimen of its kind, but big enough to be king (or shepherd) in such company. A brook, or perhaps two, with the few birds, sang about me, invisible. I knew not whither I was going, and the all-embracing cloud deepened the mystery. Soon the road took a sudden dip, and a louder noise filled my ears. I was coming to a river? Yes, for presently I was on the bridge, with a raging mountain torrent, eighty feet, perhaps, underneath, foaming against the boulders; a bare, perpendicular cliff on one side, and perpendicular spruces and hemlocks draping a similar cliff on the other side. It was Baker’s River, I was told afterward,—the same that I had looked at here and there, the day before, from the car window. It was good to see it so young and exuberant; but even a young river need not be so much in haste, I thought. It would get to the sawmills soon enough, and by and by would learn, too late, that it is only a little way to the sea.

Once over the bridge, the road climbed quickly out of the narrow gorge, and at the first turn brought me in sight of a small painted house, with a small orchard of thrifty-looking small trees behind it. Here a venerable collie came running forth to bark at the stranger, but yielded readily to the usual blandishments, and after sniffing again and again at my heels, just to make sure of knowing me the next time, went back, contented, to lie down in his old place before the window. He was the only person that spoke to me—the only one I met—during the forenoon, though I spent it all on the highway.

Another patch of woods, where a distant Canadian nuthatch is calling (strange how I love that nasal, penetrating, far-reaching voice, whose quality my reasoning taste condemns), and I see before me another house, standing in broad acres of cleared land. This one is not painted, and, as I presently make out, is uninhabited, its old tenant gone, dead or discouraged, and no new one looked for; an “abandoned farm,” such as one grows used to seeing in our northern country. It is beautiful for situation, one of those sightly places which the city-worn passer-by in a mountain wagon pitches upon at once as just the place he should like to buy and retire to—some day; in that autumn of golden leisure of which, now and then,

he has a pleasing vision. Oh yes, he means to do something of that kind—some day; and even while he talks of it he knows in his heart that “some day” is only another name for “next day after never.”

A few happy barn swallows (wise enough, or simple enough, to be happy now) go skimming over the grass, and a pair of robins and a pair of bluebirds seem to be at home in the orchard; which they like none the worse, we may be sure,—the bluebirds, especially,—because, along with the house and the barn, it is falling into decay. What are apple trees for, but to grow old and become usefully hollow? Otherwise they would be no better than so many beeches or butternuts. It is impossible but that every creature should look at the world through its own eyes; and no bluebird ever ate an apple. A purple finch warbles ecstatically, a white-throated sparrow whistles in the distance, and now and then, from far down the slope, I catch the upliftings of a hermit thrush.

A man grows thoughtful, not to say sentimental, in such a place, surrounded by fields on which so many years of human labor have been spent, so much ploughing and harrowing, planting and reaping, now given up again to nature. Here was the garden patch, its outlines still traceable. Here was the well. Long lines of stone wall still separate the mowing land from the pasturage; and scattered over the fields are heaps of boulders, thrown together thus to get them out of the grass’s way. About the edges of every pile, and sometimes through the midst, have sprung up a few shrubs,—shad bushes, cherries, willows, and the like. Here they escape the scythe, as we are all trying to do. “Give us room that we may dwell!”—so these children of Zion cry. It is the great want of seeds, so many millions of which go to waste annually in every acre,—a place in which to take root and (harder yet) to keep it. And the birds, too, find the boulder heaps a convenience. I watch a savanna sparrow as he flits from one to another, stopping to sing a measure or two from each. Even this humble, almost voiceless artist needs a stage or platform. The lowliest sparrow ever hatched has some rudiments of a histrionic faculty; and be we birds or humans, it is hard to do one’s best without a bit of posing.

What further uses these humble stone heaps may serve I cannot say; no doubt they shelter many insects; but it is encouraging to consider how few things a farmer can do that will not be of benefit to others beside himself. Surely the man who piled these boulders for the advantage of his hay crop never expected them to serve as a text for preaching.

The cloud drops again, and is at its old trick of exaggeration. A bird that I take for a robin turns out to be a sparrow. Did it look larger because it seemed to be farther away than it really was? Or is it seen now as it actually is, my vision not being deceived, but rather corrected of an habitual error? The fog makes for me a newer and stranger world, at any rate; I am farther from home because of it; another day’s travel might have done less for me. And for all that, I am not sorry when it rises again, and the hills come out. How beautiful they are! They will hardly be more so, I think, when the June foliage replaces the square miles of bare boughs which now give them a blue-purple tint, interrupted here and there by patches of new yellow-green poplar leaves—a veritable illumination, sun-bright even in this sunless weather—or a few sombre evergreens.

As I get away from the farm, the mountain woods on either side seem to be filled with something like a chorus of rose-breasted grosbeaks. Except for a few days at Highlands, North Carolina, some years ago, I have never seen so many together. A grand “migratory wave” must have broken on the mountains within a night or two. As far as music is concerned, the grosbeaks have the field mostly to themselves, though a grouse beats his drum at short intervals, and now and then a white-throat whistles. There is no bird’s voice to which a fog is more becoming, I say to myself, with a pleasing sense of having said something unintended. To my thinking, the white-throat should always be a good distance away (perhaps because in the mountains one grows accustomed to hearing him thus); and the fog puts him there, with no damage to the fullness of his tone.

Looking at the flowers along the wayside,—a few yellow violets, a patch of spring-beauties, and little else,—my eye falls upon what seems to be a miniature forest of curious tiny plants growing in the gutter. At first I see only the upright, whitish stalks, an inch or two in height, each bearing at the top a globular brown knob. Afterward I discover that the stalks, which, examined more closely, have a crystalline, glassy appearance, spring from a leaf-like or lichen-like growth, lying prostrate upon the wet soil. The plant is a liverwort, or scale-moss, of some kind, I suppose, and is growing here by the mile. How few are the things we see! And of those we see, how few there are concerning which we have any real knowledge,—enough, even, to use words about them! (When a man can do that concerning any class of natural objects, no matter what they are or what he says about them, he passes with the crowd for a scholar, or at the very least a “close observer.”) But to tell the shameful truth, my mood just now is not inquisitive. I should like to know? Yes; but I can get on without knowing. There are worse things than ignorance. Let this plant be what it will. I should be little the wiser for being able to name it.[2] I have no body of facts to which to attach this new one; and unrelated knowledge is almost the same as none at all. At best it is quickly forgotten. So my indolence excuses itself.

The road begins to climb rather sharply. Unless I am going to the top of the ridge and beyond, I have gone far enough. So I turn my back upon the mountain; and behold, the cloud having lifted again, there, straight before me down the road and across the valley, is the house from which I set out, almost or quite the only one in sight. After all, I have walked but a little way, though I have been a good while about it; for I have hardly begun my return before I find myself again approaching the abandoned farm. Downhill miles are short. Here a light shower comes on, and I raise my umbrella. Then follows a grand excitement among a flock of sheep, whose day, perhaps, needs enlivening as badly as my own. They gaze at the umbrella, start away upon the gallop, stop again to look (“There are forty looking like one,” I say to myself), and are again struck with panic. This time they scamper down the field out of sight. Another danger escaped! Shepherds, it is evident, cannot be so effeminate as to carry umbrellas.

Two heifers are of a more confiding disposition, coming close to look at the stranger as he sits on the doorsill of the old barn. Their curiosity concerning me is perhaps about as lively as mine was touching the supposed liverworts. Like me they stand and consider, but betray no unmannerly eagerness. “Who is he, I wonder?” they might be saying; “I never saw him before.” But their jaws still move mechanically, and their beautiful eyes are full of a peaceful satisfaction. A cud must be a great alleviation to the temper. With such a perennial sedative, how could any one ever be fretted into nervous prostration? As a matter of fact, I am told, cows rarely or never suffer from that most distressing ailment. I have seen chewers of gum before now who, by all signs, should have enjoyed a similar immunity.

While the heifers are still making up their minds about their unexpected visitor, I turn to examine a couple of white-crowned sparrows, male and female,—I wonder if they really are a couple?—feeding before the house. I hope the species is to prove common here. Three birds were behind the hotel before breakfast, and one of them sang. The quaint little medley, sparrow song and warbler song together, is still something of an event with me, I have heard it so seldom and like it so well; and whether the birds sing or not, they are musical to look at.

When I approach the painted house, on my way homeward, the fat old collie comes running out again, barking. This time, however, he takes but one sniff. He has made a mistake, and realizes it at once. “Oh, excuse me,” he says quite plainly. “I didn’t recognize you. You’re the same old codger. I ought to have known.” And he is so confused and ashamed that he hurries away without waiting to make up.

It is a great mortification to a gentlemanly dog to find himself at fault in this manner. I remember another collie, much younger than this one, with whom I once had a minute or two of friendly intercourse. Then, months afterward, I went again by the house where he lived, and he came dashing out with all fierceness, as if he would rend me in pieces. I let him come (there was nothing else to do, or nothing else worth doing), but the instant his nose struck me he saw his error. Then, in a flash, he dropped flat on the ground, and literally licked my shoes. There was no attitude abject enough to express the depth of his humiliation. And then, like the dog of this morning, he jumped up, and ran with all speed back to his doorstep.

Another descent into the gorge of Baker’s River, and another stop on the bridge (how gloriously the water comes down!), and I am again in the pretty, broken woods below the hotel. Here my attention is attracted by an almost prostrate but still vigorous yellow birch, like the one that stood for so many years by the road below the Profile House, in the Franconia Notch. Somehow the tree got an awkward slant in its youth, and has always kept it, while the larger branches have grown straight upward, at right angles with the trunk, as if each were trying to be a tree on its own account. The Franconia Notch specimen became a landmark, and was really of no inconsiderable service; a convenience to the hotel proprietors, and a means of health to idle boarders, who needed an incentive to exercise. “Come, let’s walk down as far as the bent tree,” one would say to another. The average American cannot stroll; he has never learned; if he puts his legs in motion, he must go to some fixed point, though it be only a milestone or a huckleberry bush. The infirmity is most likely congenital, a taint in the blood. The fathers worked,—all honor to them,—having to earn their bread under hard conditions; and the children, though they may dress like the descendants of princes, cannot help turning even their amusements into a stint.

And the sapient critic? Well, instead of carrying a fishing rod or walking to a bent tree, he had come out with an opera-glass, and had made of his morning jaunt a bird-cataloguing expedition. Considered in that light, the trip had not been a brilliant success. In my whole forenoon I had seen and heard but twenty-eight species. If I had stayed in my low-country village, and walked half as far, I should have counted twice as many. But I should not have enjoyed myself one quarter as well.

The next day and the next were rainy, with Moosilauke still invisible. Then came a morning of sunshine and clear atmosphere. So far it was ideal mountain weather; but the cold wind was so strong at our level that it was certain to be nothing less than a hurricane at the top. I waited, therefore, twenty-four hours longer. Then, at quarter before seven on the morning of May 23, I set out. I am as careful of my dates, it seems, as if I had been starting for the North Pole. And why not? The importance of an expedition depends upon the spirit in which it is undertaken. Nothing is of serious consequence in this world except as subjective considerations make it so. Even the North Pole is only an imaginary point, the end of an imaginary line, as old geographies used to inform us, pleonastically,—as if “position without dimensions,” a something without length, breadth, or thickness, could be other than imaginary. I started, then, at quarter before seven. Many years ago I had been taken up the mountain road in a carriage; now I would travel it on foot, spending at least an hour upon each of its five miles, and so see something of the mountain itself, as well as of the prospect from the summit.

The miles, some longer, some shorter, as I thought (a not unpleasant variety, though the fourth stage was excessively spun out, it seemed to me, perhaps to make it end at the spring), are marked off by guideboards, so that the newcomer need not fall into the usual disheartening mistake of supposing himself almost at the top before he has gone halfway. As for the first mile, which must measure near a mile and a half, and which ends just above the “second brook” (every mountain path has its natural waymarks), I had been over it twice within the last few days, so that the edge of my curiosity was dulled; but, with one excuse and another, I managed easily enough to give it its allotted hour. For one thing, a hairy woodpecker detained me five or ten minutes, putting such tremendous vigor into his hammering that I was positively certain (with a shade of uncertainty, nevertheless, such as all “observers” will understand; there is nothing so true as a paradox) that he must be a pileatus, till at last he showed himself. “Well, well,” said I, “guesswork is a poor dependence.” It was well I had stayed by. The forest was so nearly deserted, so little animated, that I felt under obligation to the fellow for every stroke of his mallet. Though a man goes to the wood for silence, his ear craves some natural noises,—enough, at least, to make the stillness audible.

The second mile is of steeper grade than the first, and toward the close brought me suddenly to a place unlike anything that had gone before. I named it at once the Flower Garden. For an acre, or, more likely, for two or three acres, the ground—a steep southern exposure, held up to face the sun—was covered with plants in bloom: Dutchman’s-breeches (Dicentra cucullaria),—bunches of heart-shaped, cream-white flowers with yellow facings, looking for all the world as if they had been planted there; round-leaved violets in profusion; white violets (blanda); spring-beauties; adder’s-tongue (dog’s-tooth violet); and painted trillium. A pretty show; pretty in itself, and a thousand times prettier for being happened upon thus unexpectedly, after two hours of woods that were almost as dead as winter.

Only a little way above this point were the first beds of snow; and henceforward, till I came out upon the ridge, two miles above, the woods were mostly filled with it, though there was little in the road. About this time, also, I began to notice a deer’s track. He had descended the road within a few hours, as I judged, or since the last rainfall, and might have been a two-legged, or even a one-legged animal,—biped or uniped,—so far as his footsteps showed. I should rather have seen him, but the hoofprints were a deal better than nothing; and undoubtedly I saw them much longer than I could possibly have seen the maker of them, and so, perhaps, got out of them more of companionship. They were with me for two hours,—clean up to the ridge, and part way across it.

Somewhere between the third and fourth mileboards I stopped short with an exclamation. There, straight before me, over the long eastern shoulder of Moosilauke, beyond the big Jobildunk Ravine, loomed or floated a shining snow-white mountain-top. Nothing could have been more beautiful. It was the crest of Mount Washington, I assumed, though even with the aid of a glass I could make out no sign of buildings, which must have been matted with new-fallen snow. I took its identity for granted, I say. The truth is, I became badly confused about it afterward, such portions of the range as came into view having an unfamiliar aspect; but later still, on arriving at the summit, found that my first idea had been correct.

That sudden, heavenly apparition gave me one of those minutes that are good as years. Once, indeed, in early October, I had seen Mount Washington when it was more resplendent: freshly snow-covered throughout, and then, as the sun went down, lighted up before my eyes with a rosy glow, brighter and brighter and brighter, till it seemed all on fire within. But even that unforgettable spectacle had less of unearthly beauty, was less a work of pure enchantment, I thought, than this detached, fleecy-looking piece of aerial whiteness, cloud stuff or dream stuff, yet whiter than any cloud, lying at rest yonder, almost at my own level, against the deep blue of the forenoon sky.

All this while, the birds, which had been few from the start,—black-throated greens and blues, Blackburnians, oven-birds, a bay-breast, blue yellow-backs, siskins, Swainson thrushes, a blue-headed vireo, winter wrens, rose-breasted grosbeaks, chickadees, grouse, and snowbirds,—had grown fewer and fewer, till at last, among these stunted, low-branched spruces, with the snow under them, there was little else but an occasional myrtle warbler (“The brave myrtle,” I kept saying to myself), with its musical, soft trill, so out of place,—the voice of peaceful green valleys rather than of stormy mountain-tops,—yet so welcome. Once a gray-cheeked thrush called just above me. These impenetrable upper woods are the gray-cheeks’ summer home,—a worthy one; but I heard nothing of their wild music, and doubted whether they had yet arrived in full summer force.

It was past eleven o’clock when I came out at the clearing by the woodpile, with half the world before me. From this point it was but a little way to the bare ridge connecting the South Peak—up which I had been trudging all the forenoon—and the main summit. This, with its little hotel, that looked as if it were in danger of sliding off the mountain northward, was straight before me across the ravine, a long but easy mile away.

On the ridge I found myself all at once in something like a gale of ice-cold wind. Who could have believed it? It was well I had brought a sweater; and squatting behind a lucky clump of low evergreens, I wormed my way into what is certainly the most comfortable of all garments for such a place,—as good, at least, as two overcoats. Now let the wind whistle, especially as it was at my back, and was bearing me triumphantly up the slope. So I thought, bravely enough, till the trail took a sudden shift, and the gale caught me on another tack. Then I sang out of the other corner of my mouth, as I used to hear country people say. I no longer boasted, but saved my breath for better use.

Wind or no wind, it is an exhilaration to walk here above the world. Once a bird chirps to me timidly from the knee-wood close by. I answer him, and out peeps a white-throat. “You here!” he says; “so early!” At my feet is plenty of Greenland sandwort,—faded, winter-worn, gray-green tufts, tightly packed among the small boulders. Whatever lives here must lie low and hang on. And with it is the shiny-leaved mountain cranberry,—Vaccinium Vitis-Idæa. Let me never omit that pretty name. Neither cranberry nor sandwort shows any sign of blossom or bud as yet; but it is good to know that they will both be ready when the clock strikes. I can see them now, pink and white, just as they will look in July—nay, just as they will look a thousand years hence.

Again my course alters, and the wind lets me lean back upon it as it lifts me forward. Who says we are growing old? The years, as they pass, may turn and look at us meaningly, as if to say, “You have lived long enough;” yet even to us the climbing of a mountain road (though by this time it must be a road, or something like it) is still only the putting of one foot before the other.

So I come at last to the top, and make haste to get into the lee of the house, which is tightly barred, of course, just as its owners left it seven or eight months ago. The wind chases me round the corners, one after another; but by searching I discover a nook where it can hit me no more than half the time. Here I sit and look at the mountains,—a glorious company: Mount Washington and its fellows, with all their higher parts white; the sombre mass of the Twins on this side of them; and, nearer still, the long, sharp, purple crest of dear old Lafayette and its southern neighbors. So many I can name. The rest are mountains only; a wilderness of heaped-up, forest-covered land; a prospect to dilate the soul.

My expectation has been to stay here for two hours or more; but the wind is merciless, and after going out over the broad, bare, boulder-sprinkled summit till I can see down into Franconia (which looks pretty low and pretty far off, though I distinguish certain of the buildings clearly enough), I begin to feel that I shall enjoy the sight of my eyes better from some sheltered position on the upper part of the road. Even on the ridge, however, I take advantage of every tuft of spruces to stand still for a bit, looking especially at the mountain itself, so big, so bare, and so solid: East Peak, South Peak, and the Peak, as they are called, although neither of them is in the slightest degree peaked, with the great gulf of Jobildunk—in which Baker’s River rises—wedged among them. If the word Moosilauke means a “bald place,” as it is said to do, then we have here another proof of the North American Indian’s genius for fitting words to things.[3]

Even to-day, windy and cold as it is, a butterfly passes over now and then (mostly red admirals), and smaller insects flit carelessly about. Insects are capable mountaineers, as I have often found occasion to notice. The only time I was ever on the sharp point of Mount Adams, where my companion and I had barely room to stand together, the air about our heads was black with insects of all sorts and sizes, a veritable cloud; and when we unscrewed the Appalachian Club’s brass bottle to sign the roll of visitors, we found that the signers immediately before us, after putting down a date and their names, had added, “Plenty of bugs.” And surely I was never pestered worse by black flies than once, years ago, on this very summit of Moosilauke. All the hours of a long, breathless, tropical July day they made life miserable for me. Better a thousand times such a frosty, man-compelling wind as I am now fleeing from.

Once off the ridge, I can loosen my hat and sit down in comfort. The sun is good. How incredible it seems that the air is so furiously in motion only fifty rods back! Here it is like Elysium. And almost I believe that this limited prospect is better than the grander sweep from the summit itself,—less distracting and more restful. So half a loaf may be better than a whole one, if a man cannot be contented without trying to eat the whole one. A white-throat and a myrtle warbler sing to me as I nibble my sandwich. They are the loftiest spirits, it appears. I take off my hat to them.

Already I am down far enough to catch the sound of running water; and every rod brings a new mountain into view from behind the long East Peak. One of the best of them all is cone-shaped Kearsarge, topped with its house. Now the white crest of Washington rises upon me,—snow with the sun on it; and here, by the fourth mileboard, are a few pale-bright spring-beauties,—five or six blossoms only. They have found a bit of earth from which the snow melted early, and here they are, true to their name, with the world on every side nothing but a desolation. If it is time for myrtle warblers, why not for them? Now I see not only Washington, but the mountains with it, all strangely foreshortened, so as to give the highest peak a most surprising preëminence. No wonder I was in doubt what to call it. In days past I have walked that whole ridge, from Clinton to Adams; and glad I am to remember it. A man should do such things while he can, teaching his feet to feel the ground, and letting his heart cheer him.

A turn in the road, and straight below me lies my deserted farmhouse. Another turn, and I lose it. In ascending a mountain we face the path; in descending we face the world. I speak thus because at this moment I am looking down a charming vista,—forest-covered mountains, row beyond row. But for the gravel under my feet I might be a thousand miles from any human habitation. Presently a Swainson thrush whistles. By that token I am getting away from the summit, though things are still wintry enough, with no sign of bud or blossom.

And look! What is that far below me, facing up the road? A four-footed beast of some kind. A bear? No; I raise my glass, and see a porcupine. He has his mobile, sensitive nose to the ground, and continues to smell, and perhaps to feed, as I draw nearer and nearer. By and by, being very near, and still unworthy of the creature’s notice, I roll a stone toward him. At this he shows a gleam of interest. He sits up, folds his hands,—puts his fore paws together over his breast,—looks at me, and then waddles a few steps toward the upper side of the road. “I must be getting out of this,” he seems to think. But he reconsiders his purpose, comes back, sits on end again and folds his hands; and then, the reconnoissance being satisfactory, falls to smelling the ground as before. I can see the tips of his nostrils twitching as in a kind of ecstasy. There must be something savory under them. Meantime, still with my glass lifted, I come closer and closer, till I am right upon him. If porcupines can shoot, I must be in danger of a quill. Another step or two, and he waddles to the lower side of the road. He is a vacillating body, however; and once more he turns to sit up and fold his hands. This time I hear him rattling his teeth, but not very fiercely,—nothing to compare with the gnashings of an angry woodchuck; and at last, when I cluck to him, he hastens his steps a little, as much, perhaps, as a porcupine can, and disappears in the brush, dragging his ridiculous, sloping, straw-thatched hinder parts—a combination of lean-to and L—after him. He has never cultivated speed or decision of character, having a better defense. So far as appearances go, he is certainly an odd one.

There are no blossoms yet, nor visible promise of any, but once in a while a bright Atalanta (red admiral) butterfly flits before me. I wonder if I could capture one by the old schoolboy method? I am moved to try; but my best effort—not very determined, it must be confessed—ends in failure. Perhaps I should have had some golden apples.

At last I come to a few adder’s-tongues, the first flowers since the five or six spring-beauties a mile and a half back. Yes, I am approaching the Flower Garden; for here is a most lovely bank of yellow violets, a hundred or two together, a real bed of them. Nobody ever saw anything prettier. Here, also, is the showy purple trillium, not so unhandsomely overgrown as it sometimes is, in addition to all the flowers that I noticed on the ascent. A garden indeed. I pull up a root of Dutchman’s-breeches, and sit down to examine the cluster of rice-like pink kernels at the base of the stem. Excellent fodder they must make for animals of some kind. “Squirrel-corn” is an apt name, I think, though I believe it is applied, not to this species, but to its relative, Dicentra Canadensis.

The whole plant is uncommonly clean-looking and attractive, with its pale, finely dissected leaves and its delicate, waxy bloom; but looking at it, and then at a bank of round-leaved violets opposite, I say once more, “Those are my flowers.” Something in the shade of color is most exactly to my taste. The very sight of them gladdens me like sunshine. But before I get out of the garden, as I am in no haste to do (if it was attractive this morning, it is doubly so now, after those miles of snowbanks), I am near to changing my mind; for suddenly, as my eye follows the border of the road, it falls upon a small blue violet, the first of that color that I have noticed since my arrival at Moosilauke. It must be my long-desired Selkirkii, I say to myself, and down I go to look at it. Yes, it is not leafy-stemmed, the petals are not bearded, and the leaves are unlike any I have ever seen. I take it up, root and all, and search carefully till I find one more. If it is Selkirkii, as I feel sure it is,[4] then I am happy. This is the one species of our eastern North American violets that I have never picked. It completes my set. And it is especially good to find it here, where I was not in the least expecting it. With the two specimens in my pocket I trudge the remaining two miles in high spirits. The violets are no newer to me than the liverwort specimens on Mount Cushman were, but they have the incomparable advantage of things long looked for,—things for the lack of which, so to speak, a pigeonhole in the mind has stood consciously vacant. Blessed are they who want something, for when they get it they will be glad.

The weather below had been warm and still, a touch of real summer. So said the people at the hotel; and I knew it already; for, as I came through the cattle pasture, I saw below me a new, strange-looking, brightly illuminated grove of young birches. “Were those trees there this morning?” I thought. A single day had covered them with sunny, yellow-green leaves, till the change was like a miracle. Indeed, it was a miracle. May the spring never come when I shall fail to feel it so. Then I looked back at the summit. Was it there, no farther away than that, that so icy a wind had chased me about?—or had I been in Greenland?

A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON

I went up Mount Washington in the afternoon of August 22d, and came down again in the afternoon of the 29th. Ten years before I had spent a week there, in early July, and had not visited the place since. In some respects, of course, the summit is badly damaged (I have heard it spoken of as utterly ruined) by the presence of the hotel and other buildings, not to mention the railway trains, with their daily freight of bustling lunch-box tourists. Still the railway and the hotel are indisputable conveniences; I should hardly have stayed there so long without them; and in this imperfect world we must not expect to find all the good things in one basket.

As for the tourists, one need walk but a few steps to be rid of them. As a class they are not enterprising pedestrians. In fifteen minutes you may find yourself where human beings are as far away, practically, as if you were among the highest Andes or on the famous “peak in Darien.” There you may sit on a boulder, or recline on a mat of prostrate willow, and imagine yourself the only man in the world; gazing at the prospect, listening to the mountain silence (there is none like it), or eating alpine blueberries, as lonely as any hermit’s heart could wish. All this you may do, and then return to the most obliging of hosts, the best of good dinners, and a comfortable bed.

By the time you have been there two days, moreover, you will have begun to enjoy the hotel, not only for its physical comforts, but as an interesting miniature world. The manager and the clerk, the waiters and the bellboys, the editors and the printers, the night watchman and the train conductor, will all have become your friends, almost your blood relations,—such intimate good feeling does a joint seclusion induce,—and at any minute of the day in may come a group of strangers of the most engagingly picturesque sort; having no more the appearance of sales-ladies or women of fashion, shopkeepers or bankers’ clerks, than of college students and professors. They are men and women. They have put off the fine clothes and the smug appearance which society exacts of its members; they look not the least in the world as if they had just come out of a bandbox; their negligée costumes bear no resemblance to the dainty, immaculate rig of the tennis court or the golf links. They are “roughing it” in earnest. For at least eight or ten hours, possibly for as many days, they have ceased to be concerned about the cut of their garments or the smoothness of their hair. Of some of them the aspect is fairly disreputable. It is a solemn fact that you may here see gentlemen with rents in their trousers and a week’s beard on their faces. And ten to one they will brazen it out without apology.

The dapper clerk and the prosperous merchant and his wife, who have ridden up in the train with their good clothes and their company faces on, may stare if they will. It is nothing to the campers and walkers. They are not on parade, and do not mind being smiled at. A pretty college girl will walk about the office, alpenstock in hand, with her hair tied in a careless knot, her skirts well above the tops of her scratched and dusty boots, her face brown and her sleeves tucked up, and seem quite as much at ease as if she were in full evening dress with the drawing-room lights blazing upon her alabaster shoulders, her laces, and her diamonds. It is heroism (or heroinism) of a kind worth seeing.

You are still enjoying the spectacle when two men enter the door, one with a botanical box slung over his shoulder. It is as if he had given you the Masonic grip, and you hardly wait for him to cross the sill before you make up to him with a question. By which route has he come, and what luck has he met with? Over the Crawford path, he answers, and though the season is pretty late, and Alpine plants are mostly out of bloom, he has found some interesting things.

Two or three of them he cannot name, and he opens the box. His special puzzle is a tiny, upright-growing plant, thickly set with roundish, crinkled leaves, and bearing a few blossoms so exceedingly small as almost to defy a common pocket-lens. Do you know what it is? Yes, to your own surprise, you remember, or seem to remember, and you run upstairs to bring down a Gray’s Manual. The plant is Euphrasia (eyebright), an Alpine variety. It was pointed out to you ten years ago, near the same Crawford path, by the man who knew the Mount Washington flora better than any one else. You recall the time as if it had been yesterday. Your companion dropped suddenly upon his knees, eyes to the ground. “What are you looking for?” you asked; and he answered “Euphrasia.” It is good to see it again. You find it for yourself the next day, it may be, in the Alpine Garden.

And this other plant, stiffly matted and long past flowering? Your new acquaintance supposes it to be Diapensia; and for that you need no book. And this third one, with its rusty leaves, is the Lapland azalea. You remember the day you saw it first—in middle June—when all by yourself you were making your first ascent of the mountain, walking alternately over snowbanks and beds of flowers. So far as the lovely blossoms are concerned, you have never seen it since.

Next morning your botanist bids you good-by; he is going down by the way of Tuckerman’s Ravine; and at noon, after some indolent, happy hours on the carriage-road and in the Alpine Garden, you are again in the hotel office when half a dozen campers from the northern peaks make their appearance. Dusty, travel-stained, disheveled, they bring the freedom of the hills with them and fill the place with their breeziness. Some of the “transients” clustered about the stove smile at a sight so unconventional, but the manager, the clerk, and the bellboys are better informed. They have seen the leader of the party before, and in a minute the word is passed round. This is Mr. ——, who came up the mountain with his son a year ago on the day of that dreadful storm, when two later adventurers upon the same path perished by the way, and he himself, old mountaineer that he was, with another life hanging upon his own, had more than once been all but ready to say, “It can’t be done.” Your traveling companion has seen him here before, though she was not present on that memorable occasion, and presently you are being introduced to him and his friends—a metropolitan clergyman, a university professor, and a younger man, with whose excellent work in your own line you are already acquainted.

Anon the company breaks up,—the pedestrians are off for an afternoon excursion,—and you step out upon the platform to look about you. Against the railing are two men, one of them with what seems to be a “collecting gun” in his hand. “An ornithologist,” you say to yourself, and at the word you begin edging toward him. A remark or two about the weather and you ask him point-blank if he is collecting birds. No, he answers, his weapon is a rifle, and he shows you the cartridge. He has brought it along to shoot squirrels with. You wonder why any one should think it worth while to carry a gun over the nine miles of the Crawford path for so trifling a use; but that is none of your business, and just then the other man speaks up to say that his companion is a botanist, while he himself is a “bird man.” This is interesting (the second ornithologist within an hour), and you set about comparing notes. Did he hear anything of the Bicknell thrushes and the Hudsonian chickadees on his way up? No, he missed them both on this trip, though he has met them elsewhere in the mountains. You drop an innocent remark about the thrushes, and he says, “Are you Mr. So-and-So?” There is no denying it, and when he pronounces his own name it proves to be familiar; and a good talk follows. Then he starts down into the Alpine Garden,—you charging him to be sure to eat some of the delicious cespitose blueberries on the descent,—and ten minutes afterward he turns up again at your elbow. He has left his friend, and has hurried back to tell you of a sharp-shinned hawk that he has just seen. You may put the name into your Mount Washington bird list, if you will.

So the days pass—no day without a new acquaintance. If you and one of the local editors start down the trail to the Lakes of the Clouds after a Sunday-morning breakfast, you find yourselves going along with three Baltimore gentlemen, who have walked up from the Crawford House the day before (“Well, we arrive!” you remember to have heard the leader exclaim, as his foot struck the hotel platform), and are now on their return.

They introduce one another to you and your companion,—Dr. This, Dr. That, and Dr. The Other,—and you pick your way downward over the boulders in Indian file, talking as you go. After a while you and the oldest of the Baltimoreans find yourselves falling a little behind the rest, and the conversation grows more and more friendly. He has come to New Hampshire, as he does every year, for the best of all tonics, a dose of mountain climbing. He has been somewhat overworked of late, especially with a long task of proof-reading. A new edition of his treatise on chemistry is passing through the press, and the moment the last sheets were corrected he broke away northward; and here he is, walking over high places, where he loves to be. “I am an old man,” he says; but his strength is not abated. Far be the day! At the lakeside hands are shaken and good-bys said. You will most likely never see each other again, but one of you, at least, keeps a bright memory.

It is a strange place, the Summit House. Twice a day, as on the seashore, the tide rises and falls. But the evening flood is a small affair. The crowd comes at noon. It registers its name, eats its luncheon, writes a postal-card, buys a souvenir, asks a question or two, more or less pertinent (“Can you tell me where the Tip-Over House is?” one good woman said—for the rarified air plays queer pranks with its victims), possibly looks at the prospect, probably snaps a camera, and then takes the after-dinner train for the base. Evening passengers make a longer stay. They cannot do otherwise. For them the sunset and the sunrise are the great events. One would think that such phenomena were never to be witnessed in the low country. They watch the clouds, or more likely the cloud, and go to sleep with one ear open for the sunrise bell.

So much for the larger number of Summit House guests, the respectable majority. A few, two in twenty, perhaps, arrive on foot; and these are the good ones—the salt of the mountain, so to speak. This time I was not one of them, but I had no thought of denying the superiority of their privilege.

ABOVE THE BIRDS

In the course of my seven days at the summit of Mount Washington I listed six species of birds. A few snowbirds—three or four—were to be found almost always in the neighborhood of the stables; a myrtle warbler was seen on the climb up the cone from the Lakes of the Clouds; twice I heard a goldfinch passing somewhere overhead; a sharp-shinned hawk, as I took it to be, showed itself one day, none too clearly, flying through the mist; and the next afternoon, as I sat in the rear of the old Tip-Top House waiting for the glories of the sunset, a sparrow hawk shot past me so near as to display not only his rusty tail, but the black bands on the side of his neck. Here are five species. The sixth was one that, rightly or wrongly, I should not have expected to find in so treeless a place. I speak of the red-breasted (or Canadian) nuthatch. On two mornings, as all hands were out upon the platform at sunrise, we heard the characteristic nasal calls of this northern forester, and saw two birds scrambling about the roofs of the buildings; and more than once at other times I noticed one or two on the wing. The species is very common this season in Franconia,—where it was extremely scarce a year ago,—and I was pleased at the summit when a lady standing near me remarked to her husband, “Why, that is the note we have been hearing so continually at the Rangeleys.” It was so incessant there, she told me, as to be almost a trouble. Let us hope that this autumnal abundance in New Hampshire foreshadows a nuthatch winter in Massachusetts.

The all but total absence of birds at the summit was a most striking thing. It helped greatly to intensify the loneliness and the silence; that wonderful mountain silence—no leaf to rustle, no brook to murmur, no bird to sing—which, wherever I walked, I was always stopping to listen to. I should love to praise it, but language for such a purpose would need to be found on the spot, the stillness itself suggesting the words; and I came down from the summit more than a week ago. It must have been, I think, something like that apocalyptic “silence in heaven.”

As for the birds, I should have felt their absence more disagreeably but for the fact that I had a novel and absorbing occupation with which to enliven my walks, and even to beguile effectually what otherwise might have been the idle odds and ends of the day. For the nonce I had turned entomological collector. My search was for rare Alpine insects. Not that I knew anything about them; it would have been all one to me if most of what I saw had been created out of nothing the day before; but I was in learned company and needed no science of my own. My part was to carry a “cyanide bottle” and put into it any beetle, moth, fly, or other insect—ants and spiders excepted—on which I could lay my ignorant fingers. The possessor of the learning—enough and to spare for the two of us—has made many collecting visits to the summit; her list of Mount Washington species numbers more than sixteen hundred, if I remember the figures correctly, and no inconsiderable proportion of them are honored with her name. A proud lot they would be, if they knew it. But the end is not yet; there are many winged mountaineers still to be pinned, and in the prosecution of such an enterprise, so she gave me to understand, two bottles are better than one, no matter who carries the second one. Her language was rather encouraging than complimentary, it might have seemed, but I did not mind; and for seven days I was never without a bottle about my person except when I lay in bed.

If I went down to the Lakes of the Clouds, for example, the poison-bottle went with me; and the looker-on, had there been one,—as luckily there wasn’t,—might have seen me on my knees, with hands outstretched over the water, struggling to snatch from the surface a poor, unhappy “skater,” or a “lucky-bug” (it really was lucky, for it got away while the skater perished), as a possible prize for my lady’s cork-lined box. On all my jaunts down the carriage-road (and they were many, longer or shorter, that route offering the readiest means of escape from the frequent summit-capping cloud) the same scientific vial was my companion. If a grasshopper jumped (not the common one with banded legs, of which I saw a superfluity, but a handsome, rare-looking green fellow, making me think of Leigh Hunt’s “green little vaulter in the sunny grass”), I stole murderously after him, and with a reckless clutch at the stunted bush on which he had settled I gathered him in and put him to sleep. (This was well done, for he was really of a wingless Alpine species, and only my employer’s third specimen of his kind.) If a “daddy-long-legs,” prayerless friend of my childhood, crawled across the way, he, too, hapless creature, with legs so superfluously numerous and elongated that he could not hurry, even to save his life, fell a victim to my uninstructed zeal. He died easily, for all his undevout habits, but the sacrifice was useless. He proved to be no longer among the entomologist’s desiderata, though he also is Alpine, and it is not many years since she herself discovered him here, an insect till then unregistered by human science.

All caterpillars I was bidden to bring in alive; and so, of course, I did, rolling them up in scraps of soft paper and committing them tenderly to a pocket. My chief business, however, after I had breathed the air, eaten my fill of mountain blueberries (“Happy,” said I, “is the mouth that feeds on such manna”), and looked my fill at the northern peaks,—for I was not employed by the day, but by the piece, and could steal an hour to myself now and then with a clear conscience,—my principal occupation, I say, was to pry under the boulders for beetles. “Leave no stone unturned,” the entomologist had said, with her fine gift of laconic quotation; but she could not have intended the commission to be taken literally. The stones were too many, and human existence is too brief. She meant no more than that I should use a reasonable diligence; and so much I surely did, till the ends of my fingers were in danger of being skinned alive. Down on all fours I got, lifted a stone quickly, fastened an eagle eye upon the exposed hollow, and if a dark object, no matter how small or how large, was seen to be scurrying to its burrow, I thrust my fingers into the dirt in frantic efforts to seize it. I knew not which were common and which rare; my only course was to let none escape. But many were too swift for me, with all my efforts, and of all that I captured in this manner I am not sure that one was “worth mounting.” I quote those last two words partly by way of emphasis. They stood for the lowest round in the ladder of my entomological ambition. What I most of all desired was to discover a new species; next I coveted a species new to New England; after that a species new to Mount Washington; and last of all a specimen worth saving, or, as my employer said, “worth mounting”—in short, worth a pin.

My most productive field, like her own, was about the front of the hotel itself. In warm afternoons flies, beetles, moths and what not are known to drop out of the invisible, from nobody can tell where, upon the windows or the white clapboards of the house. Here, not once, but with something like regularity, insects have been captured, the like of which have never been seen elsewhere except in the West Indies or Mexico, in Greenland or among the Rocky Mountains. How such wanderers come, and why, are among the things that no man knoweth. Enough that they are known to come. And who could tell but one might have come for me? Here, at all events, was my golden opportunity. Let me not miss it. If by chance, therefore, the lady herself stepped inside for a minute or two, I hastened to take her place. Tourists by the dozen might be watching me curiously, or even derisively, my equanimity was undisturbed. Science is a shield. Vial in hand (my vade-mecum I called it, Latin being in the air), I walked along the platform, with my eyes upon the glass and the paint, and woe to the unlucky insect that was there taking the sun. The yawning mouth of a bottle was clapped over him, the world swam before his eyes, and long before he knew it he was on his way to be a specimen. Strange things happen to insects, though they are not the only ones who have found perdition in a bottle.

Sometimes I climbed the stairs to the upper floors of the observatory. No matter how high I went, the higher the better. In the warm hours of the day the air at the very top was almost a cloud of tiny wings. “Excelsior” is the insects’ watchword. Once, in the upper room, I bottled carelessly a small black-and-white moth. Its appearance was ordinary enough; no doubt it was common; but it was an insect, and hit or miss I took it in. And in due course it went into the entomologist’s hands with the rest of the catch. She emptied the vial, and passed an unexciting comment or two upon the few flies and beetles it contained; perhaps she remarked that one of them might be worth mounting—I do not remember precisely; it was a way she had of egging me on; but the next morning she said: “You didn’t tell me anything about the lovely moth you took yesterday.” I was obliged to stop and think. “Oh, that little black-and-white thing,” I said. Yes, that was the one—“new to the summit.” If I was not proud, then pride does not dwell in earthly minds. This, I confide, was not my only contribution to the fauna of our highest New England mountain; I seem to remember a short-winged beetle also; but the moth, being in the Lepidoptera, is my especial glory. I wish I could recall its name, that I might print it here for the reading of future generations.

With such pursuits did I improve the spare hours of my Mount Washington week. I have no thought of boasting. At least I would not seem to do so. It was little enough that I accomplished, or could hope to accomplish, hampered as I was by my ignorance. Probably I shall never have a beetle, much less a moth, named after me; but with that precious black-and-white rarity in mind I feel that even in the way of entomology I have not lived altogether in vain.

Scientific studies apart, the best hours of the week (after some spent along the carriage-road, resting here and there upon a boulder to enjoy the magnificent, ever-shifting prospect, and some—not hours, alas, but minutes—spent in eating the ambrosial, banana-savored, soul-satisfying berries of Vaccinium cæspitosum)—my best hours, I say, were perhaps those of a certain wonderful evening. The air was warm, no breath stirring, the sky clear, and the half world below us, as we walked the hotel platform, lay covered with white clouds, on which the full moon was shining. The stillness, the mildness, the brightness, the sense of elevation, and the bewitching, unearthly scene, all this was like an evening in fairyland. For the time being, it is to be feared, even the rarest of moths would have seemed a matter of secondary importance. Such is the power of beauty. So truly was it born to make other things forgotten.

MOUNTAIN-TOP AND VALLEY

Nothing heightens appreciation like a contrast. After a week at the summit of Mount Washington, where we lived in the clouds and above them, in a world above the world, we returned to the lowlands. The afternoon was sultry, and before the descent was half accomplished—by the train—we wished ourselves back again on the heights. How can men live in such an atmosphere, we asked each other; so stifling, so depressing, so wanting in all the elements of vitality. Our condition seemed like that of fishes out of water, and we began to think of angling as a cruel sport. It grieved us to see the trees growing taller. Even the laughing young Ammonoosuc was looked upon with indifference. “I wish I were back,” said one; and the other responded, “So do I.”

At Fabyan’s the crowd surged about us like a sea. Baggage must be found and checked, our train was waiting, and the baggage-master, true railway “official” that he was, was not to be hastened. His steps were all taken by rule, and every movement of his hands was set to slow music. When he spoke, which was seldom, it was in a muffled voice and with funereal moderation. In the midst of all that bustle he was calm—

You might say what you pleased to him, be urgently argumentative, or plaintive even to wheedling, it was all one. Your eloquence was wasted. It was like nudging a graven image, or crying haste in the ear of Death. Not a feature of his countenance altered, not a muscle quickened. Who ever knew the hands of a clock to accelerate their pace in response to human impatience? Time and tide—and a baggage-master—hurry for no man.

“Two trunks for Bethlehem,” you say. No answer. By and by, meekly insistent, and thinking that by this time your turn must surely have come, you repeat the words. No answer. But the man is taking down checks from their peg, and in due time, stepping as to the measure of a dirge, he marches with them down the platform. “These are mine,” you say, keeping an uneasy pace or two in advance and pointing to the trunks on the truck. No answer—not so much as a look. Nor is there need of any. You are silenced. That implacable manner carries all before it. You could not speak again, even to claim your soul. But finally the man himself speaks. You are relieved to know he can. He is addressing you. The minute hand is at twelve and the clock strikes. “These are yours?” he asks. You reply in the affirmative, as best you are able. “For Bethlehem?” he asks, and you answer “Yes.” And then, after one more set of machine-like motions, the mighty work is accomplished. The checks are yours. Fortunately, the train has not yet pulled away, though it is past the time, and at the last moment you see the trunks on board.

Trifles like these would have been as nothing, of course, to ordinary travelers; but to us, innocent Carthusians, fresh from the unearthly quiet of a mountain-top, they were little short of tragical. And how intolerably hot and close the car was! Things were growing worse and worse with us. Should we live to reach Bethlehem, with nothing but this blast out of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace in our nostrils? Why had we not remained where existence was not a struggle, but a dream of pleasure; where the air had not to be gasped for, but came of itself to be sweetly inhaled? Nevertheless, we survived the passage,—the conductor helping to pass the time by stopping in the aisle to make inquiries touching a little flock of puzzling birds, crossbills, perhaps, lately seen in his apple orchard,—and at Bethlehem the carriage awaited us. This was a welcome change, but even so we still found it difficult to draw breath; and when the horses started, what a dust they set flying! Truly, between the heat and the drought, this lower world was in an evil case. It was a road of sighs all the six miles to Franconia.

Once there, however, and supper eaten, I stepped out upon the piazza and looked westward. Venus was bright just above the near horizon (the near horizon!), and against the sunset sky stood a line of low woods, with detached pine trees towering over the rest. And in that sight I discovered anew, all in a moment, the charm of this valley world. I had seen nothing like this from the mountain-top. Yes, good as the summit prospect was, this was in some respects better. If that was more magnificent, more soul-expanding, this was more home-felt and beautiful. And as I looked and looked, while the light faded out of the sky, I was conscious of a new contentment. Mountain-tops for visits, I said, and may I enjoy them often; but the valley to live in.

The next morning I was no sooner abroad than this happy impression was renewed and deepened. It was a comfort to the feet to be going neither uphill nor downhill, and it rested the eyes to be looking not at remote peaks and dimly discovered sheets of water, but into green branches so near that the leaves could be seen, and the blue sky through them. How sweetly the ripple of the brook came to my ears as it ran over its stony bed just beyond the velvety, smooth meadow! And the cawing of a dozen or two of crows, who were talking politics among the pines on the hillside, affected me most agreeably. There was something of real neighborliness about it. I would gladly have taken a hand in the discussion, if they would have let me. When a song sparrow started out of the hedge at my elbow it gave me a start of surprise. I had become so unused to such movements! A robin’s sudden cackle I thought almost the sweetest of music; the careless warble of a bluebird was nothing less than a voice from heaven; and a squirrel sputtering defiance from the stone wall set me laughing with pleasure. None of these sounds, nor anything akin to them, was to be heard on the desolate, boulder-covered top of Mount Washington.

Now the trees interlaced their branches over my head. Nothing could be prettier; and the effect was so novel! I stopped short to admire it. And anon, as the road made a little ascent, scarcely noticeable to one fresh from the steepness of a mountain cone, I found myself gazing down upon one of the most engaging scenes in the world; a sequestered valley farm, thrifty-looking, snugly kept, nestled among low hills, with a mountain river winding along the farther side of it, between the meadow and the woodland, now lost to sight, now shining in the sun. I had known the place for years, as I had known the worthy man who owns it; and I had looked at it many times from this very point; but I had never seen it till this morning. A pleasant thing it is when an old picture or an old poem, or both in one, is thus made new. If our eyes could but oftener be anointed!

The softness of the meadow, freshly sprung after the summer mowing, the glistening of the corn leaves, the narrow road,—a brown ribbon laid upon the green carpet,—that runs to the door and stops (for nothing goes by—nothing but the river, the clouds, and the birds), the shade trees clustered lovingly about the house, the whole pastoral scene, I saw it all with the vision of one who had been looking at a vaguely defined, far-away world, over which the eye wandered as the dove wandered over the face of the waters, and now had come suddenly in sight of home.

Yes, distance is a good painter, but nearness is a better one. So I felt for the time being, at all events, falling in with the mood of the hour; for it is well that moods alter, as it is well that the earth goes round the sun and season gives place to season. Man was not made to see one kind of beauty, or to believe in one kind of goodness. The whole world is hid in his heart. All things are his. The small and the great, the near and the far, light and darkness, good and evil, the intimacies of home and the isolations of infinite space, all are parts of the Creator’s work, and equally parts of the creature’s inheritance.

For to-day, then, I praise the valley. I am for having the hills close about me, rather than afar off and far below. I like to see the trees, and the leaves on them, rather than leagues on leagues of barely discernible forest; and a lonely pool of still water at my feet, with alders reflected in it, is more in my eyes than Lake Umbagog itself, hardly better than a blur upon the landscape, fifty miles away. To-morrow I may feel differently, but for to-day let me listen to the breeze in the pine branches and the brook pattering over stones, rather than to the eternal silences of the bare mountain-top and the brooding sky.

IN THE MOUNT LAFAYETTE FOREST

It is one of the cool mornings that descend rather suddenly upon our White Mountain country with the coming of autumn; cool mornings that are liable to be followed by warm days. I was in doubt how to dress as I set out, and for the first mile or two almost regretted that I had not taken an extra garment. Then all at once the sun broke through the clouds, and even the one coat became superfluous and was thrown over my arm. This state of things lasted till I had crossed the golf links and entered the woods. At that point the sun withdrew his shining, and now, between the clouds and the shadow and dampness of the forest, I have put on my coat again and buttoned it up; and what counts for more, I am driven to walk less slowly than one would always prefer to do in such a place.

A fresh breeze stirs the tree-tops, so that I am not without music, let the birds be as silent as they will. Nearly or quite the only voice I have so far heard was that of an unseen Maryland yellow-throat, some distance back, who sprang into the air and delivered himself of a song with variations, all in his most rapturous June manner. Why the fellow should have been in anything like an ecstasy at that precise moment is quite beyond my guessing. Possibly it would be equally beyond his, if he were to stop to think about it. Some sudden stirring of memory, perhaps. Natural beings seldom know just why they are happy. I recall the fact, unthought of till now, that I have not heard a yellow-throat sing before for several weeks, though I have seen the birds often. They are among the late stayers, and at this season have a more or less lonesome look, being commonly found not as members of a flock or family, after the manner of autumnal warblers in general, but here and there one, dodging about in a roadside thicket, or peeping out curiously at a casual passer-by.

Just as I am remarking upon the unusual silence my ear catches in the far distance the song of a white-throated sparrow. So very far off it is that the sound barely reaches me. Indeed, I do not so much hear it as become vaguely conscious that I should hear it if the bird were ever so little nearer. Yet I am sure he sang—as sure as if I had seen him. Probably experienced readers will divine what I mean, although I seem unable to express it.

The road is bordered with the dead tops of trees, thrown there in heaps by the road-makers. They form an unsightly hedge, which birds of various kinds resort to for cover. At this minute two winter wrens, pert-looking, bob-tailed things, scold at me out of it. My passing is a trespass, they consider, and they tell me so with emphasis. For the sake of stirring them up to protest even more vigorously (such an eloquent gesticulatory manner as they have), I stand still and squeak to them. Few birds can be quiet under such insults; and the winter wren is not one of them. There is nothing phlegmatic about his disposition. He is like some beings of a higher class: it takes very little to set him in a flutter. So I squeak and squeak, and the pair vociferate tut, tut, till I have had enough and go on my way laughing. Touchy people were made for teasing.

I have hardly started before a hairy woodpecker’s sharp signal is heard, and within a minute a sapsucker on the opposite side of the way utters a snarling note, which by a slight effort of the imagination might be taken for the voice of an angry cat. To my ear it is not in the smallest degree woodpeckerish. I see the bird a moment later as he flies across the road.

In a mountain-side forest like this, near the mountain’s foot, the traveler, if he is not climbing the slope but crossing it transversely, is certain to come now and then upon a brook. I am on the edge of one now, and as the sun at this moment shines out between two clouds I stand still to enjoy the warmth while it lasts, and at the same time to hear the singing of the water. Good music, I call it, and fear no contradiction. It has the quality of some of the best verse—liquidity. It is broken unevenly into syllables, yet it is true to the beat, and it flows. In short, it is smooth, yet not too smooth—with the smoothness of water, not of oil. It speaks to every boulder as it passes. I wish my ear were more at home in the language.

There is seldom a minute when, if I pause to listen, I cannot hear from one direction or another the quaint, homely, twangy, countryfied, yet to me always agreeable voice of Canadian nuthatches. At frequent intervals one or two come near enough so that I see them creeping about over the trees, bodies bent, heads down, always in search of a mouthful, yet keeping up, every one, his share of the universal chorus. As well as I can judge, all the evergreen forests of this Northern country are now alive with these pretty creatures; for they really are pretty. In fact, there are few forest birds for whom I cherish a kindlier feeling. It is too bad they do not summer in our Massachusetts woods, though possibly I should care less for them if they made themselves neighborly the whole year long, like their relatives, the white-breasts.

A goldfinch is passing far above, dropping music as he goes. He is one of the high-fliers. Wherever you may happen to be, at the summit of Mount Washington or where not, you will pretty often hear his sweet voice as he wanders under the sky, dipping and rising, dipping and rising, voice and wing keeping step together.

Here and there one or two clouded-sulphur butterflies (Philodice) take wing as I disturb them. They have been most extraordinarily abundant of late. A fortnight ago we drove for almost a whole forenoon through clouds of them, bunches of twenty or more constantly rising from damp spots of earth by the wayside; and in a meadow all bespangled with purple asters they were so thick as almost to conceal the flowers. Twinkling in the sunlight, they looked a thousand times more like stars than the asters themselves. Even the entomologists of the valley, in whose company I was driving, had never seen the like. Here in this shaded road such lovers of the sun are naturally less numerous. In truth, the wonder is that they should be here at all. And yet the wonder is not so very great; they wander at their own will, and the will of the wind. Only last week, I am told, in the midst of a driving snowstorm, one took shelter in the Summit House on Mount Washington. After all, a butterfly is not exactly a fool; it knows enough to go into the house when it snows.

Now I come upon a few snowbirds, hopping in silence about the twigs of a brush-heap, snapping their tails nervously, as if proud to show the white feather; and shortly beyond are two or three white-throated sparrows. They also are silent. Perhaps they perceive that a red squirrel close by is talking enough for them and himself too. He says a good many things, some of which I feel sure would be highly interesting to a competent listener. Among forest folk, as among church folk, the rule is, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” As for me, I can only lament my deficiency. A solitary vireo is chattering sweetly (with him music is its own reward), and all the while, whoever else speaks or keeps silence, the nuthatch chorus goes on. Taking New England together, we may safely say that just at present hundreds of thousands, yea, millions of ank-anks go up to heaven every minute of every day, from sunrise to sunset.

I walk but a few rods farther before I am delighted by the sight of four winter wrens in an overturned tree-top. In my experience it is something extremely out of the common course to see so many together, and—as I did with the two a quarter of a mile back—I work upon this quartet’s sensibilities till they fairly dance with curiosity and indignation. I wonder if they are a family group.

I bethink myself that I am saying nothing about the forest itself. Its presence is felt rather than seen, a grateful solemnity; but the temperature will not suffer me to sit down and enjoy it as a Christian should. And just here I emerge into territory over which a fire has swept within a few years. Under these dead trees I get the sun again, and can go slowly. Nothing in the way of physical comfort is more grateful than warmth after coolness, unless it be coolness after warmth. A pine siskin calls, the first for some weeks, and another hairy woodpecker shows himself. Not a warbler has been seen since I entered the woods. Of the flycatchers, too,—olive-sides and wood pewees,—which were always conspicuous in this burning in August and early September, there is neither sight nor sound. Their season is done. Crossbill notes lead me to look upward, and I see four birds flying past. Restless, nomadic souls! Like the saints, they have “no continuing city.”

Another half-mile in the leafy forest, and I reach the foot of Echo Lake, where as I pass a cluster of balsam firs I am saluted by the busy, hurried calls of golden-crowned kinglets. A wren is here also, irritable as ever, and hearing a chickadee’s voice, I whistle and chirp to him. If I can set him to scolding, all the birds in the neighborhood will flock this way to ascertain what the trouble is. The device works to a charm; in half a minute the excitement is intense. Nuthatches, white-throats, chickadees, kinglets, and wren, all take a hand in vituperating the intruder, and a youthful redstart comes from the opposite side of the way to satisfy his more gentle curiosity. One creature, strangely enough, remains neutral: a red squirrel, who sits on end at the top of a stump and gazes at me in silence. He holds one hand upon his heart, like an opera singer, and looks and looks. “You sentimental goose!” I say; “who taught you that trick?” and I laugh at him and pass on. This is near the corner of the old Notch road, and as I round it and face the cold northerly wind I button my coat about me and start homeward at a quicker pace.

ON BALD MOUNTAIN

“Four inches of snow at the Profile House:” such was the word brought to us at the breakfast table, the driver of the “stage” having communicated the intelligence as he passed the hotel an hour or two earlier. We were not surprised. It rained in Franconia night before last, and yesterday, when the clouds now and then lifted a little, the sides of the mountains were seen to be white. This morning (October 7), although even the lower slopes were veiled, the day promised well, and at the first minute I set out for the Notch.

It was evident almost immediately that at some time within the last forty-eight hours there had been a great influx of migrating birds. Song sparrows, white-throated sparrows, snowbirds, bluebirds, and myrtle warblers were in extraordinary force. Soon I began to hear the wrennish calls of ruby-crowned kinglets,—which have been very scarce hitherto,—and presently more than one was heard rehearsing its pretty song. What with bluebird voices, song sparrows’ warblings (no set tune, but “continuous melody”), the cackle of robins, and the croaking of rusty blackbirds, the air was loud. To these travelers, as to me, the weather seemed to be changing for the better, though the sun did not yet show itself, and finding themselves in so delectable a valley, they were in exuberant spirits.

Just above the Profile House farm the road took me into a flock of birds that proved to be the better part of half a mile in length. The wayside hedges were literally in a flutter, snowbirds being the most abundant, I think, with white-throats and myrtle warblers not far behind. Hermit thrushes, winter wrens, chipping sparrows, song sparrows, and ruby-crowns were continually in sight, and an unseen purple finch was practicing niggardly, disconnected, vireo-like phrases, as the manner of his kind is in the autumnal season.

Then, when the older forest was reached, there came an interval of silence, broken at last by the distant, or distant-seeming, voice of a red-breasted nuthatch and the cheerful notes of chickadees. Soon two hermits showed themselves, facing me on a low perch, and lifting their tails solemnly in response to my chirping; and not far away were a winter wren or two, and a flock of white-throats and snowbirds. I had never seen the dear old road birdier, even in May, though of course I had often seen the number of species very much larger.

At the height of land I came upon the first snow, a ragged fringe left on the shady side of the way. I made a snowball, for the sake of doing it (or, as I said to myself, suiting the boyish act with a boyish word, “for greens”), and decided all at once not to go down into the Notch, but up to the top of Bald Mountain. From that point, if the sky cleared, as I felt hopeful it would, there would be sights worth remembering.

The mountain is only a little one, but it is steep enough—the upper half, at all events—to give the eager pedestrian a puff for his money. For myself, I had time to spare, and, fortunately or unfortunately, had been over the path too often to be subject to the state of mind (I know it well) which we may characterize as climbers’ impatience. Unless something unforeseen should happen, the summit would wait for me. Halfway up, also, a flock of blue jays, five or six at least, who were holding a long and mysterious confabulation close by the path, afforded me a comfortable breathing spell. For a moment I suspected the presence of an owl, against whom the rascals were plotting mischief; but their voices were much of the time too soft, too intimate-sounding, too lacking in belligerency. Some of the birds might even have been communing with themselves. Their whole behavior had an air of preternatural gravity and cunning, and their remarks, whatever the purport of them, were in the highest degree varied. One fellow was a masterly performer upon the bones (jay scholars will understand what I mean, and I should despair of explaining myself in a few words to any one else), while another furnished me with a genuine surprise by whistling again and again in the manner of a red-tailed hawk.

Well, the conspirators dispersed, the solitary climber pocketed his curiosity, and in a few minutes longer his feet were at the top. The rocky cone of Lafayette was still densely capped, but under the fringed edges of the cloud there was plenty of snow in sight. All the upper slopes of Kinsman, Cannon, and Lafayette were covered with it, except that the deciduous trees (broad patches of yellow) stood bare. Apparently the snow had stuck only upon the evergreens, and the effect at this distance was very striking, the white over the green producing a beautiful gray. I could never have imagined it. The hotel and its cottages, nestled between the mountains, all had white roofs, but the landscape as a whole was anything but wintry. Everywhere below me the great forest still showed an abundance of bright hues,—red, yellow, and russet,—a piece of glorious pageantry, though many shades less brilliant than I had seen it two days before.

So I am saying to myself when suddenly I look upward, and behold, the cap is lifted from Lafayette, and the mountain-top is clear white, shining in the sunlight against the blue sky; a vision, it seems; something not of this world; splendor immaculate, unearthly, unspeakable. I feel like shouting, or tell myself that I do; but for some reason I keep silence. Clouds still hang about the mountains, their shapes altering from glory to glory with every minute. Now a band lies clean across Lafayette, immediately below the cone, detaching the white mass from everything underneath, and leaving it, as it were, floating in the air.

A sharp-shinned hawk sails past me, nuthatches call from the valley woods, a snowbird perches on a dwarf spruce at my elbow, a red squirrel breaks into sudden spluttering, and then, with hands uplifted, sits silent and motionless. I mention these details, but they are nothing. What I really see and feel is the world I am living in: the sunshine, the stillness, the temperate airs, the bright encircling forest, in which my little hilltop is cradled, and the white peak yonder in the sky. The snow lends it lightness, airiness, buoyancy. As I said just now, it seems almost to float in the ether.

I remained with this beauty for an hour, divided at the last between the luminous, snowy peak above me and the soft—ineffably soft—world of leafy tree-tops below. Then, as I had done only day before yesterday, I bade the place good-by. Probably I should not come this way again till next summer, at the soonest. Good-by, old mountain. Good-by, old woods. No doubt you have many worthier lovers, but let me be counted as one of the faithful.

I was still on the cone, making my way downward, when a grouse drummed and in a minute or two repeated himself. The sound struck me as curiously wanting in resonance, as if the log were water-soaked (though I do not believe he was striking one), or his breast not fully inflated. Perhaps he was a young fellow, a new hand with the drumsticks, and so excusable. Certainly the difficulty lay not in the matter of distance, for between two of the performances I turned a sharp corner, effectively triangulating the bird, and it was impossible that he should be more than a few yards away. On all sides the little nuthatches were calling to each other in their quaint childish treble. I love to hear them, and the goldcrests also; but here, as on the heights above, the birds were less than the forest. I was in a susceptible mood, I suppose. The mere sight of the tall, straight trunks, with the lights and shadows on them, gave me a pleasure indescribable. Though the friend who had been my walking companion for a week past (and no man could wish a better one) is sure to read this column, I cannot refrain from saying that solitariness has its merciful alleviations. I was no longer tempted to babble, and the wise old trees took their turn at talking. If I could only repeat what they said!

BIRDS AND BRIGHT LEAVES

After the red maple trees and the yellow birches are mostly bare, and the greater part of the sugar groves have passed the zenith of their brilliancy, then the poplars come to the rescue. The hills are all at once bright again with a second crop of color, an aftermath of splendid sun-bright yellow. I knew nothing about this beforehand, and am delighted over the discovery. From my Franconia window I am looking at as pretty an autumnal wood as any man need wish to see, and it is a wood the seasonable glories of which were ended, I thought, more than a week ago. As I look at it I feel sorry for my last week’s companion, who went home too soon. Since his departure the days have been outdoing one another in the softness of their airs and the beauty of their lights. Mother Earth has been in her most amiable mood. Nothing is too good for her children. I have never seen fairer weather; though some, I dare say, might criticise it as a few degrees too warm. It is hard, I admit, for a walker to keep a coat on his back, far along as the season is getting, when the sun wrestles with him for it.

An interesting thing to me has been the tardy brightening of individual maple trees. It is one more manifestation, I assume, of Nature’s gift of versatility, her faculty of variation, to which, all but universal as it is, scientific men attribute so much potency in the evolving of so-called species. What I notice just now is that, as some bushes and trees mature their fruit later than others of the same kind, living apparently under the same conditions, so some maple trees are a week or two behind their immediate neighbors in ripening their foliage. I have passed within a day or two both sugar maples and red maples that were just donning their gay robes. Well done, I am moved to say, as my eye lights on them. They and the poplars, together with certain extensive maple groves on the higher levels, still keep the world arrayed in a really barbaric splendor. Two weeks ago I should have prophesied that before this time the landscape would be stripped for winter; and so it would have been, perhaps, if a cold storm had supervened instead of this period of summery brightness and calm. Great is weather. There is nothing like it. It makes a man—and a tree, too, for aught I know—glad to be alive.

That it makes the birds happy is beyond dispute. You can see it with half an eye. Many of them are gone, it is true, but many others are left; and wherever you take your walk you may have joy of them. You will need to be blind and deaf, or of a hopelessly sour temper, not to catch a little of their cheeriness. Three days ago (it was an anniversary with me, and I was early abroad) I went into the kitchen garden before breakfast, as I have been doing frequently of late, to see what birds might be there. For a month and more, as the coarse grasses and weeds have ripened their crop (the garden, luckily for me, having been allowed to go untended), the place has been a favorite resort of sparrows. There I saw the Lincoln finches in their time,—on September 5 and subsequently,—and there for a fortnight past I have always been able to begin the day with a few white-crowns.

Well, on the morning in question one of the first things I heard was a brief, uncharacteristic, autumnal-sounding ditty which, being too short for a song sparrow’s work, I at once credited to a white-crown; and, to be sure, when I looked that way, there the bird stood on a top stone of the wall, a young fellow, not yet “crowned,” practicing his first musical exercises. The morning was cool,—the ground had stiffened overnight,—and every time he opened his mouth to sing, a tiny cloud of vapor could be seen rising from it. It was visible music. Again and again I watched him. The dear little chorister! Nobody’s birthday was ever more prettily honored. He “sang to my eye” indeed—in a daintily literal sense such as the poet never thought of. I wonder if any one, anywhere, ever saw and heard the like.