Transcriber Note

The term "Ursus Major" appears on [page 88]. As Ursus is a genus of the family Ursidæ (Bears), it is assumed the author meant to use Ursus instead of the usual "Ursa Major" of astronomers.

WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS

Sunrise from the summit of Mount Washington

WHITE MOUNTAIN
TRAILS

TALES OF THE TRAILS

TO THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON AND
OTHER SUMMITS OF THE WHITE HILLS

BY

WINTHROP PACKARD

Author of "Florida Trails," "Literary Pilgrimage
of a Naturalist," "Wild Pastures," etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1912
By Small, Maynard and Company
(INCORPORATED)

Entered at Stationers' Hall

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

TO THE
APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN CLUB
WHOSE PATHS MADE IT POSSIBLE
THIS BOOK
IS APPRECIATINGLY DEDICATED

FOREWORD

The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors of the "Boston Evening Transcript" for permission to reprint in this volume matter originally contributed to the columns of that paper; to Mr. Frederick Endicott of Canton, Massachusetts, for permission to reproduce his photographs of "Sunrise on Mount Washington," "Clouds Cascading over the Northern Peaks," "Fog on Mount Cannon," and "Lafayette from Bald Mountain"; to the Appalachian Mountain Club for the shelter of cosy camps so hospitably open to all wayfarers; and to many mountain people, especially those who dwell summers in the tiny hamlet on Mount Washington Summit, for unassuming hospitality and friendly guidance.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS

I
UP CHOCORUA

The Mountain and Its Surroundings in Mid-May

The smooth highway over which thousands of automobiles skim in long summer processions from Massachusetts to the mountains, coquettes with Chocorua as it winds through the Ossipees. Sometimes it tosses you over a ridge whence the blue bulk and gray pinnacle stand bewitchingly revealed for a second only to be eclipsed in another second by the lesser, nearby beauties of the hill country, and leave you wistful. Sometimes it gives you tantalizing flashes of it through trees or by the gable of a farm-house on a round, hayfield hill, but it is only as you glide down the long incline to the shores of Chocorua Lake that the miracle of revelation is complete. Then indeed you must set your foot hard on the brake and gaze long over the Scudder farm-house gate down a green slope of field to the little lake, and as the eye touches approvingly Mark Robertson's rustic bridge, set in just the right spot to give the human touch to the wild beauty of the landscape, and leaps beyond to the larger lake framed in its setting of dark growth, and on again to the noble lift of the great mountain with its bare pinnacle of gray granite, you realize the grandeur and beauty of this outpost sentinel of the white hills. It is hard to believe that Switzerland or Italy or any other country has anything finer than this to show the traveller.

"The smooth highway over which thousands of automobiles skim in long summer processions from Massachusetts to the Mountains"

It was a wonder day in May when I first stopped, spell-bound, upon this spot. A soft blue haze of spring was over all the mountain world, making mystery of all distant objects and lifting and withdrawing the peak into the sky of which it seemed but a part, only a little less magical and intangible. Hardly was this a real world on this day, but rather one painted by some mighty master out of semi-transparent dust of gems. The lake was a mirror of emerald stippled about its distant border with the chrysophrase reflection of young leaves, carrying deep in its heart another, more magical, Chocorua of softest sapphire tapering to a nadir-pointing peak of beryl. Out of the nearby woods came the song of the white-throated sparrow, the very spirit of the mountains, a song like them, built of gems that fade from the ear into a trembling mist of sound, the nearby notes sapphire peaks, the others distant and more distant till they seem but the recollection of a dream. Such days come to the mountains in May and they bring the white-throats up with them from the haze of the subtropics where they are born.

If one would climb Chocorua by the Hammond trail he must leave the smooth road that winds onward to Crawford Notch after he passes Chocorua Lake. There another, less smooth but still available to carriage or motor, will take him across Chocorua Brook and end at a house in the woods. Just before the end it crosses a second brook, and there is the beginning of the trail, a slender footpath only, but well defined in the earth and well marked by little piles of stone wherever it goes over ledges. It is hardly possible to miss it in daylight; after dark it would be hardly possible to find it. Twice it crosses the brook, the second time leaving it to gurgle contentedly on in its ravine and rising more directly skyward. Beech and birch branches shimmered overhead with the translucent green of half-grown young leaves along the lower reaches of this trail. Maples flushed the green in spots with tapestry of coral red. Scattered evergreens, pine, spruce, hemlock and fir lent backgrounds of green that was black in contrast to the lighter tints. Smilacina, checkerberry and partridge berry wove carpets of varying color in the tan brown of last year's leaves, climbing the slope as bravely as anyone, and painted and purple trilliums did their best to follow, but had not the courage to go very far. The pipsissewa, bellwort and Solomon's seal did better. A few of them dared the ledges well up to the top of the first great southerly spur which the trail ascends.

It was the day after I had first seen Chocorua and a wind out of the west had blown the blue haze of unreality away from the mountain, massing it to the east and south where it still held the land in thrall. I got the blue of it through straight stems of beech and birch and through the soft quivering of their young leaves painted with the delicate coral tracery of maple fruit.

All the way up the lower slope one is drowned in Corot. I watch yellow-bellied sap-suckers make love among the beeches, the crimson of their crowns and throats flashing with ruby fire, the blotched gray and white of wings and bodies a living emanation of the bark to which they cling. Their colors seem the impersonal fires of the young trees personified. In this, another wonder day of May, the goodness of God to the green earth flows in a tide of unnameable colors up the mountain-side, enflaming bird and tree alike and from the great shoulder of the mountain I look down through its mist of mystery and delight to Chocorua Lake, a clear eye of the earth, wide with joy and showing within its emerald iris as within a crystal lens magic mountains, upside down, and between their peaks the turquoise gateway to another heaven, infinitely deep below. The lowland forest sleeps green at my feet, a green of sea shoals that deepen into the tossing blue of mountains far to the south, Ossipee, Whittier, Bear Camp and the lesser hills of the Sandwich range.

Many of the shrubs and trees of the lower slopes climb well to the top of this great southerly spur of the mountain, but straggle as they climb and lessen in number as they reach the height. Few of the lowland birds get so far, but among the dense spruces and firs which crowd one another wherever there is soil for their roots among the weather worn ledges, deciduous trees sprinkle a green lace of spring color, and among the spruces, too, is to be heard the flip of bird wings and an occasional song. Here the hardier denizens of the country farther to the north find a congenial climate. Myrtle warblers show their patches of yellow as they flit about, feeding, making love and selecting nest sites, and with them the slate-colored juncos glisten in their very best clothes and show the flesh color of their strong conical bills. These two are birds of the mountain and they climb wherever the spruce does.

Beyond the crest of this great southerly spur the path dips through ravines and climbs juts of crag and débris of crumbled granite to the base of the great cone which is the pinnacle. Now and then one gets a level bit for the saving of his breath and his aching leg muscles and may find a seat on fantastically strewn boulders, dropped by the glaciers when they fled from the warmth to come. On up the mountain go the small things of earth, too. Here are sheep laurel and mountain blueberries, stockily defiant of the winter's zero gales, the laurel clinging as firmly to its last year's leaves as it does on the sunny pastures of the sea level hundreds of miles to the south, the roots set in the coarse sand that the frost of centuries has crumbled from rotten red granite. Poplars climb among the spruces and willows are there, their Aaron's rods yellow with catkins in the summer-like heat that quivers in the thin air. The trees feel in them the call to the summit as does man.

As they go on you seem to see this eagerness to ascend expressed in the attitudes of the trees themselves. To the southwest a regiment of birches has charged upward toward the base of the pinnacle. Boldly they have swarmed up the steep slope and, though the smooth acclivities of the ledges about the base of the cone have stopped all but a corporal's guard, and though they stand, theirs is the very picture of a turbulent, onrushing crowd. Motionless as they are, they seem to sway and toss with all the restless enthusiasm of a mighty purpose; nor could a painter, depicting a battle charge, place upon canvas a more vivid semblance of a wild rush onward toward a bristling, defiant height. Few are the birches that have passed this glacis of granite that forever holds back the body of the regiment, yet a few climb on and get very near the summit of the gray peak. More of the dwarf spruces have done so. In compact, swaying lines they rush up, marking the wind and spread of slender defiles and leaning with such eagerness toward the summit that you clearly see them climbing, though they are individually motionless, rooted where they stand. There is a black silence of determination about these spruces that must indeed carry them to the highest possible points, and it does, while to the eye the birches behind them toss their limbs frantically and cheer.

"You realize the grandness and beauty of this outpost sentinel of the White Hills"

Whether the little blue spring butterflies climb the mountain or whether they live there, each in his chosen neighborhood, going not far either up or down, it is difficult to say, but I found them in many places along the trail to the base of the cone, little thumbnail bits of a livelier, lovelier blue than either the sky or the distant peaks could show, frail as the petals of the bird-cherry blossoms that fluttered with them along the borders of the path, yet happy and fearless in the sun. With them in many places I saw the broad, seal-brown wings of mourning cloaks, and once a Compton tortoise flipped from the path before me and hurried on, upward toward the summit. I looked in vain for him there, but as proof that butterflies do climb to the very top of Chocorua I saw, as I rested on the square table of granite which crowns it, a mourning cloak, which soared up and circled me as I sat, rose fifty feet above, then coasted the air down toward the place where the birches seemed to toss and cheer in the noonday sun. He had won the height, and more, and I envied him the nonchalant ease with which his slanting planes took the descent.

One other creature I saw, higher yet, a broad-winged hawk that swung mighty circles up from the ravine to the southeast, down which one looks in dizzy exaltation from the very summit. There was a climber that outdid all the rest of us in the swift ease of his ascent. Out of nothing he was borne to my sight, a mote in the clear depths three thousand feet below, a mote that swept in wide spirals grandly up with never a quiver of the wing. Up and up he came till he swung near at the level of my eye, then swirled on and on, a thousand feet above me. A moment he poised there, then with a single slant of motionless wings turned and slid down the air mile on mile, one grand, unswerving coast, to vanish in the blue distance toward Lake Ossipee.

Southerly from Chocorua summit the land was soused in the steam of spring. Chocorua Lake lay green at my feet, an emerald mirror of the world around it. To its right a little way Lonely Lake was a dark funnel in the forest, a shadowy crater opening to unknown depths in the earth below, filled with black water, and all to the east and south the country lay flat as a map, colored in light green, the lakes in dark green or steel blue, the roads in dust brown, the villages scattered white dots, while beyond a blue mist of mountains was painted on the margin for the horizon's edge.

To look north and west was to look into another world, to realize for what mountains Chocorua stands as the sentinel at the southeast gate. Paugus lifted, a blue-black, toppling wave to westward, seemingly near enough to fall upon Chocorua summit, while over its shoulder peered Passaconaway flanked with Tripyramid and White Face. Northward and westward from these toppled the pinnacles of jumbled, blue-black waves of land that passed beyond the power of vision. Northward again the glance touched summit after summit of this dark sea of mountains till the crests lifted and broke in the white foam of the Presidential Range with Mount Washington towering, glittering and glacial, above them all. Here was no steam of spring to soften the outlines and blur the distance in blue. Rather the crystal clearness of the winter air still lingered there, and though but a few drifts of December's snow lay on Chocorua and none were to be seen on the other, nearer mountains, Carrigain was white crested and Washington topped the ermine of the Presidential range like a magical iceberg floating majestically on a sea of driven foam. Chocorua is not a very high mountain. Three thousand feet it springs suddenly into the blue from the lake at its feet, 3508 feet is its height above the sea level, but its splendid isolation and the sharpness of its pinnacle give one on its summit a sense of height and of exaltation far greater than that to be obtained from many a summit that is in reality far higher.

Yet to him who stays long on the summit of Chocorua thus early in the spring is apt to come a certain sense of sadness, following the exaltation of spirits, sadness for the inevitable passing of this inspiring pinnacle. The work of alternating heat and cold, of sun and rain, are everywhere visible, beating the granite dome to flinders and carrying it down into the valley below. The bare granite shows the sledgehammer blows of the frost as if a giant had been at work on it making repoussé work with the weapon of Thor. Not a square foot of the sky-facing ledges but has felt the welts of this hammer of the frost, each lifting a flake of the stone, from the size of one's thumbnail to that of a broad palm. These crumble into nodules of angular granite that make drifts of coarse sand even on the very summit. The sweep of the wind and the rush of the rain come and send these in streams down the mountain side. The rain and the water of melted snow do another work of destruction, also. Such water has a strong solvent power, even on the grim granite. Always after rain or during the snow-melting season of early spring, there is a little basin full of this water in the bare rock just northeast of the very summit. There it stands till the winds blow it away or the thirsty sun dries it up, and year after year it has dissolved a little of the rock on which it rests till it has worn quite a basin in the granite,—a basin which looks singularly as if it had been hollowed roughly out by mallet and chisel. So the work goes on, and Chocorua summit is appreciably lowered, century by century.

Fortunately man thinks in years and not in geological epochs, else the sadness of the thought were more poignant. After all, the work of erosion of the centuries to come can never be so great on the mountain as that of the centuries that have passed, for the geologists tell us that all the summits of the Appalachians were once but valleys in the vast table-land which towered far higher above them than they now do above the sea. The forces of erosion whose patient work one now sees on Chocorua summit have hammered at the hills thus long. So wears the world away, but the great square block which sits on the very peak of the mountain shows none of the bruises which fleck the soft granite below it, and it may well be many a thousand years before it slides down into the ravine below.

The black bulks of Paugus and the mountains beyond were rimmed with the crimson fire of the westering sun as I reluctantly climbed down from the peak of this hill of enchantment, greeted by the evensongs of the juncos and myrtle warblers in the first broad patches of spruce about the base of the cone. A pigeon hawk swung up from the westerly ravine and hovered a moment so near me that I could see the white tip of his tail and the rusty neck collar, then slid down the air and vanished in the ravine on the opposite side of the mountain. He builds his nest on mountains and was well fitted to show me the easiest way down. I grudged him his wings as I waked the yelps in a new set of leg muscles, slumping down the slopes and climbing laboriously down the almost perpendicular, rocky ravines. The Hammond trail is no primrose path, for all its beauties, and it was my first climb of the year. I was glad indeed to drink deep of the mountain brook near the end of the trail and then rest a bit to the soothing contralto of its song.

The shadowy coolness of the evening was welling up and blotting the gold of sunset from the treetops as I rounded Chocorua Lake and watched the sunset fire the summit where I had lingered so long,—a fire reflected deep in the very heart of the mirroring waters. The roar of the little river on its way down to Chocorua town came faintly to me, a sleepy song, half that of the wind in pines, half an echo of droning bees that work all day in the willow blooms by its side. Liquid, clear, through this came the songs of wood thrushes out of the shadows. The peace of God was tenderly wrapping all the world in night, and the mountain loomed farther and farther away in blue mystery and dignity, while from its pinnacle slowly faded the rosy glow of the passing, perfect day.

"The shadowy coolness of evening was welling up and blotting the gold of sunset from the treetops"

II
BOBOLINK MEADOWS

Early June about Jackson Falls and Thorn Mountain

On a May morning after rain the bobolinks came to the meadows up under the shadow of Thorn Mountain. The morning stars had sung together and the breaking of day let tinkling fragments of their music through, or so it seemed. Something of the sleighbell melodies that have jingled over New Hampshire hills all winter was in this music, something of the happy laughter of sweet-voiced children, and something more that might be an echo of harps touched in holy heights. Surely it is good to be in the mountains at dawn in May, when such sweet tinklings of melody fall out of celestial spaces! The high hills were veiled in the mists of the storm that had passed, but the nearer summit of Thorn leaned friendly out of them, and over it from the south pitched the fragments of heavenly music, fluttering down on short wings like those of cherubs. The bobolinks had come to Jackson.

It is as easy to believe that the cherubs of Raphael and Rubens can make the journey from high heaven to earth on their chubby wings as that these short-winged, slow-fluttering birds can have come from the marshes below the Amazon on theirs, but so they have done, finding their music on the way. They went south in early September, brown, inconspicuous seed-eaters with never a note save a metallic "chink." Somewhere in the far south they found new plumage of black with plumes of white and old gold. Somewhere in the sapphire heights of air above the Caribbean Sea they caught the tinkling music of the spheres and dropped upon Florida with it in the very last days of April, bringing it thence again in joyous flight that drops them among the mountain meadows in mid May.

Now June is making the grass long about the little brown nests where the brown mother-bird sits so close, but the meadows are full of tinkling echoes of celestial music still. All the mountain world is rapturous with this same joy of something more than life which the bobolinks brought from on high in their songs, dancing and singing with it and tossing something of beauty skyward day and night. Round the margins of the bobolink meadows the apple trees have completed their adoration of bloom, the strewing of incense and purity of white petals down the wind, and now yearn skyward with tenderness of young leaves. The meadow violets smile bravely blue from shy nooks, and the snow that lingered so long on the slopes is born again in the gentler white of houstonias which frost the short grasses with star-dust bloom. All the heat of the dandelion suns that blaze in fiery constellations round the margins cannot melt away this lace-work of the houstonias, and it is not till the buttercups come, too, and focus the sun rays from their glazed petals of gold that the last frost of the season, that of the houstonia blooms, is melted away. Dearly as the bobolink loves his brown mate in the nest, the moist maze beneath the grass culms where he dines, and his swaying perch on the ferns that feather the meadow's edge, he, too, feels this upward impulse within him too strong to resist and continually flutters skyward, quivering with the joy of June and setting the air from hill to hill a-bubble with his song.

The bobolink meadows begin on the grassy levels between the Ellis and Wildcat rivers, the bottom land which forms the foothold of Jackson town, and they climb the mountains in all directions as do the summer visitors, scattering laughter and beauty as they go, till you hear the tinkle of the bobolink's song and find the beauty of meadow blooms in tiny nooks well up toward the very summits. Up here the shyest meadow birds and sweetest meadow flowers seem to love the rough rocks well and climb them by the route that the brooks take as they prattle down from the high springs. Up the very rivers they troop, and though they turn aside eagerly to the safer haven of the brook sides, they climb as well by way of the boulders that breast the roar of the bigger streams. The Wildcat River plunges right down into Jackson village by way of Jackson Falls, a thousand-foot slope over granite ledges worn smooth with flood, and mighty boulders scattered in bewildering confusion. In time of freshet this long incline is a welter of uproarious foam. This year a long spring drought has bared the rocks in many places, and one may climb the length of the falls as the stream comes down, from ledge to ledge and from boulder to boulder.

The Glen Ellis River at Jackson, New Hampshire, Thorn Mountain in the distance

The rush of the water drowns the warbling of the water-thrushes in the alders and viburnums on the banks, it drowns the cool melodies that the wood thrushes sing from the deep shade of the wooded slopes along the stream, but nothing has drowned the wild flowers that climb the falls by way of the ledges and boulders as the adventurous fisherman does. Why the whelming rush of freshets has not wiped them out of existence it is hard to say. There must be times each year when they are buried deep beneath the boiling foam, but there they cling this June and smile up in the sun and take the fresh scent of the churning waters as a strong basis for their perfumes. They knew the tricks of the perfumer's trade long before there were perfumers, and the moisture of the flood itself is their ambergris. Here the cranberry tree leans over the water and drops the white petals of the neutral blooms from its broad, flat cymes to go over one fall after another on their way to Ellis River and, later, the Saco. The gentle meadow-sweet dares far more than this. It grows from slender cracks in the face of perpendicular granite, and with but rocks and water for its roots thrives and bathes its serrate leaves in the spray. The mountain blueberries have set their feet in similar places and hang fascicles of white bells over the water for the more daring of the bumblebees that have their nests in the moss of the river banks.

Showiest and boldest of all is the rhodora which has taken possession of a rock island in midstream well up the falls. Here in a tangle of rock points and driftwood it grows in clumps and puts out its umbel clusters of richest rose, a mist of petals that seems to have caught and held one of the rainbow tints from the spray that dashes by the blooms on either side. Nor is even this, with its showy beauty that Emerson loved, the loveliest thing to be found growing out of granite in the very tumult of the waters. The blue violet is there, unseen from the bank but smiling shyly up to him who will clamber out to midstream, finding coigns of vantage down where even at low water the splash of spray sprinkles its pointed leaves and violet-blue flowers. Viola cucullata is common to all moist meadows and stream margins from Canada to the South, but nowhere does it bloom more cheerily and confidingly than in the midst of the rush and roar of Jackson Falls in these danger spots among the rocks. One clump I found in a square well of granite in the very wildest uproar, holding its sprays of bloom bravely up in a spot that at every freshet must be fairly whelmed with volumes of whirling icy water. How it holds this place at such times only the clinging, fibrous roots and the gray granite that they embrace can tell, but there it is, blooming as sweetly and contentedly as in any sheltered, grassy meadow in all the land.

Up from the bridge above Jackson Falls the road climbs by one bobolink meadow after another along the slope of Tin Mountain till it stops at the wide clearing on the higher shoulder of Thorn, which was once the Gerrish farm. Farm it is no longer, for the farmers are long gone. The jaw-post of the old well-sweep leans decrepitly over the well, which is choked with rubbish. The weight of winter snow and the rush of summer rain have long since broken through the roof of the old house and are steadily carrying it down into the earth from which it sprang. The chimney swifts have deserted the crumbled chimney, and the barn swallows no longer nest in the barn, last signs of the passing of a homestead, and even the phœbes have gone to newer habitations, but the broad acres are still strong in fertility and the grass grows lush and green on the gentle slopes. Down from Thorn summit and over from Tin the forest advances, but hesitatingly. It is as if it still had memory of the strokes of the pioneer's axe and did not yet dare an invasion of the land he marked off. It sends out skirmishers, plumed young knights of spruce and fir, scouts of white birch and yellow, of maple and beech, to spy out the land, and where these have found no enemy it is advancing, meaning to take peaceful possession, no doubt, for the wild cherries and berry bushes mingle with the old apple trees, and both hold out white blossom flags of truce.

Down the Wildcat River, over the brink of Jackson Falls, Moat Mountain in the distance

One wonders if the pioneer did not have an eye for mountain scenery as well as for strong, rich land, for from the very doorstone of the old house the glance sweeps a quarter of the horizon, scores of miles from one blue peak to another. At one's feet lies Jackson as if in a well among the hills, Eagle Mountain and Spruce and the ridges beyond dividing the valley of the Wildcat from the glen of Ellis River, yet not rising high enough to hide the peak of Wildcat Mountain, up between Carter and Pinkham notches. Iron Mountain rises on the left of Jackson, and beyond it the unnamed peaks of Rocky Branch Ridge lead the eye on to the snow still white in the ravines of the Presidential Range and Mount Washington looming in serene dignity to the northwest. One may climb thus far on Thorn Mountain by carriage if he will, or by motor car indeed, provided he has a good hill climber. The ascent is often made thus. But to get to the very summit, the point of the thorn, a footpath way leads up through the bars into the pioneer's pasture, onward and upward through the forest.

The pasture ferns climb too, and the pasture birds love the wooded summit as well as they do the slopes far below the pioneer's farm. The June delight which echoes in the bobolink music in the meadows so far below sweeps up the mountain-side in scent and song and color till it blossoms from the Puritan spruces on the very top of Thorn. There one glimpses the rare outpouring of joy that comes from reticent natures. They are in love, these prim black spruces, and they cannot wholly hide it however hard they try. Instead they tremble into bloom at the twig tips, and what were brown and sombre buds become nodding blossoms of gold that thrill to the fondling of wind and sun and scatter incense of yellow pollen all down the mountain-side. In the distance they are prim and black-robed still, but to go among them is to see that they wear this yellow pollen robe in honor of June, a shimmering transparent silk of palest cloth of gold. More than that, their highest plumes blush into pink shells of acceptance of joy, pistillate blooms of translucent rose as dear and wondrous in their colors of dawn as any shells born of crystalline tides, in tropic seas, blossoms whose fulfilment shall be prim brown cones, but each of which is now a fairy Venus, born of the golden foam of June joy which mantles the slender trees. Only with the coming of June to the mountains can one believe this of the spruces, because seeing it he knows it true.

The little god of love has shot his arrow to the hearts of the trembling spruces, and he sings among their branches in many forms. The blackburnian warbler lisps his high-pitched "zwee-zwee-zwee-se-ee-ee" all up the slope of Thorn to the summit and shows his orange throat and breast in vivid color among the dark leaves. The black-throated green, moving nervously about with a black stock over his white waistcoat, sings his six little notes, and the magnolia warbles hurriedly and excitedly his short, rapidly uttered song. The mourning warbler imitates the water-thrush of the misty banks of Jackson Falls, and the Connecticut warbler echoes in some measure the "witchery, witchery" of the Maryland yellow-throats, both birds that have elected to stay behind with the bobolinks.

Thus carolled through cool shadows where the striped moosewood hangs its slender racemes of green blossoms, you come rather suddenly out on the bare ledges which face northerly from the summit. Truly to see the mountains best one should look at the big ones from the little ones. Here is the same view that Gerrish had from his farm, only that you have a wider sweep of horizon. Over the Rocky Branch Ridge to the westward rises the Montalban Range, with the sun swinging low toward Parker and Resolution and getting ready to climb down the Giant's Stairs and vanish behind Jackson and Webster. Everywhere peak answers to peak, and you look over low banks of mist that float upward from unknown glens, forming level clouds on which the summits seem to sit enthroned like deities of a pagan world. There is little of the bleak débris of battle with wind and cold on the summit of Thorn. It is but 2265 feet above sea level, lower than most of the mountains about it, and the trees that climb to its top and shut off the view to the east and south are in no wise dwarfed by the struggle to maintain themselves there. But from it one gets a far better outlook on mountain grandeur than from many a greater height. Washington holds the centre of the stage which one here views from a balcony seat, seeming to rise in splendid dignity from the glen down which the Ellis River flows, and it is no wonder that there is a well-worn path from the Gerrish farm to the point of the Thorn.

It may be that the pioneer who first hewed the mountain farm from the forest also first trod this path to the very summit of the little mountain. It may be that he got a wide enough sweep of the great hills on the horizon to the north and west from his own doorstone. But I like to think that once in a while, of a Sunday afternoon perhaps, he went to the peak and dreamed dreams of greater empire and higher aspirations even than his mountain farm held for him. There is a tonic in the air and an inspiration in the outlook from these summits that should make great and good men of us all. These linger long in the memory after the climb. But longer perhaps even than the hopes the summit gives will linger in the memory of him who climbs Thorn Mountain in early June the recollection of two things, one at least not of the summit. The first is the joy of June in the bobolink meadows far down toward Jackson Falls, the celestial melodies that the bobolinks echo as they flutter upward in the vivid sunshine and sing again to mingle their white and gold with that of the flowers that bloom the meadow through. The other is the bewildering beauty of the once black and sombre spruces in their sudden draperies of golden staminate bloom, looped and crowned with the pistillate shells which so soon will be prim brown cones. The bobolinks will sing in the meadows for many weeks. The mountains will blossom with one color after another till late September brings the miracle of autumn leaves to set vast ranges aflame from glen to summit, but only for a little time are the spruces so filled with the full tide of happiness that they put on their veils of diaphanous gold and their rosy ornaments of new-born cones. It is worth a trip into the hills and a long climb to see these at their best, which is when the bobolinks have eggs in the brown nests in the meadow grass and the blue violets are smiling up from the rock crevices in the midst of the tumult of Jackson Falls.

III
CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN

Some Joys of an Easy Ascent Near Jackson

The dawn lingers long in the depths of the deciduous woods that line the eastern slope of Iron Mountain. You may hear the thrushes singing matins in the green gloom after the sun has peered over Thorn and lighted the grassy levels in the hollow where Jackson wakes to the carols of field-loving birds. The veery is the bellman to this choir, ringing and singing at the same time, unseen in the shadows, the notes of bell and song mingling in his music till the two are one, the very tocsin of a spirit in the high arches of the dim woodland temple, calling all to prayer. The wood thrushes respond, serene in the knowledge of all good, voices of pure and holy calm, rapturous indeed, but only with the pure joy of worship and thoughts of things most high. So it is with the hermit thrushes that sing with them, nor shall you know the voice of the hermit from that of the wood thrush by greater purity of tone or exaltation of spirit, though perhaps it falls to the hermits to voice the more varied passages of the music. Of all bird songs that of these thrushes seems to be most worshipful and to touch the purest responsive chords in the human heart. As they lead the wayfarer's spirit upward, so they seem to lead his feet toward the mountain top, the cool forest shades where they sing alternating with sunny glades as he scales the heights with the mountain road, which climbs prodigiously.

Way up the mountain the sunny glades widen in places to mountain farms, their pastures set on perilous slants, so that one wonders if the cattle do not sometimes roll down till checked by the woodland growth below, but their cultivated fields more nearly level, spots seemingly crushed out of the slopes by the weight of giant footsteps, descending. The wooded growth and ledges of the summit leap upward from the southern and western edges of these clearings, but to the north and east the glance passes into crystal mountain air and penetrates it mile on mile to the blue summits that cut the horizon in these directions. Far below lie the valleys, with the smaller hills that seem so high from the grassy plains about Jackson village smudged and flattened from crested land waves to ripples. Highest of all mountain cots is the Hayes farm-house, its well drawing ice water from frozen caverns deep in the heart of the height and its northern outlook such as should breed heroes and poets through living cheek by jowl with sublimity. Here the mighty swell of the mountain sea has sunk the rippling hills below, but the sweep of crested land waves leaps on, high above them. Looking eastward, one seems to be watching from the lift and roll of an ocean liner's prow as the great ship runs down a gale. Out from far beneath you and beyond roar toppling blue crests, ridge piling over ridge. Thorn Mountain, Tin and Eagle are the nearer waves, their outline rising and falling and showing beyond them Black Mountain and the two summits of Doublehead, and beyond them Shaw and Gemini and Sloop, great billows rising and rolling on. Down upon the forest foam left behind in the hollows of these rides the Carter Moriah Range, a jagged, onrushing ridge, driven by the same gale. The day may be calm to all senses but the eye, yet there is the sea beneath you and beyond, tossed mountain high by the tempest.

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.

It stands, not only in the rock but in the imagination of the onlooker, once he has found the dignity and grandeur of the highest summit, for authority. Dignity and grandeur are the impressions which come to one from the north through the crystal clear, thin air out of the cool, snow-samite which still stands in the deep ravines even on the southerly slope of the master mountain, just as illusion and romance dwell in the violet haze which veils all the south in pleasing mystery. Here on Iron Mountain one is lifted high in air between the two and able with a turn of the head to see either, and again it should be said that to know the mountains well it is best to see them from the lesser summits of their ranges. From every one of these they stand before the onlooker in new aspects, so different each from each that they seem new peaks whose acquaintance he has not hitherto made. Only thus is their many-sided completeness revealed and their full personality brought out. Nor need the visitor be among them long before he realizes that they have personality and grow to be individual friends, as well loved and as ardently longed for when absent as any human neighbor or associate. Within them dwell a deep kindliness and a strength which goes out to those who love them, unfailing and unvarying through the years. It is no wonder that prophets seek them, and that within the sheltering arms of their ridges are cosy nooks where hermits build their hermitages and find a deep peace which the cities of the world deny them.

"From nowhere does one get a better view of Kearsarge than from this little cairn on the plateau which is the summit of Iron Mountain"

From nowhere does one get a better view of Kearsarge than from this little cairn on the plateau which is the summit of Iron Mountain. The long ridge which rises from the east branch of the Saco to Bartlett Mountain and goes on and up to make the summit of Kearsarge stands with its edge toward him and vanishes against the mountain itself, leaving its outline that of a narrow cone, rising abruptly from a plain below. There is something spectacular in its dizzy, abrupt loom into the sky, quivering in gray haze against the violet depths beyond, making of it a magic peak such as the early voyagers of legendary times saw and viewed with fear and wonder. Such a mountain as this seems was the lodestone which drew the ship of Sinbad from the sea to be wrecked on its base, and over it at any time might come flying a roc with the palace of a prince of India in its talons.

The sun that sinks to his setting behind the great ridges that wall in Crawford Notch sets their peaks in eruption, black smoke of clouds rising from them and glowing with the reflection of lakes of lava below and the flicker of long flames. The Presidential Range looms and withdraws in mighty solemnity and dignity, lost in the turbid glow of this semblance of what may have happened in æons gone, but the reflection of these fires only deepens the amethystine gray of Kearsarge and the purple gloom beyond it, while it touches the very summit with a soft rose, a flower of mystery as sweet as any that ever bloomed in legendary lore. When the watcher on the peak sees these signs, it is time to begin the descent to the deepening shadows far down the mountain, where the thrushes are singing vespers in tuneful adoration, prayerfully thankful for a holy day well spent.

Sunset over Iron Mountain and Jackson, seen from Thorn Mountain

IV
JUNE ON KEARSARGE

Butterflies and Flowers on a Summit of Splendid Isolation

The familiar spirits of Kearsarge Mountain this June seemed to me to be the white admiral butterflies. Clad in royal purple are these with buttons of red and azure and broad white epaulettes which cross both wings. These greeted me in the highway at Lower Bartlett and there was almost always one in sight up Bartlett Mountain, over the ledges and to the very top of Kearsarge itself. One of them politely showed me the wrong wood road as a start for the trail up Bartlett which leaves the highway just a little south of the east branch of the Saco. Then when the road ended in a vast tangle of slash and new growth he showed me what was to him a perfectly good trail still, up in the air and over the tops of the trees and ledges in easy flight, and I dare say he thought me very dull that I did not follow as easily as he led. It is the season for white admirals and you may meet them in favored places all over the mountains from now on, but nowhere have I seen them so plentiful as they are this June along the slopes of Bartlett and Kearsarge. A South American navy could not have more admirals.

Kearsarge and Bartlett, seen from Middle Mountain, near Jackson

With the white admirals I find, flying lower and keeping well in shadowy nooks, a thumbnail butterfly which might well be a midshipman, he is so much a copy on a small scale of the admiral, very dark in ground color and having white epaulettes across both wings also. This butterfly is new to me, nor do I find him figured in such works on lepidoptera as I have been able to consult since I have seen him. I had to get lost on the way up Bartlett to find him most plentiful, but his fellows are common throughout the shady woodlands of the upper branches of the Saco from Pinkham Notch to the borders of the Conway meadows. In fact I fancy the whole White Mountain region is a school for these understudies of the white admirals, and they certainly could have no more noble exemplar.

No doubt my volunteer white admiral guide had a great contempt for any would-be sailor that could not climb as he did when he went straight toward the main truck of Kearsarge by way of the bobstay, but he left me where the lumber road did, in a wild tangle of slash, to get up the mountain the way the bear does, on all fours. There is a path up Bartlett, a proper one that enters from the highway as the A. M. C. guide says it does and sticks to its job after the first third of the ascent is accomplished, but the way it flirts with the wood roads between these two points is bewildering to the sober-minded stranger who attempts to follow it. However, missing this slender trifler had its compensations. I am convinced that I reached portions of the slope of Bartlett that are rarely visited. I was long getting out of the awful mess which lumbermen leave behind them at the upper ends of their roads. The inextricable confusion of tangled spruce tops and the sudden riot of new deciduous growth, wild with delight over the flood of sunshine it gets, held me as if in a net. And all the time I wrestled with it an indigo bunting sat on the top of a rock maple and sang his surprise at seeing such a thing in such a place. "Dear, dear!" he gurgled, "who is it? who is it? dear, dear, dear!" and once in a while he added a little tittering "tee, hee, hee." It was all very well for him. He could follow the white admiral if he were bound for the main truck of Kearsarge by way of the Bartlett bobstay, and he looked very handsome and capable as he glistened, iridescent blue-black up there against the sun. How poor a creature a man is, after all! A box turtle could have gone up through that slash better than I did.

From Eagle Mountain one may see Kearsarge, blue and symmetrical in the distance, peering over the shoulder of Thorn

However, man wins because he keeps everlastingly at it, and I reasoned that if I kept climbing I would come out on top of something or other, and I did. On top of a pretty little hill, which is an outlying, northwesterly spur of Bartlett, a spot which gave me a glimpse of the dark, spruce-covered summit far above and a deep ravine between down into which I must go and begin my scramble all over again. A no-trail trip gives one an idea of what a mountain really is, showing him, for one thing, how rapidly it moves down into the valley beneath it. Here on steep slopes were loose masses of angled fragments of granite, weighing from a few pounds to a few tons each, broken from the precipices above by the frost and ready, some of them at least, to be toppled at a touch and start an avalanche. It needs but the footfall of a climbing deer, a bear, or a stray man to start one rock, or two, and it is easy to see that a down-rush of spring rain takes always a part of the mountain with it. To go up one of the precipitous ledges, "tooth and nail" as one must who misses the path, is to find how easily these broken chunks, separated by the frost from the parent rock, fall out and join the masses below.

Yet such a climb has its joys, which the path does not always give. Here the deer have browsed and left prints of slender hoofs in the black earth beneath the trees, there the white hare had his lair all winter, a jutting rock sheltering him and the sun from the southwest warming him as he crouched. Here are holes where the porcupines have scratched their bristly way, or a cave where perhaps a bear had his den. This the wandering stranger views with suspicion and approaches with many delightful thrills strangely compounded of hope and fear. Probably there are no bears on Bartlett, but what if there were one, and nothing for defence but the majesty of the human eye! A man is apt to get his own measure in places like these. Of course the bear, if there be one, will run—but which way? In the wildest glen, filled with rough dens and suspicions of bears of the largest size, I found grateful traces of at least the former presence of men, men in bulk, so to speak. Here, in the forest tangle, wreathed with mountain moosewood blooms, was a good-sized cook-stove. There was no suspicion of a road, and I could only guess that it had wandered from a lumber camp and lost the trail, as I had. It reminded me that Bartlett summit was still distant, more distant perhaps than the noon hour which this mountain range also suggested, and it set me to the ascent with renewed vigor.

All the way up in woodsy nooks where are little levels of rich black soil the moccasin flowers climb till the very top of Bartlett is reached. Their rose-purple foot coverings with the greenish-purple pointed thongs for tying seem scattered as if pukwudgies had lost them, fleeing in terror from the bears which I could only suspect, the mountain top their refuge, where I found them, grouped rather close together in mossy nooks among the ledges. The dwarf cornels climb with them, finding footing in much the same places and stare unblinkingly up with round and chubby foolish faces. The cypripediums are sensitive and emotional; these that climb with them are strangely stolid and shallow by comparison, yet they add beauty of their own sort to the wide, moss-carpeted stretches beneath the trees. On the very ledges themselves neither of these advance, yet wherever the frosts of winter have split the rock the slender lints of strange lettering are green with mountain cranberry vines, and the creeping snowberry has followed and holds rose-white blooms up to lure the mountain bees. The lichens have painted these ledges, of which the upper part of Bartlett Mountain is built, with wonderful soft colors of mingled grays and greens, and the spruces spire, black and beautiful, all over the summit, making one hunt for open spaces from which to view the world stretched out beneath. I found the path again on the ledges well up toward the summit, a slender, coquettish thing still, hard to follow, but enticing with its waywardness, its most bewildering vagaries marked by former lovers, men of the A. M. C. without doubt, little piles of stone which lead him who trusts them to the very summit.

Here, as on that lower spur of Bartlett which I had struggled to attain, one looks upon a greater height, with a ravine between, Kearsarge looming grandly up into the sky to eastward. The white admiral butterfly danced along here, too—or was it another?—seemingly impatient at my long delay in following, and the path coquettes in vain, down ledges and up ledges, always to be found by patient study of those little piles of marking stone, till, breasting the steep slope of Kearsarge itself, one enters the comparatively broad highway which leads up from Kearsarge village. After that the ascent to Olympus is easy.

On few mountains does one get the sense of exaltation and ecstatic uplift that comes to him when he stands on the high summit of Kearsarge. The mountain is splendidly isolated, only Bartlett rising high near it, and the summit of that even being so far below as to be readily overlooked. Northwestward looms Mount Washington, higher, no doubt, but so buttressed by the great ranges on which it sits serene as to lose the effect of upleap that Kearsarge has. Under you is spread all eastern Maine, like a map, and you look northeastward across silver levels of lakes and mottled green of dwarfed hills till, shadowy on the far horizon, looms the peak of Katahdin, a blue land-cloud on the rim of the silver-flecked green sea. The two peaks of Doublehead are curious twin green knolls below to the north, and only in the far-distant north and west are summits of height that equal or exceed your own. Far away in these directions they begin and pinnacle and retreat, range beyond range, till they fade into the dim blue haze of the farthest horizon. Southeast lie one silver lake after another, till the eye finds Sebago, and beyond that the thin rim of the world which is Casco Bay and the sea.

Much cool water must well up from the heart of Kearsarge to its summit, for grass grows long there in the hollows of the granite, and many alders, hung with powdery curls of staminate bloom and green with many leaves in mid-June. The moccasin flowers failed in their climb from Bartlett summit to reach the top of Kearsarge, but the rhodora has come up and set rose purple blooms in the same season, the leaves here pushing out with the flowers instead of waiting, as they do in lower latitudes, at lesser heights. Under their caresses the mountain has smiled and given forth butterflies. Here are the white admirals, conscious with epaulettes as if they had just stepped ashore from the white cloud fleets that swing with cumulus sails piled high just off shore. Here is the painted lady, hovering admiringly by, seemingly unnoticed by the admirals. Here are tiger swallowtails, their gold black-barred with rippling shadows, and little skippers, swift and busy when the admirals heave in sight. Most of all I note mourning cloaks, and one in particular is in deep mourning, the usual pale rim of his wings replaced by a brown that is so deep it is black and hides all azure spots that should be there. It may be that all these butterflies sailed up into the island port of a mountain top that swims so high in the vivid sunshine of the June afternoon that the air about it seems to me, watching them, to be a veritable transparent blue sea of great depth, yet it is just as likely that many were born on or near the summit, of generations of mountain dwelling lepidoptera. Of these must have been my black-bordered mourning cloak, the winter's cold having dulled his color within the chrysalis and giving an added depth to his mourning. He was as sombre as the dusky-wings which dashed about with the skippers, like black slaves come to help in the lading of their vessels.

Into this island port in the high air came, about four in the afternoon, a wind from the sea, cooling the intense heat and spreading a smoke-blue haze all along the southeastern horizon. It wiped out the coast-line of Casco Bay and moved the sea in with it, swallowing Sebago and pushing on till Lovell's Pond and the lesser ones within the New Hampshire line became estuaries at which one looked long, expecting to see slanting sails and smell the cool fragrance of tide-washed flats. Into this haze loomed one after another the distant Maine mountains and vanished as if slipping their cables and sailing away over the rim of the world, bound for foreign ports. A new romance of mystery had come to the outlook from the mountain top. Far up its side, borne on this cool air, came the song of thrushes, a jubilation of satisfied longing. The breath of the sea had come with cool reassurance to soothe and hearten all things.

On beyond Kearsarge, toward Crawford Notch and the Presidential Range swept this cool reviving air, carrying its blue haze with it. The low sun sent broad bands of palest blue down through this vapor and with it, northwestward, the mountains seemed to withdraw; details that had been so clear vanished, and instead of dapple of purple-green forest and rose-gray cliff were long cloud-ridges of wonderful deep blue riding one beyond another like waves on a painted sea, the darkest nearest, the farther paling into the farthest and that vanishing into the blue of the sky itself. Out of Crawford Notch rolled the Saco, flecking the valley below with patches of gleaming silver. The cumulus cloud fleets that had swung over the mountains all day long, bluing the green of the hills with the shadows of their canvas, swept northwestward with this wind, a great convoy for the sun on into the ports of the radiant west. Now one of them hid him from sight, its edges all gold with the joy of it. Again the rays flashed clear and the shadow of Kearsarge moved its point of blue a little farther out on the green of the forest to eastward. Down the mountain path a Bicknell's thrush sang, the veery's song, less round and loud and full, but with much of the spiral, bell-tone quality in it. It reminded me that the visitor to the summit who is to go home by way of the broad path to Kearsarge village may well wait till this pointed shadow of the summit climbs Pleasant Mountain in Maine and looms upward into the purple shadows beyond. I was to go back by that coquette of a trail down Bartlett, and the thought of what tricks it would play on me by moonlight made me hasten.

The cool of evening was descending like a benediction on the level, elm-fringed meadows of Intervale, and the little village of North Conway gleamed white in the low sun and pointed the broad way down the Saco Valley to a hundred lakes as I climbed over the brow of Bartlett and clinked my heels on the ledges of its western face. The mocassin flowers nodded good night and the golden green, spiked blooms of the mountain moosewood waved me on down the path that seemed as true as slender as it wound on down the hill. Surely, I thought, holding is having, and I shall keep this little path close till the end of the way. And then it slipped from under my arm and snickered as it made off in the bushes, goodness knows where, leaving me two-thirds the way down Bartlett with the dusk and the tangle of forest all before me. However, "down hill goes merrily," and so did I, and by and by I came to a tiny mountain brook, and we two jogged on together in the deepening gloom, prattling of what we had seen.

At least, mountain brooks do not run away from you as mountain paths do, but it is as well not to trust them too much, after dark. This one led me demurely to the brink of the little precipice of "No-go" Falls and chuckled as it took the thirty-foot leap, a slim thread of silver in the moonlight. I dare say it was thinking what a fine splash I would make in the shallow pool below. Instead I clambered carefully around and made the foot of the little cliff without a thud, there to find that the laugh is really on the brook, for its leap takes it into a big iron funnel whence it is personally conducted down a mile more of mountain into the little reservoir of the North Conway water supply. I followed the pipe, too, but outside, and the brook did not gurgle once about it all the way down.

V
RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS

The Gods, Half-Gods and Pixies to be Seen as the Storm Passes

There are other beauties in the high mountains than those of fair days which show blue peaks pointing skyward in the infinite distance. Now and then a northeaster comes sweeping grandly down from Labrador, swathing the peaks in mist wraiths torn from the weltering waves of Baffin's Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Then he who knows the storm only from the sea level finds in it a new mystery and delight. On the heights you stand shoulder to shoulder with the clouds themselves, seeing the gray genie stalk from summit to summit or anon swoop down and bear a mountain away to cloud castles that build themselves in a moment and vanish again in a breath. At the sea level the storm rumbles on high above your head, tossing down upon you what it will; here you are among the mysteries of its motion, sometimes almost above their level, and through rifts in the clouds you may get glimpses of their sun-gilded upper portions and see the storm as the sky does for a moment from above. Again the clouds coast to the valleys and wrap even them in the matrix of mist out of which rain is made.

Sunset light on the Southern Peaks, seen from the summit of Mount Washington

Most beautiful is such a storm in the hours of its passing, when the main cohorts have swept by, when the rear guard and camp follower clouds pass at wider and wider intervals and more and more sun comes to paint their folds with rose and flash the meadows and dripping woods with scattered gems set in most vivid green. Far off the high hills loom mightier and more mysterious than ever, for their shoulders still pass into the storm and the imagination gives them unrevealed majesties of height, built upon the blue-black cloud plateaus that hide them. No wonder the great gods dwelt on Mount Olympus. So they do on cloud-capped Mount Washington, on Carrigain, Lafayette and Carter Dome.

In time of storm lesser divinities may well come down to the valleys, and when the passing clouds are mingled with the coming sunshine is the time to look for trolls in the woodland paths, pixies by the stream, and to find, in the very blossoming shrubs and graceful trees of the level river meadows a personality that is as nearly human as that which the Greeks gave their gods. Who can know the elms of the Conway and Intervale meadows without loving them for their femininity? Each one "walks a goddess and she looks a queen." Yet each one flutters feminine fripperies with a dainty grace such as never yet stepped from motor car at the most fashionable hostelry between Bretton Woods and Poland Spring. The summer visitors who wear hobble skirts on the piazzas and along the lawns of the most luxurious mountain hotels need not think they are the first to flaunt this curious inflorescence of fashion before the stony stare of the peaks. The river-bottom elms have worn their peek-a-boo garments of green that way ever since they began to grow up in the meadows. Nor can the newcomers vie in grace, however clever their artifice, with these slim mountain maids, than whom no dryads of any grove have ever combined caprice and dignity into more bewitching beauty. The meadow elms are the queens of all summer exhibitions of the perfect art of wearing clothes.

The elms of the deep wood are far more simply dressed, losing not one whit of dignity by it, as he who intrudes upon them in their cool, shadowy bowers may know. But these elms of the sandy intervales where the sun would otherwise touch them with the full warmth of his admiration are dressed for the world, all in fluffy ruffles of green that flow yet sheathe, that clothe in all dignity yet are of such exquisite cut and proper fashion that the highest art of Fifth Avenue has nothing to match them. To look beyond these to the hillsides is to see the firs and spruces as prim Puritans of an elder day wearing the high, pointed caps of witch-women and conical skirts that follow the flaring lines of a time long gone; and the maples and beeches are roundly, frankly, bourgeois, grafting the balloon sleeves of a quarter of a century ago upon the bulge of hoop-skirts such as some of our great-grandmothers wore in conscious pride. But the meadow elms! Sylph-like and teasingly sweet, fluffy, fashionable and fascinating, yet robed throughout in a gentle dignity such as might well be the aura of purity and nobility, no tree in all the mountain world can quite match them.

In these valleys among the high hills the man from the lowland regions is apt to miss and long for the sheen of placid waters. All descents are so abrupt that streams rush impetuously always downward toward the sea, carrying with them whatever may obstruct, whether flotsam of blown leaves or the very granite ledges themselves if they impede the advance too long. They burst ledges, smash boulders to pebbles and grind pebbles to sand and then to silt and spread it over the meadows where the elms grow or hurry it on to make deltas and vex ships on the very sea itself. If they may not smash the ledges or the boulders they slowly dissolve them or more rapidly wear them away by constant scouring with the passing sand of their freshets, and always in the ravines they have dug sounds the uproar of their perpetual attrition and unrest. Far away this comes intermittently in a soothing sibilation which seems to be saying to itself "Hush, hush." It is as if one heard the voices of little mother levels of still pools trying to quiet the fretful child-foam of the cascades.

But sitting on the rock itself by the stream as it dashes down one gets, through this, a deep vibration which has almost too few beats to the second to be a tone, that is as much a jar as a sound, the deep diapason of the quivering granite itself. A beaten ledge responds like a mighty gong with a humming roar that is strangely disproportionate to the means employed to produce the sound. Sometimes to stamp with the foot over a rounded surface of earth-covered granite is to produce an answering, drumlike boom that makes one suspect that he stands on a thin film of rock over a cavern. The music of a fall has many parts. One of these is the sand-dance sibilation of the shuffling waters, another this boom of the rock drum on which the green flood beats with padded blows.

As the heart of the listener is tuned so it answers to the mingled voices of the waters. One may hear in them the well-harmonized parts of a runic lullaby and be soothed to peace and belief in all things good by the music. To many another their perpetual turmoil and unrest find too loud an echo from the depths within him, and he longs for still lakes that look friendlily up to him with the blue of the sky in their clear eyes, fringed with the dark-pencilled lashes of firs beneath the brow of the hill. The valleys of the high white hills have so few of these that one may count them on the fingers of a hand. "Echo Lake" or "Mirror Lake" we find them named, and all summer long they have their throng of admirers, who in the lowland regions would pass such tiny tarns with little thought of their beauty. They may be so set that they mirror no mountain peak. Their echo may be no more silvery in tone or more frequently repeated than one would get if he blew a bugle in some dusty, forgotten city square where red brick blocks would toss the call from one to another, yet the little lakes have a charm of placid personality that the cataracts cannot give.

Some day, without doubt, man will fill the blind ravines of the upper mountain region with a thousand eyes of these, binding the waters for use and thereby adding to their beauty. Every narrow ravine has its stream, dashing uproariously downward. It needs but a barrier of boulders set in cement to make at once a little lake and a cascade. The water, set for a moment to turn a turbine, will again dash on with its full gift of flashing foam and musical uproar for all who watch and listen, but its momentary restraint will have helped the men of the mountains with power and have helped the hills themselves to greater permanency and added beauty. Man must do this if he would keep the beauty of the hills whence cometh his strength, or indeed if he would keep the hills themselves. The black spruce growth that once clothed them from base to summit, holding the winter's snow and ice beneath their sheltering boughs to melt slowly almost all summer long, making deep, cool shadows for the growth of water-holding, spongy mosses, he has ruthlessly cut away. For many years, winter after winter, out of the Glen Ellis River Valley, right up under the slope of the Presidential Range, went half a hundred million feet of this growth, and in all the other valleys where spruce remained it was the same. The sudden freshets are more sudden, the disintegrating droughts more severe now because of this, and by these the very mountains themselves are torn down.

Such a little lake, built not to turn a wheel but to please the eye of the lovers of mountain beauty, has lately been made just north of Jackson. There it sits in a little bowl of a hollow among spruce-clad hills and its waters purl gently over a cement dam, to splash for the square-tailed trout under the shadows farther down the ravine. Creatures that already knew the little stream and the marshy hollow where the lake had welled have taken kindly to its presence, but the wider ranging woodland folk are still surprised at finding it there and shy about trusting themselves on it or its borders. It is too young to be adopted by the water birds that have known the region long. The sand-pipers that move leisurely north up Ellis River, feeding and teetering as they go, do not light in on the borders of the new-born lake, and though the loons have no doubt seen it as they fly over, they, too, go by. I have never yet seen a loon plunge over the ridge to ripple its waters with his splash or set the goblin echoes of the forest laughing with his eerie cry. A mountain lake without one loon is lonely. In the tiny "mirror lake," which is a mountain tarn that has been an eye to the woodland for countless centuries over beyond the southeast slope of Kearsarge, a loon family dwells, and I watch them from the summit, diving, feeding and making great sport in their world. Over on Chocorua there are two such, and I fancy they are equally numerous on all still waters of the high mountain world, but they have not yet trusted this new-born mountain lake, nor have the spotted sand-pipers come to nest among the ferns on its margin.

But the little lake mirrors many a bird wing nevertheless, mainly those of the eave swallows that nest in a long row under the eaves of a Jackson barn. These know that man loves them, and the things that he has made, whether barn roofs or little lakes, are to be adopted and used without fear. So they swoop over the fir tops and skim the surface of the unruffled waters, dipping to touch their own reflections and twittering mightily about it as they sweep the dust of tiny insects out of the shimmering air. Nor does the lake mirror lack for the reflection of many even more beautiful wings. When the sun breaks through the passing storm a thousand gauzy, white-bodied dragon-flies magically appear. They cluster on sunny margins and dash into the air and clash wings in infinitesimal rustlings. Their fellows of a score of varieties of coloration and shape are here too, spirits of the air but children of its love for the waters and born of the lake itself. While the storm passes I watch their miracles of recreation. When the sun lights up the shallow margins they come swimming beneath the surface, strange little slender submarines with filmy propellers behind and round conning towers in front. They come to a projecting twig and climb up on this with hitherto unsuspected legs till they are many inches above the surface, where the sun and wind will dry them.

How do they know the appointed time? Whence comes this impulse to leave the water which has been their home since the first faint beginnings of individuality were theirs? There is no answer to these questions in any depth to which scientific investigation has yet probed. Yet the impulse is there and they do know the appointed time. Moreover they know if they have obeyed the promptings of the impulse too soon. Now and then one climbs out and rests for a moment, then in a sudden panic lets go his hold on the twig and drops into the water again, scuttling back to the depths in haste. For him the hour has not yet struck. But most of them come out to stay. They cling motionless with the sun drying their backs and filling them with such new life and vigor that they burst. The submarine is itself a shell, and as it bursts out of it comes the life that animated it, in a new form, to dry and stretch its wings and presently dart into the air on them, henceforth a creature of the sun. Behind each remains its water-world husk, still clinging to the twig to which it crawled. Sometimes I put a finger into the water in front of the swimming insect, and it as readily crawls out on that as on a twig, but neither of us has yet had patience to wait thus till the transformation is complete.

The larger dragon-flies, with their clashing wings and darting flight, which is so swift sometimes that the eye fails to record it clearly, seeing the insect at the beginning and again at the end but unable to receive an impression of the passage, seem well named. Here are small creatures, indeed, but veritable dragons nevertheless that may well carry apprehension to the human watcher as well as to the tiny midges, which they capture in this darting flight and summarily devour. It may be that they will not sew up the mouth of the boy that swears in their presence, but no boy is to be blamed if he believes that they can. Their gorgon-like build and their uncanny swiftness of motion might well prompt the superstitious to believe that they could be a terror to evil-doers. But no one could think the gentle demoiselles capable of wrong, though they are dragon-flies too and are born of the same waters and eat tiny insects in the same way. Appearances count for much with all of us, and the demoiselles flit so softly and fold their wings on alighting in such prayerful demureness of attitude that they seem instead the good folk of the fairy world that margins the little lake, created to bring rewards to the good rather than to punish evil.

Thus by the man-made mountain tarn one may find the dragons and the pixies that man has made too, out of the débris of dreams that the race has accumulated since it too grew up out of placid waters which in ages past seem to have sheltered all elementary forms of life as it shelters the dragon-fly nymphs before they have grown up to use their wings. While the storm wraps the world in the illusions of romance the half-gods of Greek myth stalk the mist-entangled meadows and shout in the winding valleys, across the mountain streams. As the storm breaks, the clouds pass, and the sun floods the thin air with his gold, these mayhap, like the pixie dreams, will vanish. The half-gods go, but the gods arrive. The eye lifts with the clouds to wider and wider spaces and greater and greater heights, up stepping-stones of glistening cliffs, along rugged ranges to where the peaks sit enthroned in splendor, the great gods themselves. Vulcan looms vaguely by his black anvil, the distant storm swathing him in the smoke of his forge fire. The chariot of Apollo rides beyond, his arrows flashing far and fast. Cytherea passes with the clouds and flames them with her opalescent presence, and high over all, mighty and storm-compelling, sits Zeus himself, enthroned in white majesty on the carved nimbus of the passing rain.

Clouds on Mount Washington, from the Glen Road, Jackson

VI
CARTER NOTCH

Its Mingling of Smiling Beauty and Weird Desolation

Sometimes, even in midsummer, there comes a day when winter swoops down from boreal space and puts his crown of snow-threatening clouds on Mount Washington. They bind his summit in sullen gray wreaths, and though the weather may be that of July in the valleys to the south, one forgets the strong heat of the sun in looking upward to the sullen chill of this murky threat out of the frozen northern sky. Thus for a day or two, it may be, the summit is withdrawn into cloudy silence, which may lift for a moment and let a smile of sunlight glorify the gray crags, and flash swiftly beneath the portent, then it shuts down in grim obsession once more.

At other times winds come, born of the brooding mass of mists, and sweep its chill down to the very grasses of the valley far below, but this shows the end of the portent to be near. The morning of the next day breaks with a bright sun, and you go out into a crisp air that sends renewed vitality flashing with tingling delight through every vein down to the very toe tips. The clouds that blotted out the summits with their threat of winter are gone, and the mountains leap at you, as you look at them, out of a clarity of atmosphere that one learns to expect where the hills rise from the verge of the far Western plains but which is rare in New England.

Carter Notch seen over Doublehead from Kearsarge summit

The mystical haze that has for weeks softened all outlines and magnified all distances till objects within them took on a vague unreality, is gone, and we see all things enlarged and clarified as if we looked at them from the heart of a crystal. And as with outlines, so with colors. No newly converted impressionist, however enthusiastic in his conversion, could paint the grass quite such a green as it shows to the eye, or get the gold in its myriad buttercup blooms so flashing a yellow as it now has. All through the soft days these have been a woven cloth of gold. Now the cloth is unmeshed, the very warp has parted, the woof separated and the particles stand revealed, a thousand million scattered nuggets instead, each individual and glowing, a sun of gold set in the green heaven of the meadow. The wild strawberries that nestled by thousands in the grasses so shielded that one must hunt carefully to see them, seeming but blurred shadows complementing the green, now flash their red to the eye of the searcher rods away. Here for a day is the atmosphere of Arizona, which there reveals deserts, drifting in from the north over the lush growth and multiple rich colors of a New England hillside country.

It is a scintillant country on such a day. The twinkling leaves of birch and poplar flash like the mica in the rocks far up the hillsides, the surface of each dancing river vies with these, and through the crystal waters you look down upon the bottom where silvery scales of mica catch the light and send it back to the eye. It is no wonder the early explorers from Massachusetts Bay colonies came back from the white hills with stories of untold wealth of diamonds and carbuncles to be found here. You may find these jewels on such a day at every turn, though they are fairy gems only and must not be covetously snatched, lest they turn to dross in the hand.

The meadows above Jackson Falls flash with this beauty from one hillside across to another, and through them winds the Wildcat River, luring the casual passer to wade knee deep in the grass and clover from curve to curve, always fascinating with new enticement till it is not possible to turn back. Nor are the fairy gems which the long, winding valley has to show confined to the sands of the river bottom or the boulders scattered along its way. At times the air over the clover blooms is full of them, quivering in the sun, borne on the under wings of the spangled fritillary butterflies that swarm here in early July. Above, the fritillaries have the orange tint of burnt gold, plentifully sprinkled with dots of black tourmaline, but beneath they have caught the silver scintillation of the mica-flecked rocks and sands on which they love to light when sated with the clover honey. These too are gems of the mountain world which, if not found elsewhere, one might well come many miles to seek. It is easy to believe, too, that the spangled fritillaries know the source of the silver beauty of their under wings and cunningly seek further nourishment for it. You find them hovering in golden cloud-swarms over bare spots of scintillant sand along the reaches of the river or in the paths of the roadside which rambles down from the hills with it, anon lighting upon this bare and shining earth to probe with long probosces and draw from the mica-flecked sand perhaps the very essence of its silvery glitter, for the renewing of their wing spots. The white admirals are with them, not in such swarms to be sure, but in considerable numbers, eager also for the same unknown booty. It may be that they too thus renew the silver of their white epaulets.

I found all these and a thousand other beauties on my trip up the Wildcat to its source in Carter Notch, through this region of mica-made fairy gems. They lured me from curve to curve and from one rapid to the next beyond, always climbing by easy gradients toward the great V in the Carter-Moriah range, whose mysteries, to me unknown, were after all the chief lure. The crystal-clear air out of the north, which had swept the gloom from the high brow of Mount Washington, made the mountains seem very near and sent prickles of desire for them through all the blood. On such a day it is a boon to be allowed to climb, nor can one satiate his desire for the achievement of heights except by seeking them from dawn till dusk. Little adventures met me momentarily on the way. Here in a mountain farmer's field was a great mass of ruddy gold, showing its orange crimson for rods around a little knoll. Yet this was but fairy gold as the gems of the Wildcat meadows are fairy gems, a colony of composite weeds which no doubt the farmer hates, but which produce more wealth for him than he could win from all the rest of his farm for a decade—if he could but gather it. The fritillary butterflies know its value and flock to it, losing their own burnished coloration in it, and the wild bees are drawn far from the woodland to it by its soft perfume. To come suddenly on this was as good as discovering a new peak.

"Always climbing by easy gradients toward the great V in the Carter-Moriah Range"

To hear a tiny shriek in the wayside bushes and on search to rescue a half-grown field sparrow from the very jaws of a garter snake, sending the snake to gehenna with a stamp of a big foot and seeing the fledgling snuggle down again into the nest with the others, was as pleasant as finding the way to a new cascade. But after all, the great lure of such a crystalline day is toward the high peaks. The Wildcat River has its very beginning in the height of Carter Notch, and its prattle over every shallow teased me to follow its trail back to this high source and see what the spot might be. To do this step by step with the falling water would be a herculean task, for the gorges down which it runs are choked with boulders and forest débris and tangled with thickets as close-set and difficult of passage as any tropical jungle. But there is no need to seek its source by that route. You may go within four miles of it by motor, if you will, up the good road from Jackson that finally dwindles and vanishes on the slope up toward Wildcat Mountain, but not before it has taken you through a gate and showed you the entrance to the A. M. C. trail to the top of the Notch.

All the way up to this point the outlook to the south has been growing more extensive and more beautiful. Black Mountain still lifts its broad ridge from pinnacle to pinnacle on the east side of the Wildcat, but Eagle Mountain, Thorn, Tin, and the little height between these last two have been dropping down the sky line till Kearsarge, Bartlett, Moat, and even the distant Sandwich and Ossipee ranges far to the south, loom blue and beautiful above them, while the valley of the Wildcat unrolls its slopes, checkered with farm and woodland, to where the river vanishes from sight around the turn at Jackson Falls. Fifty miles of sylvan beauty lie before you as you look down the narrow valley, over the green heights that rim it to the blue ones far beyond, and up again to the amethystine sky.

It is a wide world of sun and it is good to look at it now, for the path before you plunges to shade immediately and is to give you little more than a dapple of sunlight for five miles. Yet it is a wide and easy way for most of the distance, for which the chance traveller may thank the lumbermen, whose road it follows, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. The lumbermen opened it. The Appalachians have kept it up since the tote road was abandoned. They even have mowed its grassy stretches each spring, lest some fair Appalachian pilgrim set her foot upon a garter snake, inadvertently and without malice, and henceforward abjure mountaineering. A half-dozen brooks splash down the mountain-side and cross this trail, all for the slaking of your thirst, and if you do not find the garter snake to step on you may have a porcupine. Indeed, to judge from my own experience, the porcupine is the more likely footstool. Just before you round the low shoulder of Wildcat Mountain to enter the Notch is a burnt region full of gaunt dead trees, and this neighborhood grows porcupines in quantity, also in bulk. One of them looms as big as a bear at the first glimpse of him in the trail ahead, and if he happens to start from almost beneath your foot as you step over a rock, giving that queer little half squeal, half grunt of his, you are momentarily sure that you have kicked up Ursus Major himself.

But though the porcupine may squeal and move for a few shambling steps with some degree of quickness, he is by no means afraid of you. He just moves off a few feet, turns his back, shakes out his quills till they all point true, then waits for you to rush at him and bite him from behind—waits with a wicked grin in his little eye as he leers over his shoulder at you. Then if nothing happens he shambles awkwardly away into the shadows of the forest. If something does happen it is the aggressor that shambles away with a mouthful of barbed, needle-pointed quills. But then, why should anyone bite a porcupine? They do not even look edible, and judging by the numbers of them that strayed casually out of the path round the shoulder of Wildcat that day nothing has eaten any of them for a long time, else there had not been so many. In this burnt district you get a glimpse of Carter Mountain on the other side of the notch you are about to enter and then you plunge again into deeper woods on the west side, under the cliffs of Wildcat, whose very frown is hidden from you by the high trees.

The cool, shadowy depths here will always be marked in my mind as the place of great gray toads. I saw several of these right by the path, six-inch long chaps, looking very wise and old and having more markings of white than I ever before saw on a toad, besides a white streak all the way down the backbone. The place is as beautiful as these bright-eyed, curious creatures, and as uncanny. Mossy boles of great trees rise through its gloom and through the perfumed air comes the cool drip of waters. Moss is deep, and over it and the rough, lichen-clad rocks grows the Linnæa, holding up its pink blooms, fairy pipes for the pukwudgies to smoke. Here out of high cliffs have fallen great rocks which lie about the patch in mighty confusion. Here are caves, little and big, that might shelter all the hedgehogs roaming the fire-swept mountain-side below, and as many bears. Yet neither porcupines nor bears appeared, or any other living things except the great white-mottled toads, that would not hop aside for my foot, but sat and gazed at me with the calm patience of woodland deities.

Then the path swung sharp down the hill through lesser trees that gave a glimpse of the high frown of Carter cliffs, swimming in the sky above, and then—I wonder if every pilgrim does not at this point laugh with pure joy and caper a bit on road-weary legs, for here in the gruesome depths of the great Notch, at the climax point of its wildness, is a little clear mountain lake where surely no lake could be, set in thousand-ton fragments of mighty broken ledges. To look north is to see a little barrier of wooded ridge stretching across from side to side of the place, and between the eye and this a low barrier of wood growth among great rocks, behind which is the air of empty space. I pushed through this, expecting a crater, and behold! Here is another little round lake with lily pads floating on its surface, and beyond this an open space in the woods and the A. M. C. camp.

The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Carter Notch

The time was early afternoon of one of the longest days of the year, and the sun sent a cloudburst of gold a thousand feet down the perpendicular cliffs of Wildcat Mountain and flooded the highest source of Wildcat River with it. The north wind poured its wine over the ridge and set the surface of the little lake to dancing with silver lights such as had greeted me in the river far below, in the boulders along the way, and in the spangles of the thousands of fritillary wings that had fluttered and folded as I passed. Here is the crucible for the making of these fairy gems, and I dare say the wise old toads from the shadows on the side of Wildcat just above are the sorcerers whence the tinkering trolls learned the trick of their manufacture.

I had to wait but a little while, however, to know the difference. Stretched on the slope on the farther shore of the flashing lake, I watched the sun swing in behind the high pinnacle of a wildcat cliff that leaps from the water's edge almost a thousand feet in air, its sheer sides embroidered by the green of young birch leaves. I had left the full tide of early summer in the Jackson meadows. Here it was early spring. There the strawberries were over ripe, here the blossoms were but opening their white petals, and the mountain moosewood and mountain ash, there long gone to seed, were here just in the height of bloom. By the lake side the Labrador tea offers its felt-slipper leaves for the refreshment of weary travellers who may thus drink from fairy shoon; nor need one go to the trouble of steeping, for the round heads of delicate white bloom send forth a styptic, aromatic fragrance that is as tonic as the air on which it floats. A drone of wild bees was in this air, and looking up the cliff toward the sun a million wings of tiny, fluttering insects made a glittering mist.

But even then the shadow of the pinnacle of the great cliff fell on the western margin of the pool and, as I lay and watched it, moved majestically out across the waters. It wiped the golden glow and the fluttering sheen of insects from the air, the glitter from the surface of the lake, and spread a cool mystery of twilight over all things which it touched. A chill walked the waters from the base of the cliff, whose rough rock brows frowned where the birches but an hour before had smiled, and all the hobgoblins of the wild Notch showed themselves in the advancing shadows. Rock sphinxes and dead-tree dragons suddenly appeared, and as the afternoon advanced so did the shadows of Wildcat Mountain, sweeping across the narrow defile and bringing forth all its weird and sinister aspects.

The way to the light of day lies down the stream southerly. But there is no stream. The waters of the upper lake flow to the other one beneath a great jumble of broken ledges, and then go on to form the stream farther down under a titanic rock barrier of shattered cliff and interspersed caverns. Gnarled and dwarfed spruces climb all over this great barrier, and so may a man if he have patience and will step carefully on the arctic moss which clothes the rocks and gives roothold to the spruces, watchful lest it slip from under him and drop him into the caverns of unknown depth below. It is a region of wild beauty of desolation even with the sun on it, and after the shadow of Wildcat has climbed it, its rough loneliness has something almost sinister about it. Only when its topmost rock is surmounted and the valley below shows down the Notch, still bathed in sunshine and peaceful in its green beauty and its rim of blue mountains far beyond, may one forget the weird spell which the shadows have cast on him in the very heart of the chasm. Here is the scintillant world of the Wildcat River valley once more, still bathed in sunshine, though the shadows of the range to westward creep rapidly toward its centre. I had seen the heart of its beginnings at the moment when the toiling trolls were at their work. I had seen the weirder spirits cast their mantle over the place, and far down the Notch I could hear the little river calling me to come down to it again as I scrambled off this giant's causeway to the friendly leading of the path and went on down through the region of great gray toads to the slope of a thousand porcupines, and on to where the footpath way enters the road. The smile of sunshine had gone from the face of the valley and the night shadows of Wildcat and its spurs were drawn across it, but only for a little was it sombre. With the darkness came a million scintillations of firefly lights in all its grasses, and out of the clear blue of the sky above twinkled back the answering stars.

VII
UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE

Day and Night Along the Short Trail to Mount Washington Summit

The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's Ravine holds winter in its heart all summer long. In the sweltering heat of the early July weather it is an unborn glacier, a solid mass of compacted snow and ice, two hundred feet in vertical diameter and spreading fan-fashion across the whole head of the ravine. Out from under it rumbles a stream of ice water, and it still makes danger for the mountain climber on the upper part of the path which climbs the head wall of the ravine and goes on, up to the summit of Mount Washington. All winter long the north wind sweeps the snow over the round ridge between the summit cone and Boott's Spur and drifts it down the perpendicular face of rock which stands above the beginning of the ravine. There are summers when the heat of the sun, beating directly upon this glacial mass, melts it away. There are others when it lingers till the snows of autumn come to build upon it again.

"The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's Ravine holds winter in its heart all summer long"

He who would do much mountain climbing in a comparatively short distance will do well to go up Mount Washington by the Tuckerman Ravine. A good motor road leads from Jackson to Gorham, and on, and the trail leaves this nine miles above Jackson. A. M. C. signs and the feet of thousands of mountain lovers have made the path's progress plain, but for a further sign the wilderness sends the swish of Cutler River, flashing over its boulders, to the ear all the way up to the snow arch, and it serves free ice water for the refreshment of travellers. Only in rare spots does this tiny torrent find time to make placid pools. All the rest of the way it leaps boulders, shelters trout in clear, bubbling depths, and makes its longest, maddest plunges at the cliffs down which foam the Crystal Cascades. Here, at the end of your first half-mile of ascent, you may lie in the shadow of maple and white birch on the brink of a narrow gulf, see the white joy of the river as it makes its swiftest plunge toward the sea, and listen to the myriad voices in which it tells the lore of the lonely ravine which the waters have traversed from the very summit of the head wall. No water comes down the Crystal Cascade that is not beaten into a foam as white as the quartz vein in which it has its very beginnings, high up the cone of the summit. It is as if this quartz were here turned to liquid life which spurts in a million joyous arches from the black rock which it touches and leaves more nimbly than the feet of fleeing mountain sheep. There are wonderfully beautiful pink flushes in this white quartz and you may see them as you go up the path to the summit above the alpine gardens of the plateau. But you do not have to climb that far to see them. The same colors of dawn are in the cascade when the sun filters through the leaves and touches those curves of beauty in which the river laughs down to its wedding with the Ellis in the heart of the Pinkham Notch.

In the heart of the snow arch is winter. On its steadily receding southern margin all through July is a continual dawn of spring. As the snow recedes the alders emerge bare and leafless. A rod down stream they are tinged green with the beginnings of crinkly leaves and have hung out their long staminate tassels of bloom. Another rod and they are in full leafage and the staminate tassels have given place to the brown seed cones. These mountain alders have a singularly crimped rich green leaf, and they so love the snow water torrents of Tuckerman's Ravine that they stand in them where they plunge in steepest gullies down the cliffs, bearing their tremendous buffeting with steadfast forgiveness. Sometimes the freshets skin them alive and leave them rooted with their white bones yearning down stream as if to follow the water that killed them. The torrents hurl rocks down and crush them, and always the downpour of water and mountain-side has bent them till in the steepest places they grow downward, their tips only struggling to bend toward the sky. Yet still in July they put out their bright green, corrugated leaves, array themselves in the beauty of golden tassels flecked with dark brown, and scatter pollen gold on the waters that now prattle so lovingly by.

In places the river-side banks are white with stars of Houstonia and the lilac alpine violets nod from slender stems nearby. Down the high cliffs the mountain avens climbs and sets its golden blooms in the most inaccessible places, flowers from the low valleys and the alpine heights thus mingling and making the deep ravine sweet with fragrance and wild beauty. The rough cliffs loom upward to frowning heights on three sides, but on their dizziest gray pinnacles the fearless wild flowers root and garland their crags, clinging in crevices from summit to base. With equal courage the alders have climbed them till they can peer at the very summit of the high mountain across the wind-swept alpine garden.

"Then the shadows are deep under the black growth that spires up all about the little placid sheet of water, though it still reflects the sapphire blue of the clear sky above"

By the middle of the afternoon the shadows of the heights begin to wipe the sunshine from the upper end of the ravine and the shade of the head wall marches grandly out, over the snow arch and on, down stream. The long twilight begins then and moves out to Hermit Lake by six. Then the shadows are deep under the black growth that spires up all about the little placid sheet of water, though it still reflects the sapphire blue of the clear sky above. The lake is, indeed, a hermit, dwelling always apart in its hollow among the spiring spruces, a tiny level of water, strangely beautiful for its placidity amid all the turmoil and grandeur about it. From its boggy margin the morning of the day that I reached it a big buck had drank and left his hoof prints plain in the mud among the short grasses. I waited long at evening for him to come back, but the only signs of life about the margins were the voices of three green frogs that cried "t-u-g-g-g" to one another by turns. One living long here might well measure the flight of time on a clear afternoon and evening by the changes of color in the lake. It is but a shallow pool, but you look through the mud of its bottom and see far below, by the inverted spires of the marginal trees, into infinite depths of a blue that is that of the sky but clarified and intensified by the clear waters from which it shines till it is to the eye as perfect and inspiring as a clear musical note that leaps out of silence to the longing ear.

As the day passes this color in the lake deepens and changes in rhythmical cadences till twilight brings a deep green, through which you see the inverted ravine below you more clearly than above. The one clear note has swelled into a symphony of color through which floats one entrancing tone, as sometimes lifts a clear soprano voice out of the fine harmony of the chorus, the pink of sunset fleece of clouds a mile above the head wall of the ravine. As the day fades, so does this high, clear tone, and the advancing night deepens the green to a black that is silence,—a silence that is velvety in body but scintillant with the glint of stars.

Through all this symphony of changing color a single hermit sang till the blackness of night welled up to the spruce top in which he sat, and as if to keep him company one or two wood warblers piped from the very darkness beneath where it seemed too dark for full songs, and they sang fragments only, too brief for me to identify the singers. From the lake itself came the voices of the three green frogs, speaking prophetically through the night with the single, authoritative words of true prophets. Just for a moment at dusk, from the icy waters of the stream above the lake, came a guttural chorus which I took to be that of tree frogs, which croak in the woodland pools of Massachusetts in March.

In the clear waters that run from the perpetual winter of the snow arch I had seen two of these frogs, of the regulation wood frog size and shape but wonderfully changed in color. Instead of the usual brown, here were frogs that were cream white throughout save for a black patch from the muzzle across either eye extending in a faint line down the side nearly to the hind leg. They seemed like spirit frogs with all the dross in their epidermis washed out by the solvent purity of that icy snow water in which they constantly dwell. In these same pools of the icy stream were caddice-fly larvæ which had woven armor for themselves with a warp of the usual spider-web threads and a filling of tiny stones. But their stones were the scales of mica with which the bottoms of the pools are paved, and as they slowly moved about they were sheathed in rainbows of sky reflections in these tiny surfaces. Such wonders of beauty has the heart of the high mountain for all that dwell in the depths of its ravines.

In the blackness of full night the song of the falling waters is the only sound that one hears in the ravine. This is an ever-varying multitone into which he who listens may read all the day sounds he has ever heard. The still air takes up the mingled voices of tiny cataracts and tosses them from one wall to another, and there are places along the path where this sound is that of a big locomotive engine with steam up, stopping at a station, the chu-chu of the air brakes coming to the ear with a definiteness that is startling. In other spots the echo of trampers' voices sound till one is sure that a belated party is on the trail and will arrive later to share the hospitality of the camp.

The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Tuckerman's Ravine

Through it all rings the gentle lullaby of the wilderness, the drone of all the winds of a thousand years in the spruce tops and the crisp tinkle of clashing crystals when an ice storm has bowed the white birches till their limbs clash together in the xylophonic music of winter. All these and more are in the song which lulled me to slumber on the borders of Hermit Lake,—a slumber so deep and restful that I did not know when the porcupines came and ate thirteen holes in the rubber blanket in which I was wrapped to keep out the cold of the snow arch which creeps down the ravine behind the shadow of the head wall. Thirteen is an unlucky number when it represents holes in one's blanket, and the chill of interstellar space wells deep in Tuckerman's Ravine toward morning of a night in early July.

Twilight begins again by three o'clock. One may well wonder what time the hermit thrush has to sleep, he sings so long into the night and begins again before the dawn is much more than a dream of good to come. As the light grows the castellated ridge of Boott's Spur shows fantastic shapes against the sky, and the pinnacle of the Lion's Head which looms so high above Hermit Lake glooms sternly with grotesque rock faces which are carved like gargoyles along its ravineward margin. Beauty wreathes the cliffs in this wildest of spots, but goblins grow in the rock itself and peer from the wreaths to make their friendliness more complete by gruesome contrast. One wakes shivering and longs for the sun of midsummer to come out of the northeast over the slope of Mount Moriah and warm him. Far below in Pinkham Notch the night mists have collected in a white lake that heaves as if beneath its blanket slept the giant who carved the stairs over beyond Montalban Ridge. But the giant too is waiting for the sun, and though he stirs uneasily in his waking he does not toss off the blanket till it shines well over Carter Range and the day has fairly begun. The ravine gets the morning early at Hermit Lake. The widening slopes lie open to the light, but the Lion's Head jealously guards the snow arch and seems to withdraw its long shadow with reluctance. By and by the sun shines full upon the great white bank, and as at the pyramid of Memnon strikes music from it with the increasing tinkle of falling water.

By this time the stirring of the giant's blanket has tossed off woolly fleeces from its upper side, and these climb toward the ravine in wraiths of diaphanous mist that now dance rapidly along the tree tops, now linger and shiver together as if fearful of the heights which they essay. These follow me as I toil laboriously up the almost perpendicular slope along the snow margin toward the head wall, and by the time I have worked around the dangerous glacial mass and surmounted the cliffs they are massed along the cold slope and seem to mingle with the snow into an opaque, nebulous mystery.

For a long time these do not get beyond the brow of the cliff. Now they bed down together, as dense and as full of rainbow colors under the sun as is mother-of-pearl, again little fluffs dare the climb toward the summit, fluttering with fear as they proceed and fainting into invisibility in the thin air that flows across the alpine garden. Tiny streams from the base of the high cone slip down the rocks to them and whisper in soft voices that they need have no fear, but whether it is fright or the compelling power of the sun that now shouts mid morning warmth over Carter Notch, these thin pioneers hesitate and vanish as the main body sweeps up from the Crystal Cascade and Glen Ellis Falls and fills all the lower ravines with that white blanket that began to stir at daybreak so far below. The giant is awake, has tossed his bed-clothes high in air, and is striding away along the Notch behind their shielding fluff.

I fancy him clumping up the Gulf of Slides and over to the ravines of Rocky Branch on his way to see if those stairs he built are still in order in spite of the disintegrating forces so steadily at work pulling the mountains down. Listening on the top wall of Tuckerman's I can hear these forces at work and do not wonder that he is uneasy. The steady flow of white water in a million tiny cascades is filing the rocks away all day long. But the water does far more than this. It seeps down into the cracks in the great cliffs, swells there with the winter freezing, and presses the walls apart.

"The giant is awake, has tossed his bed-clothes high in air, and is striding away along the notch behind their shielding fluff"

It dissolves and excavates beneath hanging rocks and cunningly undermines them till gravity pulls them from their perch and sends them down to swell the great masses of débris all along the bottoms of the ravine sides. Sitting on the head wall I hear one of them go every few minutes. Often it is only the click and patter of a pebble obeying that ever present force as it bounds from ledge to ledge down the wall. But sometimes a larger fragment leaps out at the mysterious command and crashes down, splintering itself or what it strikes on the way to the bottom. My own climbing feet dislodged many that have caught on other fragments, and in the steeper, more crumbled portions of the path each climber does his share in producing miniature slides. Except on rare occasions the fall of the mountains is slight, but it is continually going on wherever peaks rise and cliffs overhang.

Not till the mists out of the Great Gulf over on the other side of the mountain had swept around the base of the summit cone and hung trailing streamers down into Tuckerman's Ravine did the masses that filled it with white opacity to the top of the snow arch scale the head wall. Then they came grandly on and met and mingled with their kind till Boott's Spur disappeared and all the long ranges of mountains to southward were wiped out by an atmosphere that, with the sun lighting it, was like the nebulous luminosity out of which the world was originally made. Behind me they climbed the central cone, but slowly, almost, as I did. My trouble was the Jacob's ladder of astoundingly piled rocks of which the way is made. Theirs was a little cool wind that came down from the very summit and which steadily checked them, though they boiled and danced with bewildering turbulence against it. They wiped out the solid mountain behind me as I went till the cone and I seemed to be floating on a quivering cloud through the extreme limits of space.

Climbing this Tuckerman's Ravine path one gets no hint of the buildings on the summit. With the clouds below me and the rocks above I was isolated in space on a cone of jagged rock whose base was continually removed from beneath me as I climbed. It seemed as if, when I did reach that high pinnacle, the last rock might fade from beneath my feet and leave me floating in the white void that came so majestically on behind me. We reached the top together, but the crisis was not so lonely as I had imagined. Instead, I found myself walled in by opaque mists indeed, but still with much solid rock beneath my feet and a friendly little village, a railroad track and station, a stage office and stables, and an inn at hand, all with familiar human greetings for the weary traveller. You may come to the summit by many paths, by train, carriage or motor, but no trail has more of beauty, or indeed more of weirdness if the fluff of the giant's blanket follows you to the summit, than the three miles and a half of steady climbing by way of Tuckerman's Ravine.

VIII
ON MOUNT WASHINGTON

Sunny Days and Clear Nights on the Highest Summit

The dweller on the top of Mount Washington may have all kinds of weather in the twenty-four hours of a July day, or he may have a tremendous amount, all of one kind, extending through many days. It all depends on what winds Father Æolus keeps chained, perhaps in the deep caverns of the Great Gulf, or which ones he lets loose to rattle the chains of the Tip Top House. My four days there were such as the fates in kindly mood sometimes deal out to fortunate mortals. The land below was in a swoon of awful heat. People died like flies in cities not far to the southward. The summit had a temperature of June, and the wind that drifted in from Canada made the nights cool enough for blankets; all but one. The night before the Fourth we perspired, even in this wind of Hudson Bay, and the habitués of the hilltop were properly indignant. They had snowballed there for a brief hour on the July Fourth of the year before and these sudden changes were disquieting.

"It all depends on what winds Father Æolus keeps chained, perhaps in the deep caverns of the Great Gulf, or which ones he lets loose to rattle the chains of the Tip Top House"

Of these four gems of days the first was a pearl, two were amethystine, and the last was of lapis lazuli. The morning of the pearl broke after light rains in the valley below, the air so clear that the city of Portland lifted its spires on the eastern horizon just before sunrise and the blue water of Casco Bay flashed beyond it. Yet the nearer valleys were shrouded in the white mists that were mother-of-pearl, a matrix that gradually rose and blotted out the green and gray of granite hilltops below till the summit was a great ship, rock-laden, ploughing through a white tumultuous sea whose billows were fluffy clouds like those on which Jupiter of old sat and dispensed judgment on mankind. I know of nothing so much like this sea of white cloud surface seen from above as is the sea of Arctic ice under a summer sun, its white, sun-softened expanse crushed into flocculent pressure ridges of frozen tumult stretching as far as the eye can reach. Yet this is different in its strange beauty, for the Arctic ice changes its form only slowly, while this fleecy sea, seemingly so stable to the fleeting glance, changes shape before the next look can be given. No breath of wind may fan your brow on the summit, but the clouds below you tread a stately minuet, advancing, retreating, meeting and dividing, now a white Arctic sea, again a swiftly dignified dance by ghostly castles in Spain.

Often the near mists close in upon the summit and make all opaque, and the gray, shadowy hand of the cloud lies against your cheek and leaves a smear of cool moisture when it is withdrawn. On that morning when the summit and the day were bosomed together in a white pearl I saw the wayward moods of an imperceptible wind ordering this dance of the clouds. It passed down from the peak by the path that leads over the range to Crawford Notch, waving one line of mists eastward from the ridge until Boott's Spur and Tuckerman's Ravine stood clearly revealed, while on the west an obedient white wall stood, wavering indeed, but holding its ground from the margin of the path high into the sky toward the zenith. For nearly half an hour any alpinist climbing over the head wall of Tuckerman's in sunshine would have seen his way clearly to this Crawford path, and, going westward, have stepped into the white mystery of the mists on the farther verge.

Again the imperceptible winds beckoned and the clouds whirled up from Pinkham Notch and blotted out the spur and the ravine, pirouetting up to meet their partners while the latter retreated, fluttering lace skirts behind, the high-walled chasm of clear space between them passing over the ridge and swinging north until met by an eruption of white dancers out of the Great Gulf and across the railroad track. Then all whirled together up the rough rock tangle of the central cone and blotted out the world in a pearly opacity.

The clouds that morning were born in the lowlands and ascended to the summit from all sides, out of Huntington and Tuckerman Ravines, out of Oakes Gulf and Great Gulf and up from Fabyan's by way of the Base Station and the Mount Washington Railroad, enfolding the summit only after they had shown the marvels of their upper levels all about the foundations of the central cone. Then, after the white opalescence of the conquest of the peak the whirling dervishes above, for an hour or two, now occluded, again revealed, what was below. For half an hour they danced along the northern peaks, now hiding, now disclosing portions of them, but always during that time showing the peak of Adams, a clearly defined purple-black pyramid, framed in their fleece. After that for a long time they lifted bodily for ten-minute spaces, revealing another body of mists below, their upper surface far enough down so that the castellated ridge of Boott's Spur, Mount Monroe, Mount Clay and Nelson Crag stood out above them.

Here were clouds above clouds, the upper levels whirling in wild dances, fluttering together and again parting to let the sun in on the summit and on the levels below whence rose fleecy cloud rocks of white, tinged often with the rose of sunlight, mountain ranges of semi-opaque mists that changed without seeming to move and showed oftentimes a curious semblance in white vapor to the land formation as it is revealed below on a clear day. Out of these lower clouds came sometimes sudden jets of vapor, as if the winds below found fumaroles whence they sent quick geysers of mists, vanishing fountains of a magic garden of the gods. Old Merlin, long banished from Arthur's Court in the high Welsh hills, may well have found a retreat in this new world Cærleon, nor did ever knight of the Round Table see more potent display of his powers of illusion and evasion than were here shown for any man who had climbed the high peak on that day of pearl cloud magic.

Afterward came two days of fervent sun on clear peaks that stand all about the horizon from Washington summit, half islanded in an amethystine heat haze, as beautiful, seen from the wind-swept pinnacle, as if old Merlin after a day of tricks with pearls had ground all the gems of his magic storehouse to blue dust that filled the valleys of all the mountain world. On those days few men climbed the peak, but all the butterflies of the meadows and valleys far below danced up and held revels in the scent of the alpine plants, then in the full joy of their July blooming. The more distant valleys were deeply hazed in this amethystine blue, but the nearer peaks and plateaus stood so clear above them that it seemed as if one might leap to the lakes of the clouds or step across the great gulf to Jefferson in one giant's stride. I have heard a man on the rim of the Grand Cañon in Arizona declaring that he could throw a stone across its thirteen miles. So on those days in the high air miles seemed but yards, and only in the actual test of travel did one realize how far the feet fall behind the eye in the passage of distances.

"The more distant valleys were deeply hazed in this amethystine blue, but the nearer peaks and plateaus stood so clear above them that it seemed as if one might leap to the Lakes of the Clouds or step across the Great Gulf to Jefferson in one Giant's stride."

At nightfall one realized how that heat haze not only possessed the valleys but the air high above them, for the sun, descending, grew red and dim and finally was swallowed up in the mists of his own creating long before he had reached the actual horizon's rim. Under his passing one lake after another to westward flashed his mirrored light back in a dazzling gleam of silver, then faded again to become a part of the blue dust of the distance. By their flashes they could be counted, and it was as if each signalled good night to the summit as the day went on. Eastward the purple shadow of the apex moved out across the Alpine garden, joined that of the head wall of Huntington Ravine, and, flanked by those of the Lion's Head and Nelson Crag, went on toward the horizon. Clearly defined on the light-blue haze where the sun's rays still touched, this deep pyramid of color moved majestically out of the Notch and up the slope of Wildcat Mountain, leapt Carter Notch and from the high dome of the farther summit put the Wild River valley in shadow as it went on, up Baldface and on again across the nearer Maine ranges, till it set its blunt point on the heat-haze clouds along the far eastern horizon. Nothing could be more expressive of the majesty of the mountain than to thus see its great shadow move over scores of miles of earth and on and up into the very heavens.

It was as if God withdrew the mountain for the night into the sky, leaving the watcher on that great ledge-laden ship which is the very summit, plunging on over dark billows with the winds of space singing wild songs in the rigging. Beneath is the blue-black sea of tumultuous mountain waves that ride out from beneath the prow and on into the weltering spindrift haze of distance where sea and sky are one. In the full night the winds increase and find a harp-string or a throat in every projection of the pinnacle ledges whence to voice their lone chanteys of illimitable space. It is the same world-old song that finds responsive echoes in man's very being but for which he can never find words, the chantey of the night winds that every sailor has heard from the fore-top as the ship plunges on in the darkness when only the dim stars mark the compass points and the very ship itself is merged far below in the murk of chaos returned. What the night may be during a storm on this main-top of the great mountain ship only those who have there endured it may tell; my nights there were like the days, fairy gifts out of a Pandora's box that often holds far other things beneath its lid.

"Dawn on the mornings of those days was born out of the sky above the summit, as if the fading stars left some of their shine behind them"

Dawn on the mornings of those days was born out of the sky about the summit as if the fading stars left some of their shine behind them, a soft, unworldly light that touched the pinnacles first and anon lighted the mountain waves that slid out from under the prow of the ship and rode on into the flushing east. As the heat haze at night had absorbed the red sun in the west, so now it let it gently grow into being again from the east. In its crescent light he who watched to westward could see the mountain come down again out of the sky into which it had been withdrawn. Out of a broad, indistinct shadow that overlaid the world it grew an outline that descended and increased in definiteness till the apex was in a moment plainly marked on the massed vapors that obscured the horizon line. Down these it marched grandly, touching indistinct ranges far to westward, more clearly defined on the Cherry Mountains and the southerly ridges of the Dartmouth range, and becoming the very mountain itself as its point touched the valley whence flows Jefferson Brook and the slender thread of the railway climbs daringly toward the summit.

Below in a thousand sheltered valleys the hermit thrushes sang greetings to the day. Far up a thousand slopes the white-throated sparrows joined with their thin, sweet whistle, and higher yet the juncos warbled cheerily, but no voice of bird reaches the high summit. The only song there is that of the wind chanting still the thrumming runes of ancient times, sung first when rocks emerged out of chaos and touched with rough fingers the harp strings of the air. To such music the light of day descends from above, and the shadows of night withdraw and hide in the caves and under the black growth in the bottoms of ravines and gulfs. Rarely does one notice this music in the full day. Then the rough cone even is a part of man's world, built on a sure foundation of the familiar, friendly earth. It is only the darkness of night that whirls it off into the void of space and sets the eerie runes in vibration. Few nights of the year are so calm there that you do not hear them, and even in their gentlest moods they come from the voices of winds lost in the void, little winds, perhaps, rushing shiveringly along to find their way home and whistling sorrowfully to themselves to keep their courage up.

Man comes to the summit at all hours and by many paths. Often in that darkest time which precedes the dawn one may see firefly lights approaching from the northeast, bobbing along in curious zigzags. These will-o'-the-wisps are pedestrians, climbing by the carriage road to greet the first dawn on the summit and watch the sun rise, carrying lanterns meanwhile lest they lose the broad, well-kept road and fall from the Cape Horn bend into the solemn black silence of the Great Gulf. The voices of these are an alarm clock to such as sleep on the summit, calling them out betimes to view the wonders they seek. By day men and women appear on foot from the most unexpected places. The Crawford and Gulf Side trails, Tuckerman's and the carriage road bring them up by accepted paths, but you may see them also clambering over the head wall of Huntington's or the Gulf, precipitous spots that the novice would think unsurmountable.

These are the "trampers," as the habitués of the mountain summit call them. But the carriage road brings many who ride luxuriously up for four hours behind two, four or six horses, or flash up in less than an hour to the honk of automobile horns and the steady chug of gasolene engines. The old-time picturesque burros that patiently bore their riders up the nine miles of the Crawford trail have gone, probably never to return, and the horseback parties once so common are now rare. But by far the greater numbers climb the mountain by steam. From the northerly slope of Monroe, over beyond the Lakes of the Clouds, I watched the trains come, clanking caterpillars that inch-worm along the trestles of the cogged railroad, clinking like beetles and sputtering smoke and steam as only goblin caterpillars might, finally becoming motionless chrysalids on the very summit. From these burst forth butterfly crowds that put to shame with their raiment the gauzy-winged beauties that flutter up the ravines to enjoy the sweets of the Alpine Garden. Then for a brief two hours on any bright day the bleak summit becomes a picnic ground, bright with gay crowds that flutter from one rock pinnacle to another and swirl into the ancient Tip Top house to buy souvenirs and dinner, restless as are any lepidoptera and as little mindful of the sanctity of this highest altar of the Appalachian gods. Soon these have reassembled once more in their chrysalids that presently retrovert to the caterpillar stage and crawl clanking and hissing down the mountain, inching along the trestles and vanishing anon into the very granite whence you hear them clanking and sputtering on. Amid all the weird play of nature in lonely places the summit has no stranger spectacle than this.

The day of lapis lazuli began with a break in the intense heat, a day on which cumulus clouds rolled up thousands of feet above the summit in the thin air and cast their shadows before them, to race across the soft amethyst of the miles below and deepen it with their rich blue out of which golden sun-glints flashed still, racing shifting breaks in the cloud masses above. The wind increased in velocity toward mid-afternoon and cumulus massed in nimbus on the far horizon to the northwest out of which the flick of red swords of lightning and the battle roar of thunder sounded nearer and nearer. Mightily the black majesty of the storm moved up to us, wiping out earth and sky in its progress, the rolling edges of its topmost clouds still golden with the color of the sun that sank behind them. Here was a glory such as day nor night, sunrise nor sunset, had been able to show me.

The pagan gods of the days long gone seemed to come forth out of the summits far to the northwest and do battle, but half-concealed by their clouds. Swords flashed high and javelins flew and the clash of shields and the rumble of chariot wheels came to the ear in ever increasing volume as the tide of battle swept on and over the summit. A moment and we should see the very cohorts of Mars himself in all their shining fury, but father Æolus let loose all the winds at once from his caverns, Jupiter Pluvius opened wide the conduits of the clouds and the world, even the very summit thereof, was drowned in the gray tumult of the rain.

IX
MOUNT WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES

Filmy Beauties to be Found in Fair Weather on the Very Summit

The height of the butterfly season comes to the rich meadows about the base of Mount Washington in mid-July. The white clover sends its fragrance from the roadside and the red clover from the deep grass for them, and all the meadow and woodland flowers of midsummer rush into bloom for their enjoyment, while those of an earlier season seem to linger and strive not to be outdone. The cool winds from the high summits of the Presidential Range help them in this, and even in the summer drought the snow-water from the cliffs and the night fogs of the ravines keep them moist and fresh. No wonder that butterflies swarm in these meadows and even climb toward the summits along the flowery paths laid out for them up the beds of dwindling mountain torrents and under the cool shadows of forests impenetrable to the sun. Butterflies come to know woodland paths as well as man does and delight to follow them.

Butterfly-time on Mount Washington, the summit seen over the larger of the Lakes of the Clouds

Of a July day the butterflies and I journeyed together up the flower-margined carriage road that leads to the summit of Mount Washington. They may have been surprised at the pervasiveness of my presence. I am sure I was at theirs, which lasted as long as the marginal beds of wild flowers did.

To climb this smooth road leisurely, on foot, is always to marvel at the engineering skill which found so steadily easy a grade up such an acclivity and so cunningly constructed it that it has been possible to keep it in good condition all these years—it was finished in 1869—in spite of summer cloudbursts and the gruelling torrents of melting snow in early spring. One is well past the first mile post before he realizes that he is going up much of a hill. The rise is that of an easy country road and might be anywhere in the northern half of New England from all outside appearances.

The striped moosewood and the mountain moosewood growing by the roadside under white and yellow birch and rock maple suggest the latitude. The white admiral butterflies emphasize the suggestion. Rarely have I found these plants or this insect south of the northern boundary of Massachusetts. The white admirals flip their blue-black wings with the broad white epaulettes up and down the road in numbers. Butterflies of the shady spots, they find this highway where the trees arch in and often meet above peculiarly to their taste. Yet the meadow-loving fritillaries outnumber the admirals ten to one. Not even among the richly scented clover of the flats below, not even in the full roadside sun on the milkweed blooms which all butterflies so love, are they so plentiful. I suspect them of having a strain of adventurous blood in their veins, such as gets into us all when among the mountains and sets us to climbing them, and later observations bear out the suspicion. It was a day to lure butterflies to climb heights, still, steeped in fervid sun heat, and redolent of the perfect bloom of a hundred varieties of flowering plants.

At first I thought these all specimens of the great spangled fritillary, Argynnis cybele, but they gave me such friendly opportunities for close examination that I soon knew better. The greater number of these mountain climbing butterflies were a rather smaller variety with a distinct black border along the wings, Argynnis atlantis, the mountain fritillary. They swarmed along the narrow shady road as plentiful as the blossoms of field daisies and blue brunella. With playful necromancy they made the daisies change kaleidoscopically from gold and white to gold and black, or they folded their wings and set the flower stalks scintillant with silver moon spangles. So with the blue brunella blooms. They flashed from close spikes of modest blue flecks to great four-petalled flowers of gold and silver and black, a blossom that would make the fortune of any gardener that could grow it, and presto! the miracle of bloom rose lightly into the air on fluttering wings and the stalk held only the shy blue of the brunella after all. Such is the magic of the first mile of the ascent, which might be any easy rise under the deciduous shade of most any little New Hampshire hill, so far as appearances go.

During the second mile spruces slip casually into the roadside. They do it so unassumingly that you hardly know when, they and the firs. But the swarms of butterflies go on up the grade and through the dense foliage you still glimpse no mountain tops. With them shines occasionally the pale yellow of Colias philodice, and little orange skippers skip madly from bloom to bloom of the wayside flowers that still fill the margins from woods to wheel tracks. Clearwing moths buzz and poise like miniature humming birds, and with them in the deeper shadow flits a small white moth so delicately transparent and so ethereally pure in color that when he lights on a leaf the green of it shines through his wings.

These first two miles of the carriage road are amid scenes of such sylvan innocence that a partridge with her half-grown brood hardly feared me as their path crossed mine, and they flew only when I approached very near them. Cotton-tailed rabbits hopped leisurely across in front of me, in no wise excited by my approach, and though the chipmunks whistled shrilly and dived into their holes before I touched them, they waited almost long enough for me to do it. The roadside flowers climbed bravely up the second mile among the wayside grasses, white clover, blue-eyed grass and golden ragwort, with the daisies, these not so plentiful as below, and the gentle brunella, and out of the woods came as if to meet and fraternize with them the rose-veined wood sorrel, its pure white petals seeming even more diaphanous because of the rose-veining. The heart-shaped, trifoliate leaves of this lovely little plant which climbs the great mountain on all sides are not those of the veritable shamrock, perhaps, but they are enough like them to prove to a willing mind that St. Patrick must surely have climbed Mount Washington in his day, and that this gentle insignia of his clan remained behind to prove it. It is a flower of shaded mossy banks in deep evergreen woods, where its tender white flowers, with their beautifully rose-shaded, translucent petals, delight the eye along the lower and middle reaches of all paths that lead to the summit.

Toward the end of the second mile one realizes that he is climbing high. Through the trees to westward flit glimpses of the deep valley of the Peabody River, when he has risen, and beyond it the misty blue wall of the Carter Range, rising ever higher behind him as he goes up. The fritillaries come on, but the admirals drop behind to be seen no more, their places taken by an occasional angle-wing, Grapta interrogationis or Grapta comma. As the road rises the wayside flowers too fall behind, leaving lonely places, though well up to the Halfway House, nearly four miles up, white and pink yarrow is to be found, flanked by bunchberry blooms and the lovely greenish yellow of the Clintonia. This has half-ripened berries in the lowlands at the base, but toward the summit of the mountain it blooms till well into the middle of July, perhaps later. The butterflies fall behind as the roadside flowers do, yet now and then a mountain fritillary goes by and almost at the Halfway House I saw the most superb Compton tortoise, Vanessa j-album, that I have met anywhere. Below the Halfway House young spruces have crowded into the roadside to the very wheel tracks, and the last of the lowland blooms has vanished. On the day that I came looking for them the lowland butterflies had vanished too, and the road seemed bare and desolate for two or three miles, indeed until the alpine plants of the high plateau began to appear, and with them the Arctic butterfly that makes this summit home, the curious little Oeneis semidea.

I had thought to find this, "the White Mountain butterfly," the only variety of the plateau and the summit cone, but in this the day and the place had more than one surprise in store for me. There are many days in summer when even the hardiest, strongest-flying lowland butterfly would not be able to scale the summit because of wind and cold, but this day had only a gentle air drifting in from the north, and the heat, which was a killing one below, was there tempered to that of a fine June day. The sudden bloom of the alpine plants had passed its meridian, but many were still in good flower. All along on the head wall of the Tuckerman Ravine and out upon the Alpine Garden were the pink, laurel-like cups of the Lapland azalea. There was the Phyllodoce cærulea with its urn-shaped corolla turning blue as it withers, the three-toothed cinquefoil, Potentilla tridentata which looks to the careless glance like a little running blackberry vine with its star of white bloom, and everywhere low clumps of the lovely little mountain sandwort, Arenaria grœnlandica, the only petal-bearing plant that dares the very summit, where its white, cup-shaped blooms make the bleak rocks glad.

On the Alpine Garden and at the ravine heads are lower level flowers which come up and mingle with these. The buttercup-like blossoms of the mountain avens flash their rich yellow. The Labrador tea puts out its white umbels and sends spicy fragrance down the wind. The houstonia grows bravely its little white, four-pointed stars with their yellowish centre, and cornel and even Trientalis, the American star-flower, grow from the tundra moss and make a brave show in that bleak spot. Boldest of all is the great, rank-growing Indian poke, with its erect stem of big green leaves and its topping spike of greenish bloom. High up to the angles of the rock jumble of the cone, wherever the water comes down into the Alpine Garden, this climbs with a bold assurance that no other lowland plant equals. It is plentiful in the neighborhood of the Lakes of the Clouds and high on the head wall of the Tuckerman Ravine it sprouts under the receding snow, blanched like celery.

The fantastic lion's head which, carved in stone, guards the trail along Boott's Spur toward the summit cone of Washington

All these and more were in bloom on the plateau that supports the high cone of Washington summit on that day, and up to them had come the lowland butterflies. Most plentiful were the mountain fritillaries, but often a great spangled fritillary spread his wider wing above the head wall of Huntington or Tuckerman and soared along the levels. With these was an occasional angle-wing, Grapta interrogationis and Grapta progne, feeding in the larval stage on the leaves of the prickly wild gooseberry which is common well up to the base of the summit cone. Strange to relate, the beautiful, hardy, and common mourning cloak was not to be seen on the days in which I hunted butterflies about the summit, but his near relative, the Compton tortoise, Vanessa j-album, was there, and the smaller but lovely little Vanessa milberti, with his wings so beautifully gold-banded, I saw frequently. Milbertis flew up out of the Great Gulf toward the summit, and one afternoon I found one of them carefully following the Crawford trail down, winding its every turn a foot above the surface as if he knew that it was made to show the way. To the very summit, circling the Tip Top House, came big, red-winged, black-veined monarchs, and all the varieties I had seen in the Alpine Garden came up there too, most numerous of all being the mountain fritillaries. I take it that no one of these lowland butterflies is bred at these high levels, but that all wander up when the sun is bright and the wind still enough to permit the excursion.

"Semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock-pile which is the summit cone"

Most interesting of all to the lepidopterist is the one Arctic butterfly of our New England fauna, Oeneis semidea, "The White Mountain Butterfly," which might be perhaps better called in common parlance "The Mount Washington Butterfly," as it is commonly believed to be restricted in its habitat, so far as New England is concerned, to the high summit cone of Mount Washington. Holland so states in his excellent butterfly book. As a matter of fact the insect is plentiful over a rather wider range. I found it along the Crawford trail out to the Lakes of the Clouds and Mount Monroe, as well as along the lawns and Alpine Garden and down the carriage road far below the summit cone. It is also found at similar altitudes on Jefferson, Adams and Madison, its habitat being rather the high peaks of the Presidential Range than Mount Washington alone.

But semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock pile which is the summit cone. Wherever you climb, there it flutters from underfoot like a two-inch fleck of gray-brown lichen that has suddenly become a spirit. Alighting, it turns into the lichen again. In rough weather the other butterflies go down hill into the shelter of the ravines, but this one has learned to fight gales and midsummer snow storms and hold patriotically to its native country. Even in still weather when disturbed it skims the surface of the rock in flight, seeming to half crawl, half fly, lest a gale catch it and whirl it beyond its beloved peak. Its refuge is the little caverns among and beneath the angled boulders, and when close pressed by a would-be captor it flies or climbs down into these as a chipmunk would, and remains there till the danger has passed. It seems to be born of the rocks and to flee to its mother as children do when afraid of anything. It is our hardiest mountaineer. Neither beast nor bird dares the winter on this high summit. Yet here, winter and summer, is the home of this boreal insect which in the egg or the chrysalid withstands cold that often goes to fifty below Fahrenheit, and is backed by gales that blow a hundred miles an hour. No wonder this little but mighty butterfly takes the colors of the rocks that are its refuge.

It is the only easily noticed form of animated wild life that one is sure to find on the very summit, even in summer. Hedgehogs sometimes come to the door of the Tip Top House in summer weather and have to be shooed away, and gray squirrels have been seen there; but these, like the tourists, are casual wanderers from the warmer regions below. I believe the only bird that makes its summer home on the cone is the junco, though I heard song-sparrows and white-throats sing down on the levels of the plateau, at the Alpine Garden and about the Lakes of the Clouds. The juncos breed about these next highest levels in considerable numbers, and one pair at least bred this summer high up on the summit cone, about a third of the way down from the top toward the Alpine Garden. Like the Arctic butterflies, the refuge of this pair was the interstices of the rocks themselves, the nest being actually a hole in the ground, beneath an overhanging jut of ledge where the moss from below crept perpendicularly up to it, but left a gap two inches wide into which the mother bird could squeeze. It was almost as much of a hole in the ground as that in which a bank swallow nests, absolutely concealed, and protected from wind or down-rush of torrential rain.

Rare butterflies are not the only insects which tempt the entomologist to the very summit of Mount Washington. On my butterfly day there I found two members of the Cambridge Entomological Society dancing eagerly about the trestle at the terminus of the Mount Washington Railway, collecting beetles, of which they had hundreds stowed away in their cyanide jars. I'll confess that all beetles look alike to me, but these grave and learned gentlemen were ready to dance with joy at their success of the afternoon before at the Lakes of the Clouds, where each had captured one Elaphrus olivaceus. The name sounds like something gigantic; as a matter of fact, olivaceus is a tiny, dark, oval-shaped beetle, on which these enthusiasts saw beautiful striæ and olive-yellow stripes. Having the eye of faith I saw them too, but only with that eye. Together we went hunting the Alpine Garden for Elaphrus lævigatus, another infinitesimal prodigy of great rarity and scientific interest, but the omens were bad and lævigatus escaped. Such are some of the magnets with which this mighty mountain top draws men and women from all over the world, to spend perhaps a day, perhaps a summer, among its clouds, its scintillant sunshine and its ozone-bearing breezes.

Storm winds drive most of us below. When they blow, all the beautiful lowland butterflies set their wings and volplane down to the shelter of the valleys behind the jutting crags and the head walls. The chill of descending night as well drives these light-winged creatures off the hurricane deck of this great rock ship of the high clouds. But the thousands of hardy Oeneis semidea simply fold their lichen gray wings and creep into miniature caverns of the jumbled granite, waiting, warm and secure, for the light of the next sunny day.

X
MOUNTAIN PASTURES

Their Changing Beauty from Low Slopes to Presidential Plateaus

On the mountain farms the cultivated fields hold such levels as the farmer is able to find. Often on the roughest mountain side he has found them, treads on the stairways of the hills whose risers may be perpendicular cliffs or slide-threatening declivities. These last are for woodland in the farm scheme, if tremendously rough, or if they have roothold for grass and foothold for cattle they are pastures. Thus it is the pastures rather than the cultivated lands that aspire, and from their heights one looks down upon the farm-house and the farmer and his men at work in the hay fields. The stocky, square-headed, white-faced cattle may well feel themselves superior to these beings far below who groom and feed them, and from their wind-swept ridges I dare say they have the Emersonian thought, even if they have never learned the couplet:

"Little recks yon lowland clown

Of me on the hilltop looking down."

"The stocky, square-headed, white-faced cattle may well feel themselves superior to these beings far below who groom and feed them"

These mountain cattle are of many breeds, according to the fancy or the fortune of their owner. Probably many of them are mongrels whose ancestors it would be hard to determine, yet there seems to be a strong resemblance in some to those cattle one sees on Scottish hills and in the highlands of the English border, and one wonders if here are not lineal descendants of the stock which came in with the early English settlers. At least the white-faced ones have been settled on the mountain pastures long enough to become part and parcel of them. Except when in motion they so fit their rocky surroundings as to be with difficulty picked out from them by the eye. One might say the pasture holds so many hundred rocks and cattle, but which is which it takes a nice discernment to decide. Especially is this true when the herd stands motionless and regards the wandering stranger. Then the red bodies are the very color shadows of the green pasture shrubs and the white faces patches of weather-worn granite. Sometimes it is disconcerting to tramp up to such a rock in such a shadow and have it suddenly spring to its feet with an indignant "ba-a" and flee to the forest with much clangor of a musical bell.

Most of the mountain cattle wear this bell, which is but a hollow, truncated, four-sided pyramid with a clapper hung within. It does not tintinnabulate, but "tonks" with a tone that is low, but carries far and seems always a part of the woodland whence it so often sounds,—woodland in which pasture and cattle so continually merge. In its mellow tones the clock of the pasture strikes, marking the lazy hours for the loving listener. In the time when the slender thread of the old moon disputes with the new dawn the honor of lighting the high eastern ridges, I hear it chorusing in mellow merriment as the herd winds up the lane from the big old barn. It briskly rings the changes of the forenoon as the herd crops eagerly among the rocks, the slowing of its tempo marking the appeasing of hunger. Through the long, torrid hours of mid-day it sleeps in the deep shadow of the wood, toning only occasionally as the drowsy bearer moves. Then with the coming of the afternoon hunger I hear it again, moving down the mountain with the day, to meet the twilight and the farmer at the pasture bars.

As these mountain cattle are curiously different in aspect and carriage from those of our lowland pastures in eastern Massachusetts, so the pastures themselves differ widely in more than location and level. Here in part is the old world of bird and beast, herb, shrub and tree, yet many an old friend is missing and many a new one is to be made. It is difficult to believe that a pasture can be fascinating and lovable without either red cedars or barberry bushes, yet here are neither, and though the slim young spruces stand as prim and erect as the red cedars of a hundred and fifty miles farther south, they do not quite take their places, nor do they have the vivid personality of those trees. It is the same with the barberry. There is an individuality, an aura of personality about the shrub that forbids any other to take its place or indeed to in any way resemble it. The mountain pastures are the worse for that.

For my part I miss the clethra more even than these. July is the time for those misty white racemes to be coming into bloom and sending down the wind that spicy, delectable fragrance that seems to tempt him who breathes it to adventure forth in search of all woodland romance. But the clethra is a lover of the sea rather than the mountains and it has never voyaged far up stream. The waters of the mountain brooks have lost their clearness long before they greet the clethra on their banks. The striped moosewood and the mountain moosewood, both pasture-bordering shrubs of the high pastures, are beautiful in their way, but they cannot make up for this sweet-scented, brook-loving beauty of the lowlands.

There are two pasture people, however, who love the high slopes of the White Mountain pastures as well as they do the sandy borders of the Massachusetts salt marshes. These are the spiræas, latifolia and tomentosa. The latter, the good old steeple bush or hardhack, moves into some rocky, open slopes till it seems as if there was hardly room for any other shrub or scarcely for grass to grow, and makes the whole hillside rosy with its pink spires. It always seems to me as if the hardhack should be hardier than its less sturdy-looking, more dainty sister, the Spiræa latifolia or meadow-sweet. In most pastures of the foothills, so to speak, I find them together, but as one goes on up the slopes of the high ranges the hardhack vanishes from the wayside leaving the meadow-sweet to climb Mount Washington itself and show the delicate pink of its bloom over the head wall of the Tuckerman Ravine and about the Lakes of the Clouds. Nor has it altogether escaped the pasture there. The white-faced cattle remain behind with the hardhack, but the deer come over the col from Oakes Gulf and browse on its leaves and those of the Labrador tea and drink from the clear waters of the high lakes. These herds of the highest pastures bear no bell and fit into the color scheme of the landscape better even than the white-faced cattle, and it is no wonder that they escape observation. Yet I find their hoof marks at almost every drinking place of these highest mountain moors.

In these last days of July the most conspicuous bird of the pastures is the indigo bunting. I say this advisedly and in the presence of goldfinches, myrtle and magnolia warblers, purple finches and various sparrows, including the white-throat, also some other birds who breed and sing there. Yet of all these the indigo bunting seems by numbers and pervasiveness to be most in the public eye; I being the public. Early in the morning he sings. In the full warmth of noontide he sings, and I hear him when the sun is low behind the Presidential Range and the clouds are putting their gray nightcap on the summit of Washington. Always it is the same song, which slight variations only tend to emphasize without obscuring. "Dear, dear," he says, "Who-is-it, who-is-it, who-is-it? dear, dear, dear." And sometimes he adds a little whimsical, stuttering, "What-do-you-know-about-that?" He sits as he sings on the penultimate twig of some pasture shrub or tree, and as the sun shines on his indigo blue suit it flashes little coppery reflections from it that might well make one think him the product of some skilled jeweller's art rather than born of an egg in the bushes.

With the self-consciousness of the average summer visitor, I at first thought that this song of his referred to me. I fancied that he was calling to his little brown wife at the nest in the nearby bushes, exclaiming about this stranger who was tramping the pastures and asking her about him. If you wish to know about new people in town ask your wife. Any happily married indigo bunting will give you that advice. But I know his theme better now. I have seen the wife slip slyly out of the dense green of the thicket, and have most impolitely invaded it, there to find the compact grass nest full of a new-born bunting family. I know now that the father bunting sits in the tree tip and exclaims all day long over the arrival of these. Seeing their huddled, naked forms, their astounding mouths and unopened eyes, I do not wonder that he exclaims in perplexity and indeed some dismay over the new arrivals. "Dear, dear," he says, "Who-is-it, who-is-it? What-do-you-know-about-that?" He will never get over his astonishment at such tiny gorgons coming from those pale, pretty eggs that were there but a few days ago. Nor do I blame him one bit. It does not seem possible that these miracles of ugliness can ever grow up to be such sleek, beautiful birds as this father of theirs that sits on the treetop and all day long fills the pasture with echoes of his song of wonder over them. No. His song had no reference to me, but was strictly concerned with his own affairs. Like the other native-born mountaineers, he does not take the summer visitors any too seriously. It is interesting to go up the mountains from one pasture, scramble to another and see what lowland folk fall behind and how the habits of those that keep up the climb change as they progress into the higher altitudes. The woodchuck is not missing here, but he is not the same. He is the northern woodchuck, very like his Massachusetts cousin in habits but grayer, leaner and rangier. At this time of year a Massachusetts woodchuck is so fat that if you meet him he fairly rolls to his hole. The northern woodchuck gets into his with a scrambling bound that shows much less accumulation of adipose tissue. I fancy this leanness and greater alertness is due to the greater numbers and greater alertness of his woodland enemies. The pastures are full of foxes, and when they get hungry they go down and dig out a woodchuck for dinner. But even the northern woodchuck fails the pastures in their higher portions.

One by one the lowland flowers fall back and the lowland trees and shrubs, also, until high on the Presidential Range the pastures themselves, in the common use of the word, have failed as well. Yet I like to think the true use of the word includes that debateable land at the tree limit as pasture land. In the economy of a farm it would surely be of use for nothing else, and it would make excellent pasturage in summer, were there farms near enough to use it. It always seems homelike, this region of grass and browse, coming to it as one does from the dark depths of fir woods and dwarfed deciduous trees. The hemlocks, beeches, yellow birches and maples have stayed behind in the region of cow pastures. Here where sometimes the deer come and where mountain sheep ought to find pasturage, only the hardiest of pasture people have dared to take their stand. The firs and spruces have come up, growing stockier and more gnome-like at every hundred-foot rise, until above the head walls of the ravines they shrink to low-growing shrubs not knee high, except where they have cunningly taken advantage of some hollow. Even there they rise no higher than the shelter that fends them from the north wind. Above that they are trimmed down, often into grotesque shapes like those that old-time gardeners affected, shearing evergreens into strange caricatures of beasts or men. Often on these Alpine pastures you find a boulder behind which on the south a fir has taken refuge. Close up to the rock it mats, drifting away from it, southerly, in much the same lines that a snowdrift would assume in the same position. There is in this nothing of the spiring shape of the same variety of spruce or fir in the valley pastures far below. Yet the botanists accept this as an individual distortion due to environment and do not class these firs or spruces of the mountain pastures as a variety different from those that grow below.

Mountain Sandwort in bloom on a little lawn near Mount Pleasant on the last day in July

They think otherwise of other trees.

The white birches come up in location and come down in size on these mountain pastures very much as do the spruces and firs. We have the big canoe birch of the lower slopes, often a splendid tree that matches any in the forest in height. On higher ranges it shrinks and even undergoes certain structural changes that have given excuse for the naming of new varieties. Hence, beginning with Betula papyrifera in the valleys we have a shrinkage to cordifolia, minor, and glandulosa with its sub-variety rotundifolia, this last a veritable creeping birch which sticks its branches but a little above the tundra moss in places where the spruce and fir trees are not much different in character and the willow becomes most truly an underground shrub with no bit of twig showing above the surface and only the little round leaves cropping out, making a growth that is more like that of a moss than that of a tree. To such straits do wind and cold reduce the trees that defy them.

Yet in spite of the botanical classification which sets up these dwarfed trees as different varieties from those of the lower slopes, one cannot help wondering if the differentiation is justified. Suppose the seeds of a big paper birch from the lower valley were planted among the creeping willows of the Alpine Garden on Mount Washington. Would they not grow a dwarfed and semi-creeping Betula glandulosa or rotundifolia? Would not the seeds of glandulosa, if blown down into the lower valley and growing in the soil among the paper birches produce Betula papyrifera? It always seems to me that there is less difference between the creeping birches of the high plateaus of the Presidential Range and the paper birches of the lower slopes than there is between the grotesquely dwarfed firs and spruces of the Alpine Garden, and the big ones that grow in Pinkham Notch and in the rich bottom lands of the lower part of the Great Gulf.

The alders of these highest pastures are very dwarf, and because of the puckered leaf margins have received the specific name of crispa, being familiarly known as the mountain alder or green alder. Yet we have in lower pastures the downy green alder, Alnus mollis, so much like its higher-growing relative that even the authorities say it may be but a variation. Here again one wonders if the difference is not that of climate on the individual rather than one of species, and if the seeds of Alnus mollis from the banks of the Ellis River if planted along the head wall of the Tuckerman Ravine would not grow up to be Alnus crispa. It seems as if there was a very good opportunity for experimentation along some line between the Silver Cascades and the rough rocks at the base of the summit cone of Washington. Down in the valleys the juncos build their nests in low shrubbery or at least on the top of the ground. Up on the side of the summit juncos build actually in holes in the ground, and lay their eggs almost a month later than those below. Here is a variation in habit, yet in each case the bird is Junco hiemalis; perhaps when the scientists really get around to it we shall have the cone builders classed as variety hole-iferus.

But however we may differ as to the naming of the plants and birds that frequent them, all who have climbed that far confess to the beauty of these highest pastures of the New England world. To wander in them of a sunny summer day for even a short time is to begin to be fond of them, an affection which increases with each subsequent visit. There soon gets to be a homey feeling about them that lasts at least while the sunshine endures. With the passing of the sun comes a difference. The chill of the high spaces of the air comes down then and the winds complain about the cliffs below and above and prophecy disaster to him who remains too long. It is well then to scramble downward and leave the highest pasture lands to the deer, if they choose to climb out of the sheltering black growth below, or to such spirits of lonely space as may come at nightfall. Far below are the man-made pastures that are friendly even at nightfall, and it is good to seek these. The tonk of the cow-bells will lead you in lengthening shadows out of the afterglow on the heights down into the trodden paths and beyond to the pasture bars.

XI
THE NORTHERN PEAKS

Some Fascinations of the Gulfside Trail in Stormy Weather

The summit of Mount Washington sits on so high buttresses of the lesser spurs and cols of the Presidential Range that it is not always easy to recognize its true height. From the south, east and west it is a mountain sitting upon mountains, gaining in grandeur indeed thereby but losing in individuality. To realize the mountain itself I like to look at it from the summit of Madison, the northernmost of the northern peaks. There you see the long, majestic upward sweep of the Chandler Ridge, swelling to the rock-burst of the Nelson Crag, and beyond that, higher yet and farther withdrawn, the very summit, immeasurably distant and lofty, across the mighty depths of the Great Gulf.

Clouds on the Northern Peaks, Mount Adams seen from Mount Washington summit

Here is the real mountain and the whole of it laid out for the eye from the beginnings in the low valley of the Peabody River to the corrugated pinnacle which is the crest. It takes the gulf to make us realize the mountain, and great as the gulf is it is forgotten in the mighty creature that rears its head into the clouds beyond it. From Madison the mountain has more than individuality. It has personality. It is as if some great god of Chaos had crushed an image of immensity out of new-formed stone. To look long at this from the northernmost peak is to realize its personality more and more. If some day, sitting on the pinnacled jumble of broken rock which is Madison summit, I see the mighty one shiver and wake and hear him speak, I shall be terrified, without doubt, but not surprised.

When August comes to the Northern Peaks I like to come too, by way of the Gulfside Trail which leaves the carriage road a little below the summit of Washington and skirts the head wall of the Great Gulf. Here in early August, just off the carriage road, I am sure to find the mountain harebells nodding friendly to me in the breeze, their wonderful violet-blue corollas flecking the bare slopes with a beauty that is as dear as it is unassuming. It is easy to stride by these and not see them, so much they seem but shadow flecks of the sky above, yet once seen no one can go by without stopping for at least a time to worship their brave loveliness. Flowers of intense individuality are the harebells, with each group having, oftentimes, characteristics peculiarly its own. It seems always to me that these of the high summits of the Presidential Range are of a deeper, richer blue than any others. This may be because of the atmosphere in which I see them. They and the mountain goldenrod, the Spiræa latifolia and the little dwarf rattlesnake-root with its nodding, yellowish, composite flowers, have come in to take the places of the spring blooms that opened in these high gardens with July. Down at the sea level the seasons have three months each. Up here July is spring, August is summer, and the autumn has flown from the hilltops before the last days of September have passed.

Of the spring flowers that have lingered beyond the limits of their season are the beautiful little mountain sandwort, whose clumps still bloom white in favored spots, though most of the others hold seed pods only, and the three-toothed cinquefoil with its blossoms so like those of a small running blackberry that it is easy to mistake it for a stray from the pastures far below. The mountain avens, too, has what seems a belated crop of its yellow, buttercup-like blooms in a few places, though over the most of its area brown seed heads only nod on the tall blossom stalks. Such are the flowers of the Presidential Range high plateaus in earliest August, and though the harebells are to me the most beautiful and most striking, individually, the mountain goldenrod outdoes all others in profusion of color, its golden sprays swarming up from the Great Gulf to the trail about its head and garlanding the rocks toward the summit with feathery bloom that lures the lowland butterflies to climb trails of their own as far as it goes and to soar over the very summit in search of more of it. As a background for these flowers grows the mountain spear-grass, which is so much like the June grass of our lowland fields, its feathery blooms making a soft purple mist in many places. On the very summit of Washington this is abundant, disputing the scant soil with the sandwort, the two the most Alpine of all New England plants. Rapidly indeed do all these plant dwellers in Alpine heights hasten through their love and labor of the summer season, for with October comes the winter which will put them all to sleep until the end of the following June.

The human sojourner in this region needs as well to hasten wisely with an eye on the weather. My early August trip began at the Halfway House and strolled on up the mountain in very pleasant morning sunshine. On the col between Washington and Clay the sun had hazed and the cool sea odor of the southeast wind bade me cut short my worship of harebells and mountain goldenrod. Yet so clear was the air that every detail of the bottom of the Gulf stood out to the eye, and Spaulding Lake, a quarter mile below me and a mile distant, looked so near that it seemed as if with a jump and perhaps two flops of even clumsy wings I might light in it.

"Where the path swings round the east side of Jefferson"

Where the path swings round the east side of Jefferson I began to get glimpses of the mountains far to southeastward, and as I stood above Dingmaul Rock and looked straight down Jefferson Ravine I could see the haze behind the southeast wind shutting off these as well as the sun. The great hills no longer sat solidly on the earth beneath. Instead a soft blue dust of turquoise gems flowed up from the valleys and lifted them from their foundations till they floated gently zenithward through an increasing sea of this same semi-opaque blue. Always the distant mountains are ethereal. Tramp them as much as you may, get the scars of their granite ledges on yourself, as you surely will if you climb them, get to know their every crag and ravine if you can; and when it is all done and you look at the mountain only a few miles away, it takes itself gently from the realm of facts and becomes to your eye but the filmy substance of a dream, a picture painted on the sky and thence hung on the walls of memory forever. So these mountains to the southeast of Jefferson—Meader, Baldface and Eastman first, Imp and Moriah, the Carters and even Wildcat—lifted and swam in this blue sea of dreams that the southeast wind brought up with it, quivered and vanished into forgetfulness, and beyond where their summits had disappeared I saw the long blue-gray levels of stratus clouds standing out against the lesser gray of the storm bank and rising slowly and evenly toward the zenith.

Slowly, with majestic sureness a storm was marching up from the south. No unconsidered assault of the heights was this, no raid by the white cavalry of thunderstorm, but a forward march of a great army of investment, bent on complete conquest of the range. So slow was its coming and so sure its promise that no mountain climber need rush to safety. Each could proceed with the same dignity as the storm, having ample time to beat a safe retreat. By noon no animal life was visible on the high levels. The juncos have nests innumerable in tiny, sheltered caverns under overhanging rocks. The mother birds were snuggled deep in these on the brown-spotted eggs. Butterflies and bumblebees had been busy all the morning in the goldenrod, and a host of other insects, coleoptera, diptera, hymenoptera, honey seekers and pollen eaters. Now all had vanished save here and there a bumblebee that still clung, drunk with nectar, in the yellow tangle of bloom. The wind that had been so gentle blew cold on these and swished eerily through the sedges on the borders of the little pool over on the side of Sam Adams, known as Storm Lake. Very different was this swish of the wind in the sedges from its soft song in the mists of the mountain spear-grass. Very different was the feel of it as it blew out of the smooth gray arch of sky where had been those level lines of stratus clouds. It had blown these to the zenith and over, and the following mists had shut off the Carter Range entirely, and even as I watched from the Peabody spring on the southwest slope of Sam Adams they shut off the farther ridge of the Great Gulf and came over the close tangled tops of the dwarf spruces with the swish of rain. Even then as I tramped along the northerly slopes of Adams and John Quincy Adams I could see the fields of Randolph laid out in checker-board pattern and the lower slopes of the Crescent Range farther to the north, but as I came down the final pitch to the stone hut on Madison a gust growled ominously over the Parapet and a rush of rain shut the visible world within a narrow circle of which I was glad to make the cosy shelter of the hut the centre.

The Madison hut is built of stone, cemented together, and is tucked so well into the hillside that one may step from the rocks in the rear to the roof. Certainly its walls are storm proof, but for thirty hours the wind did its best to tear the roof off it while the rain filled every gully with a rushing torrent, and the caretaker and I did our best to make merry within the safe shelter of the walls. The clouds that had been so high came down with the rain and made the world an opaque mass of solid white. It was not so much like a mist as like a cheese through which the wind in some miraculous fashion blew at a tremendous rate.

Cataract of clouds pouring over the Northern Peaks into the Great Gulf, seen from the summit of Mount Washington

From mid-afternoon of one day until mid-forenoon of the next there was no change in this white opacity which blocked the very door and hid objects completely though only a few feet away, and through it the wind roared in varying cadences and the drumming rain fell steadily. Then came occasional tiny rifts in this white cheese in which the world was smothered. It lifted a little from the mountain side beneath and left fluffy streamers of mist trailing down. By noon it had shown the summit of John Quincy once, then shut down as if it were a lid operated by a stiff spring. Late in the afternoon, thirty hours after the murk had immured us in the hut, the wind had lulled, swung to the west, and was shredding the clouds to tatters, through which I climbed to the peak of Madison.

Again the great gods of chaos were crushing an image of immensity out of new formed stone. Out of the void of cloud I saw it come, piece by piece, the artificers adding to and withdrawing from their structure as the result pleased or displeased them. Once they swept the mountain away entirely leaving only the formless gray of chaos, then as if with a sudden access of skill and inspiration swept the whole grandly into being, and the low sun shot his rays through the débris of their previous failures and gilded the final structure. Through the long miles below me came the voice of the Great Gulf. Down its sheer declivities ten thousand streams were splashing to reach the swollen flood in the channels of the west branch of the Peabody. Each lisped its consonant or its vowel, and as they met and mingled in syllables and sped on the river took them and built them into words and phrases, an oration whose sonorous uproar came from the deep diaphragm of the mighty space out of which, for all I know, the mountains themselves were born. Down its distant, narrow ravine I could see the Chandler River leap from its source high on the Nelson Crag, to its junction with the west branch, a continuous line of white cataract, roaring full from brink to brink. Few little rivers of any mountains fall so swiftly through so deep and straight a ravine and few indeed have a mountain top three miles away that gives an unobstructed view of their flood fury from source to mouth.

A little aftermath of the storm, blown back on the ever freshening north wind, sent me down the cone again to further refuge in the hut, and it was not until the next morning that I could retrace my steps over the gulfside trail to Washington. Again I started with a clear sky, but by the time I had made the miles to the east side of Jefferson the high summits were altars whereon the little gods of storms were at work. They caught the saturated air that rose from all ravines, laid it across the upper slopes and, hammering it with the brisk north wind, beat white puffs of mist out of it with every stroke. These streamed from the peaks and were caught and tangled on them and in one another till all distances vanished and I walked in a narrowing world where mist creatures played and danced lightly to the tinkle of water that still fell from all heights. More and more little clouds the little gods hammered out on the slopes and ever fresher blew the north wind that swirled them together after it had beaten them out. The vanishing distance took with it the peaks above and the Gulf below, and the world that had been so great became very small indeed, a half circle of rocks but a few rods in circumference bisected by a trail and the whole packed in cotton wool.

In the lower parts of the trail between Jefferson and Clay this packing was thinnest. Probably at yet lower levels it was clear and these were clouds that floated above. But this thinness was not sufficient to give the traveller any landmark. His only hold on the earth was that tiny circle of rock that ever changed yet was ever the same as he went on, and the trail itself. As this rose along the west slope of Clay and swung along the levels toward the head wall of the Gulf the packing became more dense, and I walked in Chaos itself, thankful that the trail is here so well marked that one does not need to see from monument to monument, but may follow the way foot by foot without fear of wandering. A little lift came in this density just at the head wall of the Gulf. To the south just for a moment loomed ghostly blobs of deeper gray that I knew were the water tanks of the railroad, not a stone's toss away. To the north was the ravine. On this spot I had stood two mornings before and marvelled at the seeming nearness of the little lake a mile away. The rim of the head wall showed ghostly gray, but there was no Gulf. All the world, above, below and beyond, was but a mass of cotton wool so solidly packed that it seemed as if I might walk out onto that space where the Gulf should be and not fall through it.

Further on the trail was harder to find and the little diminution in the density ceased. The little gods of storms were doing well at their practice. No drop of rain fell, but where the north wind blew this white mass of mist against me it condensed within the pores of all garments and filled them with moisture. The last landmarks of the trail vanished and the white clouds blew in and tangled my feet like a flapping garment as I stepped upon the carriage road and turned mechanically to the right, hardly able to distinguish by sight the roadside from the rocks that wall it in. Even the great barns where they stable the stage horses were invisible as I walked between them, but I found the plank staircase which leads up to the stage office and found that and a good fire and a jolly crowd inside. My trip over the northern peaks had been one of such varied adventure that it was to be preferred to one made under fair skies and on a windless day. Yet this tramp in the clouds was to be had that day on the high summits alone. At the base of these and even up to the head walls of the ravines during a good part of the time the air had been clear. It was just the little weather gods making medicine with the saturated air from the ravines and the cold steel hammer of the north wind.

XII
THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS

The Alpine Beauty of These Highest New England Lakes

At nightfall from the summit of Mount Washington the Lakes of the Clouds look like two close-set, glassy eyes in the face of a giant, a face that stares up at the sky far below and whose hooked nose is the summit of Mount Monroe. As the light passes, the glassy stare fades from these and they lie fathomless black orbs that gaze skyward a little while, then close, and the giant, whose outstretched body is the southern half of the Presidential Range, sleeps. In the full sunshine of a pleasant forenoon one knows them for tiny, shallow lakes, and so near do they look that it seems almost as if a good ball player might cast a stone into them from the rim of the summit just behind the Tip Top House. As a matter of fact, they are a little over two miles away over declivities and ridges that lie above the tree line. For the most part the trail to these lakes, whether one comes from Mount Washington or along the Crawford bridle path, seems bare and desolate to the overlooking glance. But when one gets down to it he finds it full of beauty and interest. The southern part of the Presidential Range, between Mount Washington and Mount Clinton, is a mighty ridge, out of which topple the crests of Monroe, Franklin and Pleasant, a giant still by day, but now a giant wave petrified.