Classic Audiobook Collection - White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard ~ Full Audiobook [adventure]

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard audiobook. Genre: adventure In White Mountain Trails, naturalist and journalist Winthrop Packard invites you onto the footpaths of New Hampshire's White Hills in a vivid, early-20th-century journey of climbing, watching, and wondering. Moving from the spring freshness of Chocorua and its lake to the high, stony world of Mount Washington, Packard follows well-known routes and lesser rambles alike: Carter Notch, Tuckerman's Ravine, Crawford Notch, Boott's Spur, Mount Jackson, Mount Lafayette, and more. Along the way, the mountains become a living field guide. Warblers and bobolinks flash through meadow edges, butterflies swarm the alpine air, and firs and birches change character with every rise in elevation. But this is not only a celebration of scenery. Packard weighs the mood of rain and fog against the hard clarity of summit mornings, and he notices the human marks on the landscape: mountain camps, small hamlets, farms clinging to steep shoulders, and the relentless work of logging roads pushing toward the last stands of spruce. Part travelogue, part nature essay, this book captures the White Mountains as both challenge and refuge, and asks what it means to truly know a wild place by walking it. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:18:48) Chapter 02 (00:35:31) Chapter 03 (00:52:56) Chapter 04 (01:10:14) Chapter 05 (01:27:25) Chapter 06 (01:45:54) Chapter 07 (02:03:47) Chapter 08 (02:21:21) Chapter 09 (02:40:00) Chapter 10 (02:57:17) Chapter 11 (03:13:54) Chapter 12 (03:31:53) Chapter 13 (03:49:10) Chapter 14 (04:07:53) Chapter 15 (04:26:16) Chapter 16 (04:42:25) Chapter 17 (05:00:27) Chapter 18 (05:17:56) Chapter 19 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

White Mountain Trails, Tales of the Trails to the Summit of Mount Washington and other summits of the White Hills by Winthrop Packard. To the Appalachian Mountain Club whose paths made it possible, this book is appreciatingly dedicated. Chapter 1 Upchakorua 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 Jacoroa

as it winds through the Ossippies. 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 farmhouse on a round Hayfield Hill. but it is only as you glide down the long incline to the shores of Shakurra Lake that the miracle of revelation is complete. There, indeed, you must set your foot hard on the break and gaze long over the Scudder Farmhouse 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 traveler. It was a wonder day in May when I first stopped spellbound 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 apart, 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 chrys' reflection of young leaves, carrying deep in its heart another, more magical, chakora of softest sapphire, tapering to a nadir-pointing peak of barrel. 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 could climb Chokoroa by the Hammond Trail, he must leave the smooth road that winds onward to Crawford Notch after he passes Chokokoroa Lake. There, another less smooth but still available to carriage or motor, will take him across Chokokokokuuro 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. Beach 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. Smilicina, checkerberry, and partridgeberry, 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 Pipsis Siwa, Bellwark, 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 a day after I had first seen Trococora, 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 beach and birch, and through the soft quivering of their young leaves, painted with a delicate coral tracery of maple fruit. All the way up the lower slope one is drowned in coro. I watched yellow-bellied

sap-suckers make love among the beaches, 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 mountainside, inflaming bird and tree alike, and from the great shoulder of the mountain, I look down through its mist of mystery and delight to Chokor 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, Ossippee, 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 strangle as they climb and lesson in number as they reach the height. Few of the lowland birds get so far, but among the dense spruces and furs 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 warbler 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 debris 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 the 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 errands rods yellow with cackens 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 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 glaces 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. Marking. Marking. 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. 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 Shokokura, I saw as I rested at 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 plains 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 exultation 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 born to my sight, a moat in the clear depths, 3,000 feet below, a moat 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 Ossipe. Southerly from Chococora summit, the land was soused in the steam of spring. Chokoga 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 Shokogorah stands as the sentinel at the southeast gate. Pogis lifted a blue-black toppling wave to westward, seemingly near enough to fall upon Chokogara's summit, while over its shoulder peered Pasacanaway, flanked with tripermid 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, layan chokogura, and none were to be seen on the other nearer mountains, Carrigan was white-crested and Washington topped the ermine, of the presidential range, like a magical iceberg, floating majestically on a sea of driven foam. Chokura is not a very high mountain.

3,000 feet it springs suddenly into the blue from the lake at its feet. 3,508 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 exultation 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 Shakura thus early in the spring is apt to come a certain sense of sadness, following the exultation 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 in, 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 repousé 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 mountainside. 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 Chokohora summit is appreciably lowered century by century. Fortunately, man thinks in years, and not in geological epics, 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 tableland which towered far higher above them than they now do above the sea. The forces of erosion, whose patient work one now sees on Chokorra 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 Pogis 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 even songs 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 built his nest on mountains and was well fitted to show me the easiest way down. I grudged him his wings, as I wake 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 Shokorah Lake, and watched the sunset fire of 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 Shokorah 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. End of Chapter 2 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Librevox recording is. in the public domain. Bobbolink Meadows Early June about Jackson Falls and Thorn Mountain. On a May morning after rain,

the Bobalinks 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 sleigh-bell 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 bobbolinks had come to Jackson. It is 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, of celestial music still. All the mountain world is rapturous with this same joy of something more than life, which the Bobbolinks brought from on high in their songs, dancing and singing with it, and tossing something of beauty skyward day and night. Around the margins of the Bobbolink 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 lacework of the Houstonians, 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 sea, and the last frost of the season, that of the Houstonia blooms, is melted away. Deerly as the Bobbolink loves his brown mate in the nest, the moist maze beneath the grass calms where he dines, and his swaying perch on the ferns that feather the meadow's edge, he, too strong to resist, and continually flutter skyward, quivering with the joy of June, and setting the air from hill to hill a bubble with his song.

The bobbling 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 bobbolink 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 metal 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 afresh it, this long incline is a welter of abhorious 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 rush of the water drowns the warbling of the water thrushes in the alders and verburnums 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 perfumers trade, long before there were perfumers, and the moisture of the flood itself is their amber grease. Here the cranberry tree leans over the water and drops the white petals of the neutral blooms from its broad, flat siams to go over one fall after another on their way to Ellis River and later

the Seco. 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 in baths 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 riverbanks. Showiest and boldest of all is the Rodora, 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 unbuilt 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 mid-stream. finding coins of vantage, down where even at low water, the splash of spray sprinkles its pointed leaves and violet blue flowers. Viola Cucolade 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 fresh it must be fairly welled 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 bobbling 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 Garrish Farm. Farm it is no longer, for the farmers are long gone. The jawpost 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 Phoebe's 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 the thorn summit and over from tin, the forest advances, but hesitatingly. It is as it is, 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. 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 onto 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 this, but to get to the very summit, the point of the thorn, a foot pathway 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 bobbolink music in the meadows, so far below, sweeps up the mountainside 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 somber buds, become nodding blossoms of gold, that thrill to the fondling of wind and sun, and scatter incense of yellow pollen all down the mountainside. 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, pistolate 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 fulfillment 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 lips his high-pitched,

Zwee, Zwee, Zwee, See, 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 more, Morning 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 yellowthroats, both birds that have elected to stay behind with the bobbolinks. Thus caroled through cool shadows where the striped moosewood hangs its slender where seams 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 summit seem to sit, enthroned like deities of a pagan world. There is little of the bleak debris of battle with wind

and cold on the summit of thorn. It is but 2,265 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 center 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 garish 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 dream 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 Bobberlink Meadows,

far down toward Jackson Falls, the celestial melodies that the Bobbolinks 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 somber spruces in their sudden draperies of golden staminate bloom, looped and crowned with the pistolate shells, which so soon will be prim brown cones. The bobbolinks 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 of flame 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 newborn cones. It is worth a trip into the hills and a long climb to see these at their best, which is when the bobbolinks 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. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 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 thrush's 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 verie 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 toxin 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 exultation of spirit, though perhaps it falls to the hermits to voice the more or 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 mountaintop, 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 pasture 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 landwaves to ripples. Highest of all mountain cots is the Hayes Farmhouse,

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-liners 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-Murrier 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 nearby 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 or manity 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 giant's footfall on the high ridges than were there 50 or 100 years ago. In many cases, the summer hotel or the summer residence has taken the place of the one-time farmhouse,

but the dwellers in these encourage the wood rather than hold it at bay. The lumberman makes 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 breath, 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, chi, chi, chi, chee, 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.

Cozy 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 40 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 hole quiver into free life and flutter away, a tiger swallow-tail butterfly, and believe these spirits of the woodland shadows are born in any other way, if you can. Papilio turnus may come out as chrysolids in scientists and sectaries, 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 mold 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 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, 2,725 feet above the sea level, is a plateau of broken rock, scattered over solid ledges which protrude through the debris. 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, blade-like, and friendly, yet do not altogether obstruct the outlook. The breath of summer has pinked the, young cones on the spruce tops and robe 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 purled 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 broadband 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 clear-wing moth, the spring form of the snowberry clear-wing. Hemorrhia diffanus, 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-swallow-tail 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 swallow-tail, Papilio Astereus, these two the largest butterflies of the summit. Of all the insect life, large or small, that reveled in the vivid sunlight of the thin air of the little plateau, the most numerous were the little blue bottle flies that hummed there in swarms, very busy about their business, whatever it was, filling the air with glints of the deepest, most sentilent azure. But he who climbs Iron Mountain will not linger too long with the summer denist. of its little rocky plateau. From the karn 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 Ossipe 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 karn beneath the gazer takes on the semblance of a main-mast 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 spin drift. Then uprose from the depths of this awful sea, Mount Washington, enthroned on the presidential range, quote, clothed in white Samite, mystic, wonderful, quote, 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 subtly slope of the master mountain, just as a little, 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, who's 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 cozy 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 Kyrsarge than from this little karn 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 Kyrsarge, stands with its edge toward him and vanishes against the mountain itself, leaving its outline that of a narrow cone, rising abruptly from the plain below. There is something spectacular in its dizzy, abrupt loom into the sky, quivering in gray haze against the violet depths below, making of it a magic peak, such as the early voyagers of legendary times, saw, and 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 rock 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 eons gone. But the reflection of these fires only deepens the amethystine gray of Kyrsarge 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.

End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. June on Kyrsarge Butterflies and flowers on a summit of splendid isolation. The familiar spirits of Kyrsard's 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 Kier Sarge 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 greet 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 Kyrsard. A South American Navy

could not have had more admirals. 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 epaulets 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 of Bartlett to find him most plentiful, but his fellows are common throughout the shady woodlands of the upper branches of the Seiko, from Pink of 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 Admiral's, 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 Kyrsarge by way of the bobsday. 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 AMC 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 reach

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. This 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 rested 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, dear, he gurgled. Who is it?

Who is it? dear, dear, dear. And once in a while he added a little tittering, Tee-he-he. It was all very well for him. He could follow the white admiral if he were bound for the main trunk of Kier Sarge 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 is a man? After all, a box turtle could have gone up through that slash better than I did. 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 northwesternly spur of Bartlett, a spot which gave me a glimpse of the dark spruce-covered summit, far above, in 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 the 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

it is easy to see that a downrush of spring rain takes always a part of the mountain with it. To go up one of these precipitous ledges, tooth and nail, as one must, who misses the path, is to find out 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 hair 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 defense 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 cookstove. 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's 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 our 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, seemed scattered as if Pukwajis had lost them, fleeing in terror from the bears, which I could only suspect. The mountain-topped their refuge, where I found them, grouped rather close together in mossy nooks among the ledges. The dwarf cornells climb with them, finding footing in much the same places, and stare unblinkingly up with round and chubby,

foolish faces. The Cypropediums 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 Bartland 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 AMC, without doubt, little piles of stone which lead him who trust them to the very summit. Here, as on the lower spur of Bartlett which I had struggled to attain, one looks upon a greater height with a ravine between, Kyrsard, 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 Kyrsarge itself, one enters the comparatively broad highway, which leads up from Kier Sarge village. After that, the ascent to Olympus is easy. On few mountains does one get the sense of exultation and ecstatic uplift that comes to him when he stands on the high summit of Kiersarch. 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 Kiersarch 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 Catadden, a blue land cloud on the rim of the silver-flect 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 in 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 Sabago, 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 Gersarge 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's summit to reach the top of Kyrsarge,

but the Rhodora has come up and set rose-purple blooms in the same season. The leaves were 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 epaulets, as if they had just stepped ashore from the white-cloud fleets that swing with cumulus sails piled high just offshore. Here is the painted lady, hovering admiringly by, seemingly unnoticed by the admirals. Here are tiger swallow-tails, their gold black-barred with rippling shadows, and the little skippers, swift and busy when the admirals heave in sight.

Most of all I note morning cloaks, and one in particular is indeed. deep warning, 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 mountaintop 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 morning cloak, the winter's cold having dulled his color within the chrysalis, and given an added depth to his morning.

He was as somber 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 coastline of Casco Bay and moved the sea in with it, swallowing Sabago 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

main 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 mountaintop. Far up its side, born 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 Kier Sarge 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 mountain 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 Seiko, 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 Kyrsarch 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 Viery 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 was to go home by way of the broad path to Kyrsarge 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 Benedictine, on the level elm-fringed meadows of intervale, and the little village of North Conway gleamed white in the low sun, and pointed the broadway 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 moccasin 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 halving, 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, downhill 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 30-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. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of 1.5 of 1.1. White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. 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 nor'easter comes sweeping grandly down from Labrador, swathing the peaks in mist wraiths, torn from the weltering waves, 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. Most beautiful is such a storm. Most beautiful is such a storm. 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 Carrigan, 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, quote, walks like a goddess and she looks like a queen, unquote. Yet each one flutters feminine fripperies with a dainty grace, such as never yet stepped from a 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 stair 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, then 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 wit of dignity by it, as he who intrudes upon them in their cool shadowy bowers may know. But these elms of the shady intervails 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 sheath, 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 beaches 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, Silf-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, whatever 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 subalation, 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 cast

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 drum-like 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-civillation 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 mingling

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 friendily up to him with the blue of the sky in their clear eyes, fringed with the dark-penciled lashes of furs 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. Someday, 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 bold 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 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 amongst bruce-clad hills and its waters pearl 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 sandpipers that move leisurely north up Ellis River, feeding and teetering as they go, do not light in on the borders of the newborn 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 Kyrsarge, a loon family dwells, and I watch them from the summit, diving, feeding, and making great sport in their world. Over on Sukokura, 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 newborn mountain lake, nor have the spotted sandpipers come to nest among the ferns on its margin. But the Little Lake mirrors many a bird wing,

nevertheless, mainly those of the eaves 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 fur 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-body dragonflies 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 sea 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 rest for a moment, then in a sudden panic, let's go his hold on the twig, and drops into the water again, scuttling back to the depths and 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 starting 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 may well prompt the superstitious to believe that they could be a terror to evil-doers. But no one could think the gentle democels capable of wrong, though they are dragonflies 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 democels 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, 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 debris of dreams that the race has accumulated since it grew up out of placid waters, which in ages past seem to have sheltered all elementary forms of life as it shelters the dragonfly 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 may hap, 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. Seretia 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. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 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 and 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 bear 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 for the hills rise from the verge of the far western plains, but which is rare in New England. 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 unmished, the very warp has parted, the woof separated, and the particle 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 vise 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 flashed 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 boulder scattered along its way. At times the air over the clover blooms is full of them, quivering in the sun, born on the underwings of the spangled fertility butterflies that swarm here in early July. Above the fertilaries have the orange tint of burnt gold, plentifully sprinkled with dots of black tourmaline, but beneath they have caught the silver scintillation of the micaflecked rocks and sands on which they love to light, when sated with the clover honey. These two are gems of the mountain world, which, if not found elsewhere,

one might welcome many miles to seek. It is easy to believe, too, that the spangled fertilaries know the source of the silver beauty of their underwings 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 proboscis and draw from the mica-flect 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 Micah 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 fertility 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. 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 towards 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 Herculian town, for the gorges down which it runs are choked with boulders and forest debris, 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 AMC 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 skyline till Kyrsarge, Bartlett, Moat, and even the distant sandwich and a sippy range as far to the south loom blue and beautiful above them.

While the valley of the wildest, 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 of sunlight for five miles. Yet it is a wide and easy way for most of the distance, for which the chance traveler may thank the lumberman, whose road it follows, and the Appalachian Mountain Club.

The lumberman opened it, the Appalachians have kept it up since the toad 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 mountain nearing. A half-dozen brooks splash down the mountainside and cross this trail, all for this laking 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 saw before 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 balls of great trees rise through its gloom, and through the perfumed air comes the cool drip of waters. Mwoss is deep, and over it and the rough, liking-clad rocks grows the linea, holding up its pink blooms, fairy pipes for the Pukwajis to smoke. Here out of high cliffs have fallen great rocks,

which lie about the patch and 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-modeled 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 give a glimpse of the high frown of Carter cliffs, swimming in the sky above. And then, I wonder of 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

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 AMC camp. The time was early afternoon of one of the longest days of the year, and the sun sent a cloud burst 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 fertility 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 overripe. Here the blossoms were but opening their white petals. And the mountain moosewood and mountain ash, they are 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 travelers who may thus drink from fairy shun. Nor need one go to the trouble of steeping, for the round heads of delicate white bloom send forth a stiptic, 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 show themselves in the advancing shadows. Rocks, 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. Narled 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 close the rocks, and gives root hold

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 sentilent world of the Wildcat River Valley once more, still bathed in sunshine, though the shadows of the range to westward creep rapidly toward its center.

I have 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 grey toads to the slope of a thousand porcupines, and on to where the footpathway 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 somber. 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. End of Chapter 7 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Librevox recording,

is in the public domain. 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, 200 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 boots 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. 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. AMC's signs and the feet of thousands of mountain lovers have made the path's progress plane. 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 travelers. 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, and clear bubbling depths, and makes its longest mattest 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 headwall. 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 Pink of 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 downstream, 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 downstream, as if to follow the water that killed them. The torrents hurl rocks down and crush them, and always the downpour of water and mountainside 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 buy. In places, the riverside banks are white with stars of Houstonia, and the lilac alpine violets nod from slender stems nearby. Down the high cliffs, the mountain avins 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 ravines sweet with fragrance and wild beauty. The rough cliffs loom upward to frowning heights on three sides, but on their dizziest gray pinnicles a fearless wildflower's root and garland their crags, flinging in crevices from summit to base. With equal courage, the olders have climbed them, till they can peer at the very summit of the high mountain across the wind-swept alpine garden. 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 downstream. 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 hoofprints 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 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 long, 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 wailed 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 clean white throughout, save for a black patch from the muzzle across either eye, extending in a faint line down the side nearly to the high. 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 catas fly larvae, 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 seethed 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 multi-tone 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 would steam up, stopping at a station, the chew-choo of the air brakes coming to the ear with a definiteness that is startling. In other spots the echo of Tramper's 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. 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 headwall. 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 sinks 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 Bootspur

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 wreaths 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 nightmyss have collected in a white lake that heaves as if beneath its blanket slept the giant who carved the stairs over beyond Montelban 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 treetops, now linger and shiver together as if fearful of the heights which they assay.

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 his 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 streamed 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 Glenn 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 bedclothes high in the 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 Tuckermans, 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. 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 debris all along the bottoms of the ravines. sides. Sitting on the headwall, 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 dislodge 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 boots 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 traveler. 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. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 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 24 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 Eilis 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 habituays of the hilltop were properly indignant. They had snowballed there for a brief hour on the July 4th of the year before, and these sudden changes were disquieting. Of these four gems of days, the first was a pearl, two were amethystin, 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, plowing through a white tumultuous sea, whose billows were fluffy clouds, like those on which Jupiter of old sat and dispensed judgment on me. 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 flacculent pressure ridges, a 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 Bootspur 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 alpineist climbing over the headwall of Tuckermans 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 Oaks Gulf, and Great Gulf, and up from Fabians by way of the base station and the Mount Washington Railroad, infolding 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 opolescence 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 atoms, 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 mist below, their upper surface far enough down, so that the castellated ridge of Bootspur, Mount Monroe, Mount Clay and Nelson Crague stood out above them. Here were clouds above clouds, the upper levels whirling and 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, tingeed often with the rows of sunlight, mountain ranges of semi-opake 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 Karelion, nor did ever night 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 amethystoon 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 Canyon in Arizona declaring that he could throw a stone across its 13 miles. So on those days in the high era 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. 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 midst of his own creating, long before he had reached the actual horizons 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 signaled good night to the summit, the day went on. Eastward, the purple shadow of the apex moved out across the Alpine Garden, joined that of the headwall of Huntington Ravine, and flanked by those of the lion's head and Nelson Crague 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 boldface, and on again across the nearer main ranges, till it set its blunt point on the heat-hased 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 spin-drift 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 chanties 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 shanty of the night winds that every sailor has heard from the foretop 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 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 indefiniteness till the apex was in a moment plainly marked on the masked vapors that obscured the horizon line. Down these it marched grandly, touching indistinct ranges far to the westward,

more clearly defined on the Cherry Mountains and the soutly 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 ruins of ancient times, sung first when rocks emerged out of chaos

and touched with rough fingers, the harpstrings 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 ruins 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 willow the wisps are pedestrians, climbing by the carriage road to greet the first dawn on the summit and watch the sunrise, 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, Tuckermans, and the carriage road bring them up by accepted paths. But you may see them also clambering over the headwall of Huntington's or the Gulf, precipitous spots that the novice would think unsurmountable. These are the trampers,

as the habituers 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 gasoline engines. The old-time picturesque burrows 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 inchworm 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 an alpine garden. Then for a brief, two hours on any bright day, the bleak summit becomes a picnic round, 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 Lappus 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 brakes 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 thunder sounded nearer and nearer. Midily 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 it 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 Eilis 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. End of Chapter 8. 9 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. 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 helped them in this, and even in the summer drought the snowwater 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 the woodland paths as well as man does, and delight to follow them. Of a July day, the butterflies and I journeyed together up the flower margin 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 wildflowers 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 1969, in spite of summer cloudbursts and the grueling 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 flipped 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 mountain-loving fertilaries 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 fervor 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 fertility, Arginus Siboli, 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, Arginus Atlantis, the mountain fertility. 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 grate four-pedaled 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 the miracle of 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 slipped casually into the roadside. They do it so unassumingly that

you hardly know when, they and the furs. 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 coelius 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. Clear wing moths buzz and poise like miniature hummingbirds, and with them in a 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-tail 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-vaning. 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 fertilaries come on, but the admirals drop behind to be seen no more, their place is taken by an occasional angle wind, graft a interrogationist, or grabbed a comma. As the road rises, the wayside flowers too fall behind, leaving lonely places. The 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 to well into the middle of July, perhaps later. The butterflies fall behind as the roadside flowers do, yet now and then a mountain fertility 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 Onisus Semidia. 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 the 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 headwall

of the Tuckerman Reveen and out upon the alpine garden were the pink laurelite cups of the Lapland azalea. There was the Fadodosie cerulea with its urn-shaped corolla turning blue, as it withers, the three-toothed sink foil, 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, Aranaria, Grosanlendica, the only pedal-bearing plant that there's 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 avins 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 center and Cornell and even Trientilus 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 headwall of Tuckerman Ravine, it sprouts under the receding snow blanched like celery. 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 fertilaries,

but often a great spangled fertility spread his wider wing above the headwall of Huntington or Tuckerman and soared along the levels. with these was an occasional angle wing, Grafta interrogationists, and Grafta prone, 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 morning 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-faint monarchs,

and all the varieties I had seen in the alpine garden came up there too, most numerous of all being the mountain fertilaries. 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. Most interesting of all to the Lepidopterist is the one Arctic butterfly of our New England fauna, Uneas Semedea, 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. A lighting, it turns into the lichen again. In rough weather, the other butterflies go downhill into the shelter of the ravines, but this one has learned to fight gales and midsummer snowstorms 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 heartiest 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 which stands cold that often goes to 50 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 wildlife 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 Junkos 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 interstitious 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 downrush 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, Elyfresh Olovassius. The name sounds like something gigantic. As a matter of fact, Olovassius is a tiny, dark, oval-shaped beetle on which these enthusiasts saw beautiful strii 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 Elephrus Levegitus, another infinitesimal prodigy

of great rarity and scientific interest. But the omens were bad, and Lvivitus 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 run. all plane down to the shelter of the valleys behind the jutting crags and the headwalls.

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 hearty Oneas Samadilla 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. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 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 root-hold 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 farmhouse and the farmer and his men at work in the hayfields. 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. Quote, Little Rex Yon Lolan Clown of me on the hilltop, looking down, unquote.

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 tintanabulate, but taunts, 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 threat 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 midday, 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 or neither, and though the slim young spruces stand as prim and erect as the red cedars of 150 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 clethora 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 clathra is a lover of the sea rather than the mountains, and it has never voyaged far upstream. The waters of the mountain brooks have lost their clearness long before they greet the clathra on their banks. The striped moose wood and the mountain moose wood, 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 spireas, 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 pears. spires. It always seems to me as if the hardhack should be hardier than its less sturdy-looking, more dainty sister, the spirea Latifolia, or Meadow Suite. 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 Suite to climb Mount Washington

itself, and show the delicate pink of its bloom over the headwall 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 hard hack, but the deer come over the coal from Oaks 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 hoofmarks 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 gold finches, 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 jeweler'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 newborn 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 gorgans 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 inhabits, 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 debatable 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, where their farms near enough to use it. It always seems home-like, this region of grass and brows, coming to it as one does from the dark depths of fur-were

woods and dwarfed the seduous trees. The hamlocks, beaches, 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 pasture age, only the hardiest of pasture people have dared to take their stand. The furs and spruces have come up, growing stockier and more gnome-like, at every hundred-foot rise, until above the headwalls of the ravines, they shrink to low-growing shrubs, not nearer. 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 fur in the valley pastures far below. Yet the botanists accept this as an individual distortion due to environment and do not class these furs or spruces of the mountain pastures as a variety different from those that grow below. 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 papypapera in the valleys, we have a shrinkage to cordifolia, minor and gladulosa, with its sub-variety rotunda folia. This last, a variable 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 it 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, what 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-creping botula granulosa or rotunda folia? Would not the seeds of If glottulosa, if blown down into the lower valley and growing in the soil among the paper birches, produce betula papyrafera. 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 pink-up-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 this specific name of CRISPA, being familiarly known as the Mountain Alder or Green Alder. Yet we have in lower pastures the Downey Green Alder, Alnes-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 Alnes-Mollas from the banks of the Ellis River, if planted along the headwall of the Tuckerman Ravine, would not grow up to be Alnes-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-Hiamalis. Perhaps when the scientists really get around to it, we shall have the cone builders classified as variety holoferis.

But however we may differ as to the naming of the plants and birds that frequent them, all who have climbed that far confessed 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 cowbells will lead you in lengthening shadows out of the afterglow on the heights, down into the trodden paths, and beyond to the pasture bars. End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Libravox recording is in the public domain.

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 coals 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.

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 someday, sitting on the pinnacle 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 gulf. side 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 hair bells 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 hairbells, 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 in the mountain goldenrod, the spirea lotofolia 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 favorite spots, though most of the others hold seed pods only, and the three-toothed sink foil with its blossoms so like those of a small running blackberry that it is easy to mistake it for astray from the pastures far below. The mountain Avons, 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 hair bells are to me the most beautiful and most striking individually, the mountain golden rod outdoes all others in profusion of color, its golden sprays swarming up from the Great Gulf to the trail about its head, and garland 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 speargrass, 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 coal between Washington and clay, the sun had hazed and the cool sea

odor of the southeast wind bade me cut short my worship of hairbells and mountain goldenrod. yet so clear was the air that every detail of the bottom of the Gulf stood out to the eye, and Spalting 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, I began to get glimpses of the mountains far to southeastward, and as I stood above Dingmole 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-opake 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, meter, boldface and eastman first, imp and Mariah, the Carter's 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 motherbirds 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, colioptera, diptera, hymenoptera, honey seekers, and pollinators. Now all had vanished, save here and there a bumblebee that still clung, drunk with nectar, in the yellow tangle of bloom. 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 midst of the mountain speargrass. 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 mist had shut off the quarter 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 checkerboard 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 shot the visible world within a narrow circle of which I was glad to make the cozy shelter of the hut, the center. 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 stormproof, but for 30 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. 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, 30 hours after the Merck 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, peace by yewomen. 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 race through the debris of their previous failures and gilded the final structure. Through the long miles below me became the voice of the Great Gulf. Down at sheer declivities, 10,000 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-fresening 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 Gulf side 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 and circumference, bisected by a trail, and the hole 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 traveler 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 headwall 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 marveled at the seeming nearness of the little lake a mile away. The rim of the headwall showed ghost

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 walled in. Even the great barns where they stable the stagehorses 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, even up to the headwalls 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. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. The Lakes of the Clouds, the Alpine Beauty of These Highest New England, Lake's. 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 hook-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 ballplayer 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, a giant, giant wave petrified. Coming up the land from the south, I had thought that the lifting of Mount Washington through the plastic earth had caused the waves of land to radiate from it in all directions, but to stand on the highest summit is to see that this is not so. The force that made the mountains to the south and the mountains to the north is the same,

and the presidential range is a result also, and not a cause. It is but the seventh wave of those which ride in from the northwest, and the force which made them all came over the land from countless leagues beyond. The presidential range lifts out of the hollow of the wave, which is the Aminusic Valley, in a long, clean sweep southeastward, exactly as a mighty wave does it see. It pinnacles into the various peaks, and it drops suddenly, almost sheer, in places, into the next hollow beyond. This hollow beyond the northern peaks is the Great Gulf, Beyond the southern peaks is Oaks Gulf, and beyond Mount Washington itself begins with Huntington

and Tuckerman Revens. Something drove mighty waves through the land from the west, sent them pinnickling five and six thousand feet above the sea level, and froze them there. The main wave is the solid rock mass, 13 miles long, and in the neighborhood of 5,000 feet in height above the sea level. The crests are the summit cones, jumbled piles of great Micahist rocks, varying in size from a cook stove to a city block, all seeming to have been tossed together in a disorderly heap and to have settled down into such regularity as gravity at the moment allowed. The central cores of these may be solid. Certainly the outer part is but a jumble of loose rocks that sometimes topple and grind down over one another at a touch, and that give air and water

access to unknown depths. Hence on the peak of Washington, for instance, or Adam, or Jefferson, one may see the somewhat astonishing spectacle during a heavy downpour of rain of a great rock pinnacle absorbing the water as fast as it falls. One would expect miniature cataracts in a rush of a thousand streams down such a summit at such a time. Yet the downpour gets hardly beyond the spatter of the drops. The loose rocks absorb and hide it. Hence after every rainfall, welling springs on the summits and farther down the gurgle of waters running in unseen crevices, one never knows how far below the surface. Hence also, lakes of the clouds. After every rain, there are well-filled springs on the very top of Washington, and it is only after many days of dry weather

that these begin to dwindle. There are chunks of ledge up there so hollowed out toward the sky that they hold the rain by the first intention, so to speak, and every cloud that touches them oozes from its fold more water for their sustenance. Often for weeks, these pools reflect the stars by night and evaporate under the shine of the sun by day. In one of them in late June of this year, I found a pair of water striders, skipping merrily about on the calm surface. Two weeks of drought dried the pool up completely, and I thought these daring adventurers on the ultimate heights dead, and indeed wondered much how they came there at all. But later, a good rain filled the pool again, and my two water striders appeared on its surface once more,

Mary as Griggs. I am divided in my mind as to what they did, meanwhile. Perhaps they simply survived the drought by main strength. Perhaps they followed a dew down into the cracks between the rocks, and there abided in at least some moisture till the rain came. But I am more of the opinion that they simply skipped down the caverns toward the interior, and there found an underground pool for a refuge until they could return to the sunlight. I can think of no other excuse for water striders on the summit of Mount Washington. This pool, of course, like a half-score others that one can find on the very top of the summit cone after rain, was a mere puddle. But the lakes of the clouds are substantial bodies of water this summer through, and in the winter substantial bodies of ice,

for they freeze to the bottom as soon as winter sets in. Water striders they have, and larvae of catas flies and water beetles of many varieties, but never a fish swims in them, and I doubt of any other form of aquatic animal life ever wanders to their shores. Clear as crystal, shallow, ever renewed, they are but mirrors in which by day the peaks can see their clouds are on straight, and through which by night fond stars may look into the eyes of other stars nearby without being noticed by envious third parties. Their source is the clouds, yet their waters are, if possible, clearer and even more sparkling than new fallen rain. Even the air above the high, highest peaks has its dust and soot, which the rain washes out of it as it comes down.

In the spring, the snow at the head of the Tuckerman Ravine was dazzling in its pure whiteness. Now the dwindling arch is flecked with black, dust blown from the peaks above, soot washed to its surface from the sky by the rain, and without doubt also the cinders of burned stars that perpetually sift down to earth out of the void of space. All this the rain brings out of the sky when it comes in deluge from the clouds to the peaks, but nothing of it does it take into the lakes of the clouds. The crushed rock through which it must filter on its way down the ledges takes out all impurities, and the mosses of the lower slopes aid the process.

But they do more than that. By mysterious methods of their own, the mountains aerate this rainwater in its passage till it finally reaches the lakes, as it reaches all mountain springs, filled with a prismatic brilliancy that is all its own. Whether we assume these lakes to be eyeglasses of the slumbering giant, which is the range, mirrors for the peaks and the stars, they are crystalline lenses of no ordinary brilliancy and power of refraction. Highest these tiny mirrors of the sky are, by actual measurement, 5,053 feet above the sea level, the highest lakes east of the rocky mountains, the tree line creeps up to them, and,

furs dwarfed but beautiful in their courage, set spires along portions of their borders, dark straight lashes for clear blue eyes. In other spots along their margin, the ground is bluish early in the season, with the leaves of the dwarf bilberry, pink sprayed with their tiny cylindrical petals of deciduous bloom, and now that August is here, blue in very truth with the berries themselves. These are not large, but they are firm-fleshed and sweet as any love, and blueberry, and whether the flavor they have is inherent in themselves or draws its subtlety from the surroundings, I am never sure. But as I sit among them and eat, I know that it is worth the climb to their alpine altitudes. In the first part of the alpine springtime, which comes to

the lakes of the clouds with the early days of July, the country round about them was a veritable flower garden. The water in the lakes was ice water then, though the ice had disappeared from their surfaces and lingered only in the shadow of the low cliff, which forms the southern boundary of one. Often the nights brought frost, and sometimes with the rain, sleet sifted down as well. But little the dwellers in these alpine heights care for these things. If the sun but shines, it warms the tundra to their root tips, and they push their blossoms forth to meet it with all speed. The geum flecked everything with yellow gold. In the crevices of the cliffs, it clung where there was little but coarse grass, for its roots, and its radiate-veined, kidney-shaped root leaves, flapped in the gales,

and were tattered in spite of their toughness. In such soil as the rocks gave, the sand-wort put forth tiny, innumerable cups of white. Down in the tundra-clad slopes, the geum throve as well. But there the white of the sand-wort was replaced by that of countless stars of Houstonia. White and gold was everywhere in this flower garden of the clouds, subtended here and there, by the lavender delicacy of the alpine violet, Viola pellestrus. Everywhere, too, was the honest, pleblisian white and green of the dwarf cornel, and the aesthetic green-yellow blooms of the clintonia. It is strange that of two flowers that touch leaf elbows all through the woods of this northern country, high and low, one should be so hopelessly bourgeois as the cornice canadensis,

and the other so undeniably aristocratic from root to anther as clintonia. Borealis. To tramp the slopes and hollows of this garden about the two lovely lakes is to alternate the rasping surface of pitted and weather-worn cliffs and scattered boulders of mica schist with plunges half-kneed deep in a soft and close-knit tundra moss. Here are mosses and lichens in close communion that ordinarily grow far apart. The sphagnums are to be expected and they are plentiful, but with them grows the hairy cap moss, sturdier and with larger cap. than I often find it elsewhere. With these also grows the gray-glean Caledonia, the reindeer lichen, all massed in together in a springy sponge that holds water and plant roots and continually builds

peaty earth. Because of this building of earth by the tundra mosses, there are fewer lakes of the clouds than there were once. In half a dozen levels above and below the present lakes, this constructive vegetation has built up a bog where once was open water, and makes tiny meadows for the quick blooming plants of the mountain season. Meadows of this sort climb from the lakes of the clouds up to the ridge toward boot spur, connected by underground brills, and having little springs scattered through them, where even in dry weather the thirsty may find good water. Up the side of the peak of Monroe, they go as well, and it is not difficult to trace the moisture they hold by a glance from a distance, so green and pleasant does it make their flower spangled surfaces. In the lowlands meadows

are level, or they are not meadows, on the mountains they sometimes run up at a pretty sharp angle, and are meadows still. In August, the spring color scheme of white and gold stippled on the tundra moss by the Giams, the sandwar and the Houstonia, becomes blue and gold, built out of hairbell blooms and those of the dwarf alpine goldenrod, solidago cutlery. is much more of the gold than in the springtime, and the blue of the hairbells by no means is so prevalent as the white of Houstonia and of arinaria. But clumps of spirea letofolia put out their pale pink flowers in many nooks among the rocks, and even insert patches of color among the dark furs that under the high banks of the lakes dare stand erect, though they are at the top of the

tree line. Most picturesque of all plants about the lakes of the clouds in midsummer as in early spring is the Indian poke, Veritrum Viride. Next to the furs and spruces, it spires highest, but unlike them, it is of no obviously tough and hardy fiber. On the contrary, here is an endogenous plant, one of the lily family that ought from its appearance to grow in a Florida swamp, rather than on the great ridges of the presidential range, 5,000 feet and more above sea level. Here is a place for low-growing alpine plants like the sandwort, the alpine azalea, the Lapland Rose Bay, and the little moss-like diapensis, Leponica, and they grow here. But in the boggiest part of the tundra grows also this rank succulent herb, the Indian poke, spiring boldly with its light

green stem, bearing three feet in air its big pyramidal panicle of yellowish-green blossoms in early July, seed pods in middle August, but yellowish green and pyramidal still. Beneath the pyramid on the single stem stand the close set, broadly oval, plated, and strongly veined leaves, and there the hall will stand till the freezing cold of October cuts down its succulent strength. The more I see of the Indian poke on Alpine Heights, the more I admire it. It does not quite reach the tip of the summit cone of Washington, but it climbs as near it, as many a seemingly tougher fiber-dosephers. plant and would, I believe, reach as high as the sandwort could it have root hold in the necessary moisture. Much has been written about the beauty of the alpine garden between the base of the summit

cone of Washington and the head wall of Huntington ravine. All that has been said of this and more is true of the rough rocks, the slopes, and the meadows about the two little lakes of the clouds. Traces of animal life indeed are rare on their borders. The most that I have seen was a deer that came at dawn over the ridge from Oaks Gulf, nibbled grass and moss in the meadows, drank from the larger lake, and bounded off again, leaving the tundra moss punctured by slender hoofmarks. Birds are as numerous here as about those other wooded lakes of the clouds that lie below in the ravines, hermit lake and tuckermans, and spolting at the head of the Great Gulf. I suspect the Myrtle and Magnolia warblers of building their nests in the dwarf firs not far from the shores,

though I am unable to prove it. White-throated sparrows sing among the evergreens, though in August in these altitudes, the white throats rarely give their full song. Often it is but a note or two, and pauses there as if the bird were in doubt about the propriety of singing at this season. But the birds of the place beyond all others are the juncos.

They sit on the bare ledges and sing, morning, noon, and night, their gentle, melodious trill. It makes the place home to the listener at once as it is to the singers whose nests are tucked away in holes under many an overhanging stone among the ledges. The wind that beats the mountain blows more gently round the open walled, in which lie the two little lakes of the clouds. Into their tiny hollows the August sunshine wells and seems to tip with gold the plumes of the spinulose wood ferns which grow in the tundra moss and snuggle up against the Micahist ledges that make miniature cliffs along the shores.

Around the base of the mountain, these ferns are everywhere, taking the place in higher altitudes of the Asmunda Claytonia, which is the prevalent variety of lower lands. The progress of Claytonia is interrupted, not far from the entrances, to the Gulf and to Tuckerman Ravine. Thence the Aspidium-Spinulosum goes on, and is plentiful in many places, up to and on the alpine garden.

It makes the neighborhood of the lakes of the clouds beautiful, with its feathery fronds, and sends out to the lingerer in this beauty spot its ancient woodsy fragrance of the world before the coal age. Among all the beauties of the place, it is hard to tell what is dearest. But I think, after all, the decision should be with the feathery fragrant Espidium Spinulosum, the spinulose wood fern. But for all their beauty by day and their cozy friendliness, the lakes of the clouds are at their best after nightfall. As the sunshine welled in them, so at dusk, the purple shadows grow dense there, and the shallows disappear. A boy can throw a stone

across these lakes. He can wade them, but as the darkness falls upon them, and the jungles pipe the last notes of their even songs, the little lakes widen and grow vastly deep. The farther shores slip away and become ports of dreams, and he who stands on the margin looks down no longer at bare rocks through transparent shallows, but into a universe of fathomless depth, where star smiles back at star through infinite distances of blue. Who shall say, it is not for this, that the Little Lakes lie through the brief summer, clear mirrors under the shadow of the peak of Monroe? End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Crawford Notch, the mighty chasm in the mountains

and its perennial charms. In the nick of the notch, Crawford Notch, the narrow highway so crowds the Seiko River, that tiny as it is it has to burrow to get through, thereby meeting many adventures in a half mile. If Mount Willard had flowed over to the north just a few rods farther when it was fluid, there would have been no notch, but only a gulf like that between Washington and the northern peaks, or like Oaks Gulf, barred completely by the vast headwall of metamorphic rock. It came so near that originally there was room only for the Seco to pass down a slender stream, newborn at the shallow lake on the plain just above. Then the famous old 10th Turnpike of New Hampshire came along, and by smashing away the rock and crowding the Seiko, men made a way through for it.

As for the rare road, its case was hopeless. It had to burrow a nick of its own through the base of Mount Willard, and out of the debris of this blasting, the roadmakers built a series of series of fantastic rock piles, monuments to the heathen deities of Helter Skelter, which serve to make the gateway in which these three jostle one another, road, railroad, and river, more weird even than it was before. But the gateway is as beautiful as it is fantastic. The road south to it comes along a smiling plain, and the mountains draw in to meet it, indeed as if to bar it. On the left, Mount Clinton sends down two long ridges between which flows Gibbs Brook. On the right, Mount Willard shoulders its rough rock bulk boldly into the way, and down these the spruces stride, like tall plumed

Indians, come to bar the passage of the white man. But the road winds on, and just as it seems as if it must stop, it finds a way, and fairly burrowing as does the river, flows down the notch. With the rocks alone, the gateway would be a forbidding tangle of debris, clothed in the hard-wereau. Clothed in the hard wood growth, it would be but a greenwood gap. But these pointed spruces and the furs that mingle with them bring to it an architectural dignity of pillars and spires, a jutting of gothic pinnacles, a suggestion of ionic columns, that makes it the gateway of a vast woodland cathedral, a place through which one passes to worship and be filled with awe and veneration of the mighty forces that shaped it. It is a cathedral that has its gargoyles too, everywhere through

through the spiring spruces and the softening outlines of deciduous trees, protrude the rocks in fantastic shapes that show strange creatures to the imaginative onlooker. Just at the gateway, lumbering out from the mountain, comes an elephant, head and trunk, little eye and flapping ears plainly visible, poised in granite, but ready at any moment to take the one step onward that will reveal the whole gigantic animal standing in the roadway. beyond the whole left side of the notch shows a gigantic face, the mountain's brow itself, a noble dome of thought, the nose huge and Roman, and the whole weird and misshapen,

but not without a strange dignity of its own. And so it is with the whole formation of the notch, it's once molten rocks cooled or have been water-worn into strange forms that greet the eye of the imagination at every turn. It is well that the narrow turnpike flow so swiftly down into the depths of the wood and hides the traveler from the sight of too many portents. To get down the nick of the notch just a little way by road is to be shaded by the overhanging deciduous growth and to be able to forget, as does the Seco, the crowding together of those weird forms carved by the ages from enduring granite. The railroad hangs to its grade on the mountainside, but the road descends rapidly, not so rapidly as the river that, here a little,

released from its pressure between the two, comes to sight again, and slips in pearling shadows, or babbles down miniature cascades, the thinnest of slender streams, to the depths of a shaded cleft in the cliffs known as the dismal pool. Dismal this may be to look at from the height of the train, as it winds along the steep face of the Mount Willard cliff, but it is not dismal when one gets down to it, in the very bottom of the nick of the notch. In places, rough-gray cliffs and others black spruces climb one another's shoulders from this little level of grass and placid water where flows the saco. A pair of spotted sandpipers make this their home, and they did not resent my coming to join them. Instead, they bobbed a greeting and then went on industriously picking up dinner,

wading leg-deep in the shallows, and often putting their heads as well as their long bills underwater in search of food. Spotted sandpipers nest in the summer from Florida to Labergan. door. But I fancy no pair has a finer home than this little pool in the very bottom of the vast cleft in the mountains, which is Crawford-Knotch. Its shores were netted with the tracks of their nimble feet. No other bird track was there, but the sandpipers by no means monopolized the borders of this shallow water. Here were the marks of hedgehog claws, and there was a track which led me to pause in astonishment. What plantagrade had set foot of such size on the soft sand of the shore? I looked over my shoulder after the first glimpse, half expecting to see an old bear,

for here was what looked very like the track of a young one. A second look told me better. This footmark, not unlike that of a human baby, save for the claws, was no doubt that of a raccoon, but certainly the biggest raccoon track I have seen yet. It was perfectly fresh, and I dare say the owner, interrupted in his frog hunt by the sound of my scrambling approach beneath the black growth, had but then shambled to some den in the nearby cliffs, and was impatiently awaiting my departure. The flower of the place was the little herbaceous St. John's Wart, a paracum ellipticum, in whose linear petals such sunlight as reached the bottom of the cleft seemed tangled. It grew everywhere on the narrow margin between the black shade of the

spruces and the clear shallow water, and its petals shone out of the soft mist of tiny white astrooombs, in many places. Farther upstream, and indeed in most woodland shadow throughout the notch, grows the Eupatorium or ticifolium, which though its common name is white snake root, is nevertheless the daintiest of the thorough warts. Its flowers are a finer, whiter fluff of mist than are those of the astor of the astor of the asthmal pool, in which I take to be Astor Eichoides. In late August they seem to me quite the most beautiful flowers of the notch woodlands. In this I do not accept the blue hairbells, which grow so plentifully on the sandy flats down by the Willie House site. Above the tree line, the hairbells are beautiful. Here they are straggling and pale, and are not to be compared with their hardier, sturdier sisters.

As railroad, highway, and river draw together and touch elbows in passing through the gateway of the notch, so do all other tides of travel. here in spring should be the finest place in the world to see all migrant birds on their way farther north. The valley of the Seco catches them as in the flare of a wide tunnel and gradually draws them together here. At certain corners in London all the world is said sooner or later to pass. So at the gateway of the notch, one should see in May and June all northbound varieties of birds. Even at this time of year, the wandering tribes concentrate at this spot. and bird life seems far more plentiful than at any other equal area in the mountains. On the bare heights of the presidential range, which I had been traveling for long,

the junkos are one's only bird companions. Here in deep forest glades, variety after variety passed singing or twittering by. Here were robins, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, white-throated sparrows, chickadees and flocks, red-eyed virios preached in the tops of yellow birches. a yellow-throated vireo twined and peered among the twigs, gathering aphids. Here were Myrtle and Magnolia Warblers, and a black pole, all residents in the neighborhood without doubt, but all on their way and seen in a brief time. Most pleasing of all to me was a strange new chickadee voice, which sang something very like

the ordinary black-capped chickadee song, but with a slower and far different intonation. I followed the maker of this old song with new words, over some very rough country, from one side of the notch, just below the nick, to the other, for I was very eager to see him. By and by I found him with others of his kind, swinging head down from twigs, climbing and flitting in a fashion that is that of all chickadees, but had a quality of its own, nevertheless. Here was a flock of chickadees, with less of nervousness in their manner, and a little more poise, if I may put it that way, than the black caps have. Chickadees with brown crows,

grounds instead of black, and I thought a little more buff in their underparts. All summer I had looked for the Hudsonian chickadee on one mountain slope after another, and I had not found him. But here in the nick of the notch a flock had come to me, and I did my best to see and hear as much as possible of them. They too were on their way, but were probably residents of the neighborhood, for I took them to be one family, father, mother, and five youngsters, just learning to forage for themselves. This they did in true chickadee fashion, swinging and singing, flitting and sitting, and always following and swallowing food, to me invisible, with great gusto. The song was what pleased me most. One authority on birds has written it down in a book that the song of the

Hudsonian chickadee is not distinguishable from that of the black cap, though uttered more incessantly. Another equally reliable says the notes are quite unlike those of the black cap. My Hudsonian chickadees sang the black cap song, but they sang it a trifle more leisurely and with a bit of a lisp. But that is not all. There is something in the quality of the tone that reminded me at once of a comb concert. It was as of these roguish youngsters had put paper about a comb and were lustily singing the prescribed song through this buzzing medium. It may be that other Hudsonian chickadees sing differently. Birds are intensely individualistic, and it is hardly safe to generalize from one flock. This may have been a troop doing the mountain resorts with a comb concert specialty and tuning up as they traveled, as many minstrels do, but the results were

certainly, as I have described them. I am curious to see more birds of this feather, and see if they too conform. But I fancy Crawford Notch is about the southern limit of the variety in summer, and I may not hear another serenade in passing. These certainly found me as interesting. as I did them. They fearlessly flew down on twigs very near me and looked me over with bright eyes, the while talking through their combs about my characteristics and how I differed from the Hudsonian variety of man. It was a genuine case of mutual nature study. Very cozy all these things made the nick of the notch, but now and then as I scrambled through its rough forest aisles, the mountains looked down on me through a gap in the trees, frowning so portentously from such overhanging heights,

that I was minded to jump and flee from the imminent annihilation. For, after all, the beauty of flowers and the friendliness of birds, the architectural decorations of the furs and spruces, even the monster semblances of the rock carvings that overhang, are but the embroidery on the real impression of the Crawford notch. To get this, it is well to go down the long slope of the highway, to 10 miles and more, till you emerge below Sawyer's River, where Hart's ledge frowns high above Cobbs Ferry. Thus, you shall know something of the length of this tremendous fold in the rock ribs of the earth. Here is no work of erosion alone. The notch was made primarily by the bending of the granite of the mountains that rise in such

tremendous sweeps on either side to heights of thousands of feet. On most of their swift slanting sides, some dirt and deep. debris of rock has accumulated, and the forest has clothed them. But this clothing is thin, and in many places the slant is so swift, and the surface so smooth, that the rock lies bare to the sun, and all streams have swept it clean. In August, little water comes down these, but there is the bare channel of brown rock, up which one may look from the highway, taking in the whole sweep of a stream at a glance. At the bottom of these swift glasads, the tangled piles of smashed frocks show with what force the waters come down when floods push them. Thus just below the nick of the

notch, you may see where the silver cascade and the flume cascade hurry down from their birth on Mount Jackson, and farther down the vast slope of Webster is swept clear in great spaces where now only a little water comes moistening the upper rim of rocks, spreads, and evaporates before it has passed over the slanting sun-heated surface. All the way down the glen, to the willy house, to Bemis, and on to Sawyer's River, one looks to the right and left, up to rock heights swimming more than a thousand feet in air, bare, eminent, cleft and caverned, and often carved to strange semblances of man or beast. Crawford-Narch is a variable museum of gigantic fantasies. Most impressive of all it is to pause at the sight of the willy house and look back toward the

gateway of the notch, through which you have come. Here the mighty bulk of Mount Willard lifts shear from the tree-carpeted floor, 670 feet in air, a mountain that once in semi-multon form flowed into place across the wide valley and blocked it with a solid rock, overhanging, seamed and wrinkled, showing projecting buttresses and withdrawing caverns, a rock so solidly knit and compact that the wear of the ages on it has been infinitesimal. On the summit of this cliff are the hammer marks of frost. These blows and the solvent seep of rain may take from the mountain a 16th of an inch in a hundred years. But the disintegrating power that splits ledges and hurls a hundred-ton rock from precipices

seems never to have worked on this cliff. So perpendicularly high and mighty does it stand. First or last, the visitor to the notch will do well to climb Willard and see it as a whole. An easy carriage road makes the assistance. stopping well back from the brow of this tremendous cliff. Willard is hardly a mountain. It is rather a spur, a projecting ledge of the Rosebrook Range, whose peaks, Tom, Avalon, and Field, tower far above it. But on this great ledge of Willard, one is swung high in air in the very middle of the upper entrance to the notch. Hundreds of feet of it are above him still, but thousands are below, and he looks down the tremendous valley as the soaring eagle might,

Soothed by distance the rough valley bottom seems as level as a floor, its forest growth but a green carpet on which certain patterns stand out distinctly, the warp of green deciduous growth being filled with a dainty wolf of fir, spruce, and pine. To the left, the bulk of Webster blocks the horizon. To the right, the glance goes by Willie and on down to Bemis and Nancy, and the blue peaks of other more distant mountains that peer over them. From the headwall, of the Great Gulf, looking down between Chandler Ridge and the northern peaks of the presidential range, one gets a view of a wonderful mountain gorge. The outlook from Mount Franklin, down the mighty expanse of Oak's Gulf, to its opening into the Crawford Glen, below Frankenstein cliff,

is, to me, more impressive still. But greatest of all in its beauty of detail and its simplicity of might and grandeur is this ever-narrowing ten-mile chasm, this mighty deep fold of rock strata that begins below Sawyer's River and ends where the enormous rock, which is Mount Willard, so pinches the gateway to the notch, that the railroad burrows, the highway excavates, and the tiny brook, which is the beginning of the Seiko River, dives out of sight between the two, to reappear in that dismal pool, which lies at the very bottom of the nick of the notch. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Up Mount Jackson The climb from Crawfords through an enchanting forest. Off Mount Jackson runs a tiny brook. I do not know its name, but because it is the very beginning of the Seiko River and because it empties into Seiko Lake, I fancy it is Seco Brook. Whatever its name, it is fortunate above most white mountain brooks in that the lumbermen have kept away from it for half a century or so, and the great growth of an ancient forest shadows it. At the bottom of this, it dances down ledges and under prostrate trunks of trees that have stood their time and been pushed over by the wind, and as it goes it splashes joyously to itself in a liquid flow of language that has as many variations of syllables and intonations as

has human speech. On either side, its winding staircase in the forest, old old hemlocks rise in column their dignity, and great yellow birches spread the climbing walls of its passageway with a leafy tapestry of gold and green, their once crisp, sun-imprisoning curls of yellow bark all gray with age, and as shaggy as those on a centenarian's head. Through such shady glens of cool delight, the little brook calls the path up Jackson from its beginnings at the cellar hall of the old Crawford homestead, and the path responds gladly, climbing within sound of this melodious monologue, a pleasant part of the way. Even after it turns, reluctantly one thinks, to breast the slope southward and leave the friendly brook behind, the way leads still through this fine old forest, whose moist gloaming fosters the growth of all mosses,

and through them in turn makes the forest tenure secure. Nor does it pass into the full sun until its two and three-quarters miles to the summit of Jackson are all but completed, and it climbs steeply out of dwarf furs and spruces to surmount the bare dome. How excellent the moist moss which deeply closed stumps, stones, and all things else,

is for the growing of furs and hemlocks, may be easily seen. Here, no seedling need fail to grow for lack of moisture, even if it fall on the very top of a high rock. Here is a fir, for instance, beside the path up by Bugle Cliff. Its first rootlets ran from the very top of a boulder down each side of it through this soft, moist covering of moss till they reach the ground beneath. There, as the years have passed, they sunk deep and the fir has become a fine tree, though the base of its trunk is five feet from the ground, and its two big roots straddle the rock on which they

first found frail tenure in the thin covering of moss. Once let the sun in on this to dry out the moisture and the seedling would have evaporated with it. Thus the trees protect the moss, and the moss protects the trees. Remove either one and the other must go. This golden gloom and persistent moisture fosters other evergreen growth than furs and mosses. Here thrives and grows beautiful the spinulus wood fern, which seems peculiarly the fern of the high mountain slopes. But more conspicuous along this path to the summit of Jackson are the polypodus. The polypote stands drought or cold equally well. In either it shrivels and seems to wither, but let the warmth or moisture needed come back, and the seemingly blighted fronds fill out and are vigorously alive once more.

I often find polypodus in summer on exposed rocks seemingly crisp and dead with the drought, but when the September rains have soaked them, I come by again and find them growing as huskily as before. Yet for all their persistence throughout weather torment, these ferns are most beautiful and luxuriant in spots where moisture persists, and they have uninterrupted growth throughout their summer season. Such a spot is the deep wood along this trail, And there, on such rocks as they favor, the polypotes set close fronds of a green that seems singularly bright and rich in shade. It may be that the diffused gold of the sunlight in such places brings out greens at their best, but surely nowhere else have I found these little ferns at once so luxuriant in growth and so beautiful in color.

For all that, not all rocks in this delectable woodland bear the picturesque decoration of the polypote fronds. Up by Biogel Cliff are two great cubicle boulders. On the level top of one of these is a splendid garden of the little ferns. They cover it with an even matted growth that looks like a marvelously woven and decorated mat, covering a mighty footstool that might have been left behind by some recently departing race of giants. Yet within a stone's throw of it is another rock, quite like it in size and shape, on which one or two straggling ferns are trying to get a foothold, but with very indifferent success. So through this as other woodlands it seems to be with the

Polypote, which is without doubt a fern of feminine nature in spite of its sturdiness. With one rock, Miss Polypote will dwell in woodland seclusion most happily all her days. With another of similar shape and size, she will have no dallying. The cause is no doubt to be sought in the character of the rock, rather than in its figure or consistency. The Polypote has, a predilection for lime, and it is probable that the rocks which they decorate so faithfully have their characters sweetened by this ingredient. But in these forest shades if every stone may not bear willful Miss Polypote upon its breast, none goes without decoration of beauty. Without the mosses and lichens, the ferns would find little chance for life in any forest, and here they

cover all things with a beauty that is as profuse as it is delicate. No rock nor stump nor growing trunk of forest tree, but has these, so wonderfully blended in their grays and greens, their olives and browns, that the eye accepts them as a whole, and in such perfect harmony is their adornment, half the time fails to note that they are there at all. Yet one has but to pick out a definite spot and examine it for a moment to be impressed with the prodigality of beauty of the whole. Here, for instance, not far from the point where the trail up Mount Webster diverges from that up Jackson is a pathside rock of rough, micaceous granite, such as Moss's love. Its surface slopes like a lean-to roof toward the north, and it's but a foot or two square.

It is no more beautifully, no more diversely decorated than ten thousand other rocks, which one may see along the trail. Yet here is a harmony of blending and contrasting colors and forms, such as the cleverest human artist, with all the fabrics and all the dyes of Christendom might labor in vain to produce. Tiny fern-like fronds of the dainty cedar moss we've acrossed it a tapestry of golden green, a feathery fabric such as only fairy workmen laboring patiently for long years can produce. Yet it is a fabric common to the whole wood, carpeting and upholstering its inequalities for miles. Into this is sparingly wrought an over-pattern of deeper green tufts of the hairy-cap moss, sending up slender stems, headed with fruitage, and whole.

holding the pointed caps, which are the fairy headgear. To note these is to realize suddenly that the fairies are still at work under the shadow of the warp and woof of the fabric, though they are too nimble to be seen, however suddenly one may lift it. It is easy to lift the hairy caps, but I refrain. To take even one away is to spoil the perfect symmetry of this pattern, which is so complete that every detail, even the most minute, is needed for the harmony of the hull. On one side, an hepatic lichen spreads a rosette-like decoration of purple-brown, edged with silvery gray, a color that has its answering glints all through the structure of the cedar moss and which joins the brown hepatic in all its roughness to this dainty background.

In another spot is the gray mist of a clump of reindeer lichen, a fine, soft, gray-green mist blowing across from the other lichen's edge and clouding with its filmy ferns. fluff a tiny portion of the picture. It is thus that summer clouds float over the green tops of the forest trees on some days and shadow them with a gray mist for a moment. The reindeer lichen is growing on the stone, but it has all the effect of being blown across it. And I know well that if I look away for a moment, it will be gone when I look back. Diagnally across the rock runs a bar dexter of clintonia leaves, loosely laid in shining green, and in certain groups are the trifoliate scallops of the wood sorrel. The whole is like a shield of one of the great knights of Arthur's court,

heraldic emblazory thick upon it, hung here in the greenwood while its bearer rests upon his arms, or drinks perhaps from the borders of the silver cascade brook, which I hear swishing coolly down the glen not far away. But all this decoration, so wonder, wonderfully harmonious, so minutely complete in itself, is on this particular rock, but a background for a clump of pure white Indian pipe blooms growing in its center. Ghostily beautiful, their white glowing by contrast in the green gloom of the place. These blossoms seem the plant embodiment of the cool echo of falling waters that slips along the aisles of flickering golden light between the brown, straight columns of the firs and hemlocks. The nodding pallid flowers are as soothing to the sight as

this soft whisper of descending streams to the ear. The forest writes the word hush in letters of the Indian pipe blooms. With eye and ear, as well as muscles rested, I go on to the steeper ascent, which the path makes the rectangle of furs, that diminish in size but increase in numbers as the elevation increases. For long, it climbs within sound of silver cascade brook, but finally gets too high for it, and passes into a little section of silver forest, where for a space, all the firs are dead. Most of them still stand erect, the green all gone out of them. Ghosts of the trees they once were, they stand silvery gray in the midst of the green wood, as if a patch of moonlight had forgotten to go when the day came.

into this sunlit place in the surrounding shade of the forest, the mountain goldenrod has come till its flowers make all the space beneath the dead trees yellow, a very lake of sunlight. Silver and gold, the rocks of the white mountains may or may not have in their veins, but the white mountain forest hold the two precious metals in nuggets and pockets, and veritable placers for all who will seek. Not far from this silver forest, the path crassed, through a dense tangle of dwarf firs and climbs out upon the rough rock dome of Mount Jackson, 4, 112 feet above the sea level, just rising above the tree line. Here, to be sure, are a few dwarf

firs, not knee-high, and here climbs plentifully the resinous perfume of their taller brothers just below. But the eye has an uninterrupted sweep of the horizon, where a few ranges obstruct. northward, 15 miles or so across Oaks Gulf, looms Mount Washington, 2,181 feet higher still, and the long ridge of the southern peaks descends from this to Clinton, a mighty wall of perpendicular rock set against the sky. The vast basin of the Gulf is always a marvel, with its precipitous walls and its expanse of forested floor. The forest so distant and so close set that it looks like the Cedar Moss tapestry on the way up. But nowhere is it more impressive than from the summit of Jackson, with its mighty wall of the presidential range for a background. Southeast, Kyrsardt

lifts its clean cone over the jumble of mountains that make the northward walls of the Crawford notch. Southwesternly stands Carrigan, with the pinnacles of the sandwich range far beyond. While westerly, Lafayette rises above Goyot and the twins, far over Zeeland, notch. Under one's feet, almost, lies the green level of the Fabian Plateau, with its huge hotels, giving almost the only human touch to the view. Out of this depth of distance swings a flock of eaves swallows, already, like the occupants of the hotels, very likely, planning their southern trip, and discussing accommodations and gastronomic possibilities. In the upper woods of the trail, I had passed through a considerable flock of Hudsonian chickadees, but these had

fallen behind, and the only birds of the summit were the swift passing swallows. Here again were the summit herbs of the higher hills, the mountain sandwort, mountain cranberry, creeping snowberry, labrador tea, all springing from mosses in scant soil, which obtains in the almost level acre of rock, which is the top of the mountain. It is a place on which to make rendezvous with the winds of the world, and be sure they will meet you there, yet strange to relate, on my day on the summit, for a long time, no winds blue, and gauzy-winged insects from the regions below, fluttered lazily over the great rock dome. Here were coelius, hunters, morning cloak, and mountain fertility butterflies, making the place gay with their bright colors.

Here were a score of varieties, abdiptera, and hymenoptera, some of astonishing size and peculiarities of wing and leg, some of amazing brilliancy of color, till I wished for a convocation of the Cambridge Entomological Society to name and describe them for me. None of these unexpected mountain flyers was difficult to capture. Neither was I, and I was glad when a sudden breeze from the west sent them all careering down into the Oaks Gulf, whence I dare say they came. Passing the silver forest on my way down, I found my Hudsonian chickadee friend in numbers in the furs once more. Much as I have been in the woods about the presidential range, it is only lately that I have met these interesting birds, and now I seem to find them in increasing numbers,

at the head of the notch, on the northerly slope of Mount Pleasant, and here. I have sought them for long, and at last, as Thoreau said of the wild geese, they fly over my meridian, and I am able to bag them by shooting up chimney. Perhaps a more reasonable interpretation would be that now the nestlings are full-fledged and the increased flocks beginning to range far in search of food. August passes and the wind out of the north has sometimes in it a zest that collects flocks and sets the migratory instinct to throbbing in many a bird's breast. No tang of the north wind could touch the heart of the deep woods down the trail. But there, too, as I descended, I found the promise of autumn, written in many colored characters in the enchanting gloom. The Clintonius spelled it in the

Prussian blue ink of their ripe berries. The creeping snowberry had done it in white, and the Michela, Goltheria, and Trilium, in varying shades of red. Even the Indian pipe, which writes hush and peace all along the forest floor in late summer, seems in this way to tell of the season of rough winds, migrating birds and falling scarlet leaves that is just ahead of us. Its pallid attempt to hold the full glory of the ripened summer where it is cannot succeed here on the high northern hills, where the summer is at best but a brief sojourner. Rather, for all his desires, it seems but a pale flower of sleep, presaging, that white forgetfulness of snow that will presently descend through the whispering hemlock leaves

and blot out all this writing on the forest floor. Ah, these wise old hemlocks of the deep trails of the northern woods, these indeed of the forest primeval, quote, bearded with moss and garments green, indistinct in the twilight, stand like druids of eld with voices sad and prophetic, stand like Harper's horror with beards that rest on their bosoms." These are the wise old men of the woods, erect and tall, of mighty compactness of muscles and shaggy-headed with deep green conical capes, shielding crown and shoulders. They seem less trees than woodland deities, and to stand among them is to be present at an assembly of demigods of the forest.

The wisdom of centuries blown about the world by the western, winds, finds voice in their whispering leaves, and I, listening in the cool twilight below, hear it told in forest runes. Some day, someone who loves the woods enough shall learn to translate this runic rhyme of the harper hemlocks as their tops chant to the west wind, and send the music down the listening forest aisles where the Indian pipes whitely whisper, hush, and peace. And the translator will be very wise thereby. He who climbs Jackson shall see much beauty of wild gulfs and rugged peaks, and this I saw. But more vividly in my memory of the trip linger the sunny glade under the silver firs,

all yellow with its flood of goldenrod, and the moss-clad rocks with their messages written in white Indian pipe blooms. Most vivid of all is the personality of those stately old-man hemlocks that stand with such dignity, making the deep woods along the trail. End of Chapter 14. Chapter 15 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Carrigan, the hermit, the mountain and its overlook from the very heart of the hills. On no peak of the white mountains does one have so supreme a sense of uplift as on Carrigan. Here is a mountain for you. No nubble on top of a huge tableland is Carrigan, but a peak that springs

lightly into the unfathomable blue from deep valleys of black forest. So high is this summit that from it you look through the quivering miles of blue air right down upon the mountains in the heart of whose ranges it stands, and see them reproduced in faithful miniature below, a relief map on the scale of an inch to the mile. In the very middle of the mountain world, you see the mountains as the eagle sees them. And so ice-led it is the peak that like the eagle you seem to swim in air as you watch. The black growth of spruce and fir climbs Carrigan from all directions. Over from Hancock, it swarms along the ridge from the westward.

From the Pemaguaset it sweeps upward, and from Carrigan notch it leaps twice. Once to the round summit of Vaux spur, a clean bound of almost 2,000 feet, then on to another higher point, and again to the mountaintop. Up Signal Ridge from the east and south, it scales almost perpendicular heights for a mile, leaving only the thin, dizzy edge of this spur bear, and going on by the sides to the top of the main mountain. The path to the summit makes its final assault through this black growth to the knife edge of Signal Ridge by one of the most desperately perpendicular climbs in the whole region.

one or two trails are steeper, a little, notably part of that from Crawford Notch of Mount Willie, but none holds so grimly to its purpose of uplifting the climber for so great a distance as does this. Four and a half miles of pleasant journey in from the Railroad Station at Sawyer's River, this mighty ascent begins a strong upward movement at the old lumber camp known as Camp 5. Thence for about two miles, it goes up in the air at a most prodigious angle, no suggestion of let-up till the dismayed and gasping climber finally emerges on the knife edge of the ridge summit and willingly forgives the mountain for all it has done to him. If the climb had no more to give than just this outlook from Signal Ridge, it were worth all the heart failure and locomotor

ataxia it may have caused. Right under the onlookers' feet, the north side of the ridge drops away almost sheer to the deep gash in the mountain, which is Carrigan notch. Across the the valley rises the sheer wall of Mount Lowell, with a great beetling cliff of red rock halfway up intersected by a slide. The whole-looking as of giants had carved a huge, preposterous figure of a flying bird, there for a sign to all who pass. The summit of Lowell is far below the observer's feet, and the whole mass is so small a thing in the mighty outlook before him that it seems ridiculous to call it a mountain. It is but an insignificant knob on the universe in sight. Over beyond its rounded summit rise others, little larger or more significant,

though each really a mountain of considerable size, each part of the western wall of Crawford Notch, Anderson, Bemis, and Nancy, and beyond again the site passes between Webster and Crawford on and up the broad expanse of Oak's Gulf to Washington itself. Here always is bulk, magnificence and dignity, and between it and the nubbles which marked the line of the southern peaks, rises a glimpse of the northern Jefferson peering of her clay, but Adams and Madison withdrawn behind the looming bulk of the summit cone of Washington. Between Washington and Crawford runs the long Montalban Ridge with the giant stairs conspicuous, as always, but dwarfed to pigmy size in the great sweep of the whole outlook.

Easterly is a great jumble of the mountains south of Bartlett, Tremont in the foreground, and over that Bartlett haystack, table with its flat top, the peaked ridges of the moats, and beyond them all the perfect cone of Kier Sarge on the eastern horizon. There is something of the same feeling of Supreme Uplift to be felt on the summit of Kier Sarge, as one gets on Kargan, though in lesser degree. Kyrsard, too, is a mountain that dwell somewhat apart from other mountains,

and gives the climber the full benefit of this height and withdrawal. As the glance swings to the southward again, it stops in admiration on the blue wall of the Sandwich Mountains, the great horn of Chokuroa, first arresting the gaze. Here is a splendid outlook upon the full sweep of this great, jagged range, Pogis, Pasacanaway, Whiteface, Tri-Pyramid, and Sandwich Dome. each rugged peak rising out of the blue mass of the hull, with the green Albany intervails along the swift river showing below their foothills,

and over it all, far to the south again, the low line which is the smoke haze of cities, a brown broom behind the exquisite soft blue of the uncorrupted mountain miles of air. At the bottom of a scintillent blue transparency of this air lies the high valley between Signal Ridge and the sandwich range, a mountain valley with no hint of green fields or farmsteadings in it. Its green is that of the rich full growth of leaves in deciduous treetops, shadowed here and there by the point of a fir or a spruce, still strangely standing, though the lumbermen have long since swept the valley far and wide. Almost one may determine the exact height of spur cliffs above the valley bottom by the line

of black growth, where it has escaped the axe, not because axmen could not reach it, but because horses could not be found to drag it to the valley after being cut. The lumbermen put their horses in upon acclivities now that were thought to be forever inaccessible 20 years ago, but there are still heights they do not dare, and the lines beyond which they fail are marked along all steep slopes by that dividing line between the green of deciduous trees and the black of spruce. Seen from the great height of this knife-edge ridge, the valley is grotesque,

with its lifting crags of rough cliff so solidly built of rock that no green thing finds a crevice in which to grow, or so steep as to defy any wind-born seed to find a lodging there. These rough rock cliffs have grotesque resemblance to the shaggy heads of prehistoric animals of more than gigantic size that seem to have been turned into stone where they lie, their bodies half buried and concealed by the luxuriant growth of forest that still surges around them. A lumber company is known by its cut. The work done here seems to have been done with a certain feeling of fair play to the forest, a desire to give it a chance to ultimately recover. Westward, deeper into the heart of the wilderness, one sees another record. To see the west, one must climb

beyond Signal Ridge. High as it is, it is but a spur of the main mountain that looms spruce-clad all along the western sky, and the path rises steeply again, through this spruce, but not so steeply as it climbed the ridge. Midway of the half-mile one finds the tiny log cabin of the firewarden of the mountain, snuggled beneath the spruce behind the shoulder of the ultimate height. Whatever this lone watcher on the mountaintop is paid, he earns, for all furnishings for his tiny cabin, all supplies, even water, must be packed on his back, up to two miles of Dizzy Trail. On Carrigan's very top is a little bare spot, surrounded by dwarf spruce and fir, over whose tops you may look upon the world around.

The dark tree walls of this roofless refuge ward off all winds, and the full sunshine fills it to the top and seems to ooze thence through the black growth, and flow on down the mountain sides, which are so near that a few steps in any direction takes you to a spruce-clad precipice. Some mountain tops are broad and flat enough to form the foundation for a farm, but not this one. It is a veritable peak. Signal Ridge is a good deal of a knife edge. Here you have the edge prolonged into a point. A step or two west out of this sun-filled spruce well of refuge on the summit takes one to the finest view of all from this swimming mountain top. Underfoot lies the broad wilderness valley of the Pemaguaset, filled with what, from this point of view, are minor nubbles, but which really are lesser mountains. Just to the right, far below, is a whole string of three-thumptuset, filled with what, from this point of view, are minor nobles, but which really are lesser mountains. Just to the right, far below is a whole string of three- thousand-foot eminences, yet the sight passes over them, almost without notice, to the magnificent gap in rock walls, which is Zeeland Notch. Almost due west is Owlshead and a half-dozen lesser heights, but all these sink unnoticed below the blue wall of solid mountain range, which blocks

the horizon above them, the tremendous uplifted bulk of the Franconia Mountains. Not the grandeur and dignity of Washington, lifting the Sphinx's head from the presidential range, not the jagged line of the sandwich peaks, cutting with points of distance-blued steel, the smoke-oppelessence of the far southern sky, not the emerald marvels of all the low-lying ranges all about, can compare in beauty or impressiveness with that mountain mass of solid blue that walls the west across the rugged miles of the Pemmica-Wasset Valley. It's great mass of unblurred, undivided color holds the eye for long and gives it rest again and again after wandering over the thousand varied beauties of the surrounding landscape. Lafayette, Lincoln, Hastack, Liberty are its

famous peaks, which, however, they may seem upon nearer view from the dizzy pinnacle of Carrigan, across the broad wilderness of the Pemago-Wasset Valley, hardly notched the sky that pales above that mighty wall of deep blue, that restful mass of immensity, that unfathomable well of richest color that once looked into holds the eye within its shadowy coolness for long, and stays forever in the memory. What a world of black growth wilderness, this vast Pemaga-Wasset Valley must once have been, it is easy to see. What it will become in just a few years more, alas, is too easy to be inferred. The modern lumberman comes to his work equipped with all the vast resources of capital and scientific machinery. In this region, west of Carrigan, which still holds a remnant of virgin growth of pine and spruce,

where still stand trees, four or five feet in diameter at the butt, his logging trains rumble down his railroad through the deep woods, summer, as well as winter. The sound of dynamite explosions scares bear and deer, as his road builders grade and level the roads, down which his armies of men and horses will haul the splendid timber as soon as the snow flies. From Carrigan's summit I see the long winding line of his railroad, clear up to the western slopes of the mountains that wall in Crawford's notch. From the railroad to the right and the left run the carefully grated logging roads, high up on the sides of the surrounding mountains, branching, paralleling,

and giving the teams every opportunity for careful, methodical work. Already over square miles of mountain sides, you see the brown windroes of slash left in the wake of his choppers, who have left literally not one green thing. The black growth cut for the lumber and pulp mills, the clothespin men, and the makers of ribbon shoe pegs have been in and taken the last standing scrub of hardwood. Mountainside after mountainside in this region looks like a hayfield, the brown stubble marked with those long, wavering windrows of slash. These are the newly cut spaces. One winter's work took out of this region over 30 million feet of pine and spruce alone. There is written on the open book of the forest below Carrigan, the story of the most ruthless, clean sweep lumbering that I have ever seen in any wood.

You may go down the Pemagoosset and see the slopes that have been cleaned out thus over square mile after square mile of mountainside, four, eight, twelve years ago, and, save for blueberries, blackberries, and wild cherry trees, they are as bare and desolate today as when first logged. In a hundred years those slopes will not again bear forests. Indeed, I doubt if they ever will. Nor is this to be said in any scorn of the lumberman. Pulp and lumber we must have. He bought the woods and is using them now for the purpose for which he spent his money. The scorn should rather be for a people who once knew no better, and who, now that their eyes are opened still allow this priceless heritage of ancient forest to be swept away forever. It is good to shift the eye and the thought from these bare patches to the still remaining

black growth. Fortunately, some steep still defy the keenest logging gang, and some spruce will remain on these after another ten years has swept the valley clean. On the high northern slopes, while up toward the peaks, where the deer yard in winter, the trees are too dwarf to tempt even the pulp men who take timber that is scorned by the sawmill folk. On the summit of Carrigan, trees a hundred years old and rapidly passing to death through the senile decay of usni of moss and gray-green lichens are scarcely a dozen feet tall. Yet as these pass, the youngsters crowd thickly in to take their places and grow cones and scatter seed, often when only a few feet high. In these, one sees a faint hope for the reforestation of the valley in the distant future. They are,

After the clean sweep, we may allow 50 years for blueberries and bird cherries, a hundred more for beech, birch, and maple to grow, and supply mold of the proper consistency from their falling leaves in which spruce and fir seedlings will take root. After that, if all works well, another hundred will see such a forest of black growth, as is going down the Pemagoosset daily now on the flat cars of the logging railroad. Carrigan's peculiar birds seem to be the yellow-rumped war at least at this season of the year. They flitted continually through and above the dwarf trees of the summits. There they had nested and brought up their young, and now the whole families were coming together in flocks and beginning to move about uneasily as the migration impulse grows in them. All along the trail up

Carrigan and back, I found this same spirit of movement in the birds. Two weeks ago they were molting and silent. Hardly a wing would be seen or a chirp heard in the lonesome woods. Now all is motion in the bird world once more, and flashes of warbler colors light up the dark places with living light. Among these black spruces, the red start seems to me loveliest of all. No wonder the Cubans call him Candelita when he comes to flit the winter away beneath their palm trees. His black is so vivid that it stands clearly defined in the deepest shadows, and foiled upon it his rich salmon-red flames, like a wind-blown torch, he slips rapidly from limb to limb, flaring his way through the densest and deepest wood. The murder warblers were the birds of the summit,

but the red starts gave sudden beauty to the slopes all along the lower portions of the trail. The sun was setting the deep turquoise blue of the Franconia range in flaming gold bands as I left the mountaintop. The peak of Lafayette was a point of fire. Garfield, just over the shoulder of Bond, was another, and it seemed as if the two were heliographing one to another from golden mirrors. But along the knife edge of Signal Ridge lay the shadow of Carrigan summit, and the dwarfed growth down the two miles of steep descent was black indeed. Hardly could the sunlight touch me again, for the trail lies in the eastward cast shadow of Carragon all the way to Sawyer's River. The evening coolness brought out all the rich scents of the forest, for here to the east of Carrigan, the deciduous growth makes forest still. From the heights, the rich aroma of the

firs descended with me, picking up more subtle sense on the way. Not far below the crest of Signal Ridge, the mountain goldenrod begins to glow beside the trail. Scattered with it is the lanceolate-leaved, flutter-pedaled, astoradula. These two lent to the aromatic air the subtle, delicate pungency of the composity, and far below, in the swampy spots at the foot of the declivity, the lovely violet-purple astor Novi and Glea added to it. Here in open spots beside the trail, this beautiful astor starred the gloom for rods, but yet it was not more numerous than the rosy-tipped white pod-like blooms of the turtlehead that in the rich dusk glowed nebulously among them. Nowhere in the world do I remember having seen so many turtileysed,

turtlehead blooms at one time, as in the marshy spots along the trail leading toward Livermore and Sawyer's River from the base of Signal Ridge. Their soft, delicate perfume began to ride the fur aroma there, mingling curiously with the scent of Astors and Goldenrod. Often I looked back for a glimpse of the lofty peak I had left, but Carrigan is indeed a hermit mountain. It had withdrawn into the heart of the hills which are its home, and nothing westward showed, save the rose gold of the sunset sky which hung from the zenith down into the gloom of the woods, a marvelous background for the tracery of its topmost leaves. End of Chapter 15. Chapter 16 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropak's recording is in the public domain. Up the Giants Stairs. The Backstairs Rood

up this curious mountain. My way to the giant's stairs lay over the high shoulder of Iron Mountain, where the road shows you all the kingdoms of the mountain world spread out below, bids you take them and worship it, which perforce you do. Then it swings you down by a long drop curve into a veritable forest of Arden, through which you tramp between great bowls of birch and beach for miles. Here, long ago, Orlando carved his initials with those of Rosalind on the smooth bark of great beach trees, and, I doubt not, hung beside them love verses, which made those pointed buds open in spring before their time. Here came Rosalind to find and read them, and carry them off treasured in her bodice, wherefore one finds no traces of them at the present day.

Yet the carven initials remain, as anyone who treads the road beneath these ancient greenwood trees may see. Little underbrushes here, and no growth of spruce or fur, and one may look far down arcades of green gloom, where the flicker of sunlight through leaves may make him think he sees glints of Rosalind's hair as she dances through the wood in search of more poems. The long forest aisles bring snatches of joyous song to the ear, nor may the listener say surely that this is Rosalind and that a wood warbler, for both are in the forest, one as visible as the other. The whole place glows with the golden glamour of romance, and he who passes through it, bound for the giant stairs, thrills with the glow, and knows that his path leads to a land of enchantments. By and by the trail drops me down a sharp descent, and at the bottom I find, close set with alders, a tiny clear stream, which soon babbles out from beneath the bushes into another of those forest aisles. And there is a little house in the wood, so tiny and so picture-reveh.

restfully a part of its surroundings, that though it purports to be a hunter's camp, I know it at once, for that little house which Peter Pan and the thrushes built for Wendy. But the song of the brook, this serpentine of the deep woods, is a lonesome one, for the door of the little house is locked and the shutters are up. If I remember rightly, Wendy went away and never came back, and Peter Pan is so rarely seen nowadays that few people really believe he is to be found at all. but at least here is his house on a tributary to Rocky Branch Creek over northwest of Iron Mountain. Out of the illusory gloom of the brook, the path leaps with joy to the clear sunlight of open fields and seems to stop at an old doorstone behind which the ruins of a house still strive to shelter the cellar

over which they were built. Floors and sills are gone, boarding and shingles and upright timbers have fallen, but still the oak pins hold plates and rafters together, and the bare bones of a roof crouch above the spot. So sturdy was the work of the pioneers that here hewed a home out of the heart of a forest. Between this spot and civilization is now only a logging road for miles, and the presence of these open, sunny fields in the deep forest and among rough hills, seems almost as much an illusion as the echoes of the voice of Rosalind in the deep woodland and the thrush-built house of Peter Pan by the Brookside. But here they stand in this cove of the mountains, field after field,

still holding out against the sweep of the forest that for half a century has done its best to ride over them, still loyal to the dreams of whose fabric they were once the very warp. The old highway, too, still loiters from farm to farm, though the wood shades it and in places even send scouting parties of young trees out across it. The growing maples push the top stones from the old stone walls, brambles hide the stone heaps, and fill cellar holes with living green. Yet still the apple trees hold red-cheeked fruit to the sun from their thickets of unpruned growth, and scatter it in mellow circles on the ground for the deer and the

porcupine. The forest will in time make them its own. It will shade out the European grasses that still grow knee-deep and fill their places with dainty cedar moss and the shy wildflowers of the deep wood. Yet for all that, the trail of the pioneers, the boundaries that they set and the work of their hands will never be quite disestablished on the spot. It will remain for long years to come, a sunny footprint of civilization, dented deep in the surrounding green of the wilderness. Down one gladed terrace after another, from one farm to the next, the old, road goes, and the path, which seems to linger at the first doorstone, slips finally away and follows between the ancient ruts. Through gaps in the investing forest, I look far down the rocky

branch valley to the blue of Moat Mountain, a color so soft that it makes the great mass but a haze of unreality to the perceiving senses. If a wind from the west should come up and blow it away, or if some scene shifter of the day should wind it up into the sky above, just a part of a beautiful drop curtain, I should hardly be surprised. I do not care to climb moat, if indeed there be really such a mountain. All summer it has hung thus, a soft haze of half reality, a mountain painted on some portion of the view from whatever hill I climb, its contour changing so little from whatever direction I view it, that it seems what I prefer always to keep it. The blue, fabric of a half-wistful dream. So shall it be more permanent and in time more real than many a

higher summit, the grind of whose granite has left its mark upon me. It is the unclimed peaks, which are eternal. From the last terrace of the lowest farm, the trail drops suddenly to rocky branch, a tributary of the Seco, which has its rise in a deep angled ravine, far up on the southerly slope of Mount Washington. Here is a choice of ways, a good tote road, a logging railroad, and a broad-graded logging road which the lumbermen are dynamiting through to the last spruce of the valley up at the headwaters of the branch. From these highways, broad logging roads give me a plain trail up the steep stairs-brook Valley to the bottom step in those mighty stairs. He who would know what lumbermen can do in logging precipitous spots may well look about it.

him here. The ground rises at tremendous angles from the ravine bottom to the foot of stairs mountain, and on. Yet down these precipices, the woodsmen have brought their log-laden teams safely, the sleds chained, and the whole load lowered inch by inch by snubbing lines. To note the spots into which men have worked is to have a vivid impression of the value of spruce and the desperate lengths to which men will go to get it nowadays. The giant stairs are more in number, than the two great ones that appear to the eye from a long distance, either east or west. Northeast of these, a half mile or less, is a side stair, as big and as steep as the ones most commonly seen, and farther on around the mountain toward the north are others.

It was these back stairs that I climbed, all because of a yellow-headed woodpecker that flew by the ruins of the logging camp, which are not far from the base of the side stair. I got a glimpse of the yellow crown patch and of some white on the back or wing bars, but whether it was the Arctic three-toed woodpecker or the American, I could not make out, and I followed his sharp cries and jerky flight up the steep slope to the right of the side stairs. Here was an astounding tangle of windrode slash, with many trees still standing in it, and here for a long time I got near enough to my bird to almost make sure which variety he was. but not quite. It is hard to distinguish markings, even black and white, when a bird is high on a

limb against the vivid light of a mountain sky. It is easy to follow along the parallel roads, through which the logs have come down out of the slash, but it is another matter to struggle from one road to another across those mighty tangles, and thus my woodpecker led me. Finally, at the very top of the coal between Stairs Mountain and its outlying northeasterly spur, he shrieked, quite like a soul in torment, and flew away high over my head, straight toward the summit of Mount Resolution, leaving me somewhat in doubt as to whether he was a Pecoides-Arcticus or Pecoides-Americanus, or a goblin scout sent out by the giants to toll strangers away from the easier path up their mountain, and lose them in the wilderness tangle all about it. Whatever he was, he had led me some miles

round the mountain to a point exactly opposite to the good path up. The back stairs are formidable enough to dismay anyone with mere human legs, and for some time I wandered in what the lumbermen have left of a hackmatack swamp at their foot, looking for a way about the bottom stair. For only Baron Munchielsen's courier, he of the seven-league boots, could have gone directly up it. It felt like being a mouse in a mansion, and by and by I found a very mouse-like route up to bolters loosely held in place by spruce roots, scrambling up trunks and clawing on with fingers and toes, in momentary fear of starting an avalanche, and becoming but a very small, integral portion of it, and I finally reached the top of the bottom back stair, which is by all odds the highest,

and sat down to get breath. At one scramble I had left behind the woeful tangle of slash, and come into a country of enchantment. Here a bear had passed the day before, leaving undeniable signs. There was a deer path through the dense spruce showing recent dents of their sharp cloven hoofs, and all about and above was a forest of black growth, in which it was easy to fancy no human foot had ever trod, before I all ford up into it, mouse fashion. Here were trees not large enough to tempt the lumbermen, but old with moss and gray-green lichens, pasting so dense a shade that only mosses and lichens could fly. flourish beneath them. Here was a soft carpet of dainty cedar moss, wonderfully fronded and luxuriant,

covering everything, rocks, roots, and the trunks of ancient trees that had fallen one across another for unnumbered centuries. It was like a miniature of the close-set tangle of downwood and growing timber that one sees in the Puget Sound country. There, for miles, one may make progress through the wood only by clambering along one fallen trunk to the next, perhaps twenty-year. feet in air. Here the fallen trunks and growing trees were not one-tenth the size of the Pacific Coast giants, but the proportion and condition was the same. And so up through this fairyland I scrambled and plunged, following a deer path as best I might, and longing for their sure-footed ability to leap lightly over obstacles. I dare say my clattering plunges drove all the deer off the

mountain. At least I saw none, though their paths intersected and their hoof marks had dented them all recently. Stairs Mountain is certainly the house of a thousand staircases. All through my climb, I found detached stairs scattered about, and the mountain seems to be largely built of them, from a few feet to a few hundred feet in height. And after all, I came out, not at the top of the highest front stair, but at the top of that side stair that looks directly down on the old lumber camp. A half-mile or less southeast of me were the front stairs, and I had to go down an internal flight and climb again before reaching their top, passing again through forest primeval criss-crossed by deer paths. The yellow-headed woodpecker had given me a pretty scramble, but I think it was worth it.

From a distance I had thought stairs mountain to be fractured slate. Instead, it is molded granite. The edge of the tread on the topmost stair is of a stone that seems as high. hard and dense as any that comes out of the Quincy Quarries. Yet still clinging to it in places are remnants of a crumbly granite that seems once to have been poured over it and cooled there in a friable mass. You may kick this overlying granite to pieces with your hob-nailed mountain shoe, and I fancy once it filled the gap between the topmost tread and the summit of Mount Resolution, just to the south, and has been frost-riddled and water-worn away, leaving the solid granite of the stairs behind. From the topmost of the giant stairs one sees but half the mountain world,

the half to southward. All the north is cut off by the spruce-covered round of the summit behind him. Eastward was the great bulk of Iron Mountain, over which I had come, its round top so far below me that I could see the whole of the perfect cone of Kyrsarge over it. Directly south was the half-bald dome of resolution, and just over it, the equilateral pyramid of Shakurua dented the sky. Wonderfully blue and far away it looked, and to its right was stretched the varied skyline of the whole sandwich range. To the right again was a mighty wilderness of mountains, cones, and billows, and ranges, massed in together in almost inextricable confusion. Though out of this rose certain peaks one could not fail to recognize. Carrigan, stately and a bit apart in dignified reserve,

and the great blue wall of the Franconia range, diminished by distance, but beautiful and impressive still. Almost at my feet, down the Crawford notch, crept a train along the thin, straight line of the railroad. A puff of white steam shot upward from the engine whistling for the Frankenstein trestle, but it was long before the shrill sound rose to my ears. Nothing could so well emphasize the immensity of the prospect before me. I realized that the brakeman was walking through the observation car shouting, Giant stairs, giant stairs, now on your left, and that the mighty cliff on whose verge I was perched

seemed no more than a letter on the printed page to the on-looking crowd. The way home lies down the west side of the mountain, the steep but good Davis Trail to and along the bottom of the lower stair, thence to the west side of the ridge between stairs mountain and Mount Resolution. Then a trail east, very slender but distinguishable, goes to the broad highway of a logging road, and thence the descent, though precipitous, is easy. The stairs mountain is so different from anything else that one can find in this region, that it has an eerie individuality all its own.

To look back as I went on down the logging road was to see the stairs standing out against the glow of the lowering sun, less like steps than gigantic rock faces. The lower one particularly looked as if a giant himself, wild-eyed and bristly-haired, was lying behind the forest with his great head leaned against the mighty granite cliff that towered above. And so I left him, waiting, doubtless, to devour the next lone climber, who, if he goes up the front stairs, must pass directly in front of his jaws. For all that, I hesitate to advise the back-stairs route to which the yellow-headed woodpecker led me. It is rough and chancy.

End of Chapter 16. Chapter 17 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. On Mount Lafayette. Glimpses of coming autumn from Franconia's highest peak. Upon the highest mountain tops, the winds of winter make their first assaults upon the summer, driving it southward peak by peak. In September, the skirmishes begin, and by the end.

end of October, the conquest of the high peaks is complete. But meanwhile, the outcome of the contest is by no means sure, and day by day, sometimes hour by hour, the redouts are won and lost again. Mid-September sees the approaches to the peaks, fluttering gaily the banners of both chieftains, summers blue and gold in the asters and goldenrod, winter's crimson and gold in the flare of maple, and the glow of yellow birch. Thus I saw them from the summit of Lafayette on a day when the forces of the north met those of the south there. And the long ridge was now in the hands of one army, now of the other. Nor was it difficult to prophecy what would be the outcome of the conflict. It seemed as if moment by moment the yellow banners of winter, planted almost on the very summit

in the leaves of the dwarf birches, increased in number, and crowded farther down the slope, and into the forests of the outlying spurs. Now and then, too, the eye noted where a shell had exploded in a golden rod bloom, or so it seemed, and blown its summer banner out of existence in a white puff of papist smoke. So the wind out of the north drives the summer away, though it rallies again and again, and comes stealing up the southerly valleys and along the sunny slopes to the very summits. Near the high summits, the birches show autumn tints first. These are of the round-leafed variety, Batula Glangeloza, which is peculiar to the high peaks of the white mountains, very dwarf, at best, on the highest peaks they win as near the top as do the dwarf firs, yet at humiliating

expensive stature, becoming scarcely more than creeping vines at the greatest heights, sending up doubtful branches out of the protection of soft tundra moss. Up the higher slopes of Lafayette, they thus grow, crowding together in dense masses that now spread a velvety golden carpet to the eye that looks upon them from the summit. Amidst the gray and brown of ledges, and the green of spruce and fir, which is so deep that it is black, they glow by contrast, and put the golden rod of the lower glades to shame with their color. No other deciduous trees reach this height, and in looking at them in the early weeks in September, it is easy to believe that autumn comes down from the sky, and first, like Jokind Day, stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

On Lafayette, the color was richest near the top and paled into green as the glance slipped farther and farther down toward the Pemaguasset Valley. Even by the middle of September, the birches of the valley show little of the marvelous yellow that seems suddenly to come upon them a little later. From the mountaintop, they still hold the full green of summer to the first glance, and only by looking again and more carefully can one see that they have changed. Then indeed, little serious clouds of yellow missed them in places, rounding the low hilltops a little more definitely against the more distant wood. To look again, is to see here and there the undeniable flaunt of a yellow banner, but from the hilltops,

that is all. To tramp the levels along the water courses or climb the lower slopes beneath deciduous trees is to see more, and to learn that the autumn tints come by other roots than a descent upon the summits. For weeks in the cool seclusion of the forest aisles, the waves have been lighted by yellow flares of birch or elm leaves and red flashes of the swamp maple. Day by day now, these increase in number, and once in a mile the whole tree seems to have caught all the sunshine of the summer in itself, and to begin to let it glow forth in the half-dusk of the woodland shadows. In places, it is as if autumn had set candles along these dusty cloisters to light pilgrims to some shrine, and in many a hollow glade one may think he has found the shrine itself, an altar perhaps

of gray rock, covered with a wonderful altar cloth of dainty cedar moss all patterned. with polypote ferns, and with a great birch candelabra stretching protecting arms above it, all alight with a thousand candles of yellow leaves. The heat of the summer sun above ray filtered by the feathery firs is caught in these yellow leaves that hold back the last of its fire and set the place about with a cool, holy glow, an illumination that is like a presence before which one must bow down in reverent adoration. After all, it is not a defeat that It has come to the fiery forces of summer that have so well held the hills, it is a conversion. In the cloistered seclusion of the woods one knows this, and that seclusion obtains for much of the

four-mile climb to the summit of Lafayette. Once or twice, on the way, the gray brow of Mount Cannon looks in through gaps in the foliage from its great height, seeming to lean across the notch and peer solemnly down from directly overhead. So narrow is this deep defile between two mighty mountains. A mile up and the trail leans to a brief level, where it bridges the chasm between the spur of the mountain, which is Eagle Cliff, and the main mass. Here at a glimpse comes an idea of what happened when the mountains were made. The whole Franconia range, one thinks, must have come up out of the hard-pressed levels of the earth in one great rock mass, from which the foundations settled and let portions lean away and split off. Here in the Eagle Cliff notch is a great gap of the splitting,

now more than half-filled with fragments of the rock which fell away in enormous chunks when the action took place. Rocks the size of a city block lie here, roughly placed one upon another, with caverns of unknown depth made by the openings between them. Out of these caverns wells up on the hottest days a cold that undoubtedly comes from ice that forms in-depths to which no man's eye penetrated, and that remains the year through. The clinging of gray lichens upon these rocks has made root hold for the dainty cedar moss, which makes them green and holds moisture in turn for the roots of furs that grow from the very rocks and fill their gaps with forest. Here, where once was titanic motion is now titanic rest, and out of summer sun from above and winter coolness from below,

wild flowers build tender petals and distill perfumes the brief season through. Aster's and Goldenrod lingering still in the crannied wall, the cool airs that made them late in blooming, equally delaying their passing. In this green gap in the gray granite, summer's conversion is long delayed, though winter waits just below her flowers, the whole season through. More than a mile, the path again climbed steeply through closely set evergreens, in whose perpetual shade the moist mosses are knee-deep above all rocks and fallen timber. Nowhere can one see better the value of spruce and fur growth on mountain sides in the preservation of the mountains themselves. Beneath this everlasting cushion of wet moss, reinforced by roots, each rock lies in place

and nothing short of an avalanche can stir it. Where the path has led in the sunlight on the moss, the torrents have stripped it clean from the surface, and frost and storm year by year gully the opening deeper. It is astounding this sponge of moss that climbs to the top with the path. sphagnum's and dainty cedar moss predominating but seemingly all other varieties intermingled as well and at the top one finds how persistent in its withdrawal the summit of a great mountain like lafayette can be this is only the top of a westerly spur a far greater chunk than eagle cliff but only a chunk of the main mountain that also broke off when the foundations of the range settled strange to relate the ravine that lies between is choked not with mighty rocks, but with a level that has for a surface at least a boggy space in which lie two sheets of water, the Eagle Lakes, 4,146 feet in elevation. There is no summit, rather it is another notch, and the peak of Lafayette lies more than a thousand feet farther on into the blue. A little above

this point, the firs cease and the moss with them. The rest of the way lies over broken stone that has crumbled from rough ledges, unrestricted by any mossy protection. In the gravel ground from it, rossum stunted furs, some very dwarf birches and scattered wildflowers, but the way to the summit lies for all that through a desert. From its jagged agglomeration of rocks scattered on ledges that still hold to the main mass of rock, which is the mountain, one looks north or south along a great rocky ridge, which is the crest of the Franconia Range. North lie the great outlying spurs and buttresses of Lafayette, leading across a high coal to Garfield,

which sticks a bare rock pinnacle skyward. Southward, a well-worn path lies along the ridge to Lincoln, Hastack, Liberty, and Flume, each just a rise in the crest, which lies along the ponderous bulk of really one mountain. Garfield is in a certain measure off by itself, but these others are all mere pinnacles of one great structure, Lafayette being the highest. Here, as on the presidential range, one finds alpine plants, conspicuously the tiny mountain sandwort, so constant a bloomer as to show its white flowers still in mid-September. With this, but no others in bloom, were the three-toothed sink foil, the mountain avins, mountain cranberry, mountain goldenrod, bilberry, and Labrador tea, all to be seen

on the final crest, which is Lafayette's summit. A north wind out of the clear sky had blown at the start of my trip, but as if to prove that its day was not yet over, the wind out of the south came over the long barren ridge, bringing butterflies in its train. For a time, the two winds seemed to meet at the very mountain top, and a yellow coelius that was the first to come, caught between the two, coasted upward and disappeared toward the zenith, as if even the summit of Lafayette were not high enough for him. Later, when the south wind had fairly driven that from the north back toward the Canadian border, I saw several of these, which I took to be Colius Philodice, the common sulfur, flitting about the summit,

their yellow, pale, and clear, compared with that of the autumn-tinted birches just down the slope. Two morning cloaks, a Compton tortoise, and a grapta prognah, made up the list of other butterflies seen. summer was doing well to be able to show even these so late in September on so high a summit as Lafayette. I looked curiously for the little gray O'Anneas Semidea, the white mountain butterfly, which is so common in earlier summer on the presidential range, and said to be confined to it, but I did not see it. Perhaps this variety is not to be found on Lafayette, although the altitude is sufficient. The food plants are there, and the same geological conditions which left this variety. islanded on Washington, no doubt apply. The south wind which brought up the butterflies and which pushed the north wind back brought up also a gray haze, which swept in like a sea turn. It blotted out

the Ossippy Mountains and the little squam range. For a time, the sandwich peaks stood out, deep blue against its pale blue blur, then they melted into it and were gone. It came on and took tocumse, Osceola, and Cancamaegas. Kinneau, Cushman, and Musilaki were drowned in it, one after another, but still to the eastward, Carrigan and Hancock showed, and below them, the broad Pemagawaset Valley was spread out like a map. Almost at my feet was the broad swath of ruin which past years of lumbering have cut in this once beautiful valley of primeval forest. For miles down the western slope of the Franconia Range, and beyond, all the valleys are bare, and all slopes that the utmost daring can climb are denuded. On mile after mile,

save for in spots, a pale undergrowth of blueberry and wild cherry, only dead birches stand, stretching bare white bones to the sky in ghostly appeal. Islanded in it here and there are peaks and ridges, still beautiful in deep green evergreens, with just a misty touch of the tender yellow of autumn-tinted birches, wood too small or too dangerously set to tempt the axe. The rest is desert, dignified, haughty, even in the mighty uplift of its long slopes and bare gray crags, but desert for all that. It is a relief to turn the eye from this to the rich green of the unscathed slopes of the notch itself. A thin blue line of air between Eagle Cliff and Mount Cannon shows the narrow passage where the mountains split apart, perhaps to let man and the streams go through.

Over the way lies Moran Lake, a blue gem among the green ridges of Cannon. At my feet, so near it seems, is the round eye of Echo Lake, which is at the bottom of the notch, but seems almost as near as the larger Eagle Lake, which is but a thousand feet below, far up on the side of the mountain. All about are bold bare cliffs showing through the green, but their bareness is that of nature, and the deep green around them grows, forgetful of the axe, which for many long years has not been laid at their roots, perhaps never will be again. Southerly, the Pemago-Waset Valley opened far to the villages of Woodstock and on to Plymouth. But even as I looked, the pale blue haze blotted them out and swept on up the valley. The south wind was getting into a passion,

bringing clouds behind and above the haze, putting out the sun and growling in gray gusts about the summit. It shouted threats in my ears and shook me as I went down the zigzag trail to the shelter of the firs about the nearer Eagle Lake. Then it lulled and dropped a tear or two of warm rain as if ashamed of itself. Star Lake on Mount Madison is but a puddle among the bare, slaty, coherent rocks of the northern peaks. The lakes of the clouds are real lakes, beautifully set, but barren in themselves, their shallow rocky bottoms allowing no growth of water plants. Spalding Lake at the head of the Great Gulf on Washington and Hermit Lake at the bottom of the Tuckerman Ravine are singularly alike, shallow, transparent, barren, and beautifully set among spiring firs and spruces, each in the heart of a mighty gorge. But here, way up on the high shoulder of Lafayette, where one would think no lake could possibly be,

is a little one in a brown bog, a bog in which the mountain cranberry sets its deep red fruit to the sun, and the snowberry scatters its pearls all over the maroon carpet of the swagnam. Curiously beautiful fruit, that of the creeping snowberry. Here is a cranberry vine grown slender with tiny leaves, fringing it most delicately. Here at its tip is an elongated checkerberry, waxy, almost transparent white, with an odor of checkerberry, a pleasantly acid pulp that reminds one of cranberry

and an after flavor of checkerberry also. If there were prehistoric wizards in plant breeding in these mountains, surely one must have crossed fertilized the cranberry with the pollen of the checkerberry to the producing of this shy, delicate, hardy, and altogether lovely fruit. To this antediluvian bird, bank, it may be that the old man of the mountain is a statue, erected by a grateful posterity in the

notch below. In the lake itself grows the tape grass, stretching its straw yellow ribbons along the surface, and curiously ripening its knobby fruit underwater. With it in scattered groups was the yellow pond lily with its broad ovate leaves, floating and turning up their edges to the gusts of the south wind that swung in over the corner of the mountain. Strange indeed these familiar water plants looked in this little tarn, swung more than 4,000 feet in air on the shoulder of so mighty a mountain. All other mountain lakes at such heights had seemed weird to me in the crystalline barreness of their purity. This one, with its boggy shore, its mud, and its homely water weeds, was so friendily familiar that I lingered long on its banks. The southerly wind had massed its clouds

high above the notch, and in their shadow the dusk of early nightfall was on the path and deep in the woods on my way down. Yet in the bottom of the deep defile between Lafayette and Cannon, I saw the north wind again pressing onto victory, scattering the clouds above Mount Cannon, and letting the sunset light through far over its northerly slopes. The nimbus broke into cumulus clouds, and these to fluffs of Cirrus, that showed at first an angry red. Then this softened to pink, and finally dimpled into miles of gold, between which the depths of the sky showed a pure blue of forgiveness, such as can be found in heaven only, when one looks up into it from the bottom of a deep, like that of profile notch. Not in flowers or gems, or in the pure eyes of children,

can be found such a blue as the Franconia sky showed, out of which night and deep peace settled like a benediction on the mountains. End of chapter 17. Chapter 18 of White Mountain Trails by Winthropackard. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Mountain Farm. One on Wildcat Mountain, the highest ever cleared in New England. Last night, the north wind died of its own cold among the high peaks and black frost bit deep down in the valley meadows, killing all tender herbage. Then morning broke in a sky of crystal clarity of a blue as pure and cool as the hope of heaven. heaven in the heart of a Puritan, through miles of which all objects showed as if through a lens. From the ledges of Wildcat Mountain, I looked over to the summit of Mount Washington,

whose details were so plain that the five trains that came up were visible to the naked eye, and with glass I could see the people flow from them in a slow black stream. It's tied-flecked with the flotsam of fall millinery. So still was the air upon the summit that from each engine as it came in sight over the ridge stood high and straight, a cloudy pillar of mingled smoke and steam. The Israelites who of old were thus led through the wilderness to the promised land could have had no more visible guide. Slowly to the mountain rim sank the frosted fragment of the once round and yellow moon,

a wan, gray ghost, seeking obliteration in the greyer ledges of the summit cone. On these gray ledges of the cone, the scant herbage of the summer clung in flowing, warm, tan-brown streaks, drifting down as snow does from the summit, but coloring only perhaps a 20th part of the surface. All else was the gray of the rock, softened by distance into a cool delight to the eye. Lower, the alpine garden slants toward the ravines, black in patches with dwarf firs, soft green and others, where in moist hollows, the grasses and moss still grow. But for the most part, showing the olive yellow of autumn-tinted tinned tundra. Only below this, where the garden drops off steeply to the slope between Tuckerman and Huntington

ravines, was the rich yellow of the dwarf birches to be seen, here a clear sweep of color, lower still modeled with the black growth of spruce and fir. There was never a flame of rock maple in sight on all the visible slope of the big mountain, but below in the middle distance of a slope up to slide peak, below the boulder, and from there down into pink-of-notch, they flared, one after another, ending in a blazing group whose conflagration was stabbed by the points of the firs on the near slope of Wildcat. Such beauties as these, the mountains set daily before the eyes of the man, who hewed out the highest farm in New England a century or less ago on the high shoulder of a westerly spur of Wildcat mountain. Few New Englanders are farmers now. In the 18th century, most of them were, and the tide of

young men who had the courage and the brawn to build farms in the wilderness rose high in the New Hampshire hills. The river-bottom lands were taken up, then the lower valleys, then the higher slopes, and finally, as the 19th century grew, the ultimate pioneers landed on the very shoulders of the White Mountains. Up the valley of the Wildcat River climbed the Fernals, the hazes, the wazes, the Wilson's, the misserves, Wentworths, Johnson's, and half a dozen other pioneer families, each hewing out of the terrific timber and grubbing out of the grim rocks with infinite labor, the fields that to this day smile up to the sun. Hall, the traditions have it, was the name of the highest-minded pioneer,

who set his farm on a spur of wildcat, 2,500 feet above the sea level. He is said to have been an educated man, born far down the state and educated, in college. Tradition has it, too, that he was a poor farmer, which is what tradition always says of college men who farm. However that may be, he certainly was a worker. On his farm acre after acre of mighty trees crashed to the ground in the wine-sweet mountain air and went up again in the pungent smoke of the burns, whereby the first settlers cleared their ground and made ready for their primitive first plantings. Gray ledges and black soil, inextricably intermingled, dropped down his formed from terrace to terrace toward the Wildcat River, and on the highest of these stood his

house. Its foundations only remain today, showing the vast square occupied by the central chimney. Around the foundations of this, the cellar lingers, narrow and apologetic. The rooms above, even, must have been rather crowded by this Leviathan chimney, four square to the world, and with a big fireplace on each side. We are apt to think of the houses of the early mountaineers as being cold in winter, but this one need never have been. That great bulk of enclosed chimney once warmed through would hold the heat in its stone heart for hours, and the wood for its reheating was so plentiful as to be in the way. From his dorsal to the south, the Pioneer's family looked forth upon the sweet curves of the Wildcat River Valley at their very feet. From the shoaling green of the sea of air

beneath them, it deepens into a richer and softer blue, as Mile runs beyond Mile to the spot where Thorn and Iron Mountains slope toward one another to a broad notch, through which the glance runs on down the Seco to the horizon line where the Ossipe Mountains melt and mingle with the blue of the sky. Thorne Mountain blocks the lower end of the Wildcat Valley, in which the pioneer saw from his doorstone more farms than I see today. Down the slope of Wildcat beneath him, a half dozen since his time have passed to the slumber of pasture, are on to the complete oblivion of returning forest. Over on Black Mountain, now unoccupied, were as many more. But the view in the Maine is the same as he saw on clear September days, nor need one think he or any other mountain farmer was or is

insensible to the beauty of it. You rarely get one to talk much about it. They all know how poor things' words are, but they feel the joy of it for all that. From the northern edge of Hall's topmost terrace, I look forth across a wide gulf of crystallized. and air to the rough slopes and ridges of Wildcat and Carter Mountains. The middle of September is past, and autumn is setting the seal of her colors deeper and deeper on the high hills. Both mountains have a saddle blanket, so to speak, of green black dwarf firs, but each of these is decorated with a misty feather stitching of yellow birch leaves. Below each blanket is a ridge up and down which fire swept some years ago. On these ridges, great birches, all dead,

stand so close together that their trunks line it with perpendicular parallel scratches of gray, all crosshatched with a netting of limbs that softened the hole into a wonderful warm tone. In the greatest distance, these scratches blend into a fur that is softer and more beautiful than any ever brought into the markets of civilization by the Hudson Bay Company. Other winter pelts that the mountains wear may be warmer, but none can vie with this in the delight of its coloration. Down the ridge again the birch is thin out, and all among them and below, the bird cherry trees paint the slope, a soft churice, a color that in the distance is but a neutral one, a background for the rich hues of the rock maples that climb into it from the ravines. Not all these have felt the flare of autumn in their blood. Many seem to ride toward the summit in Lincoln Green. The outcry of beagles should be just ahead of them, but more have added a scarlet facing to their hunting coats,

and some others are fairly aflame with the richest tint that any autumn leaf can get. The flaming crimson of the rock maple foliage ripened under a full sun where mountain brooks soak a primal vigor from the granite and send it upward into white cambium layers all summer long. The 25th of September finds the hillside displaying the autumn hunting colors for all who follow the hounds. The very sight of them sets the blood a gallop and brings the view halloo to the lips of the moon.

most sedate. All along the horizon to the east of this highest farm stretches the green wall of Black Mountain. In the Pioneer's Day, no doubt, it deserved its descriptive title for the spruce growth which closed it, but on the easy slopes this did not last so long as the pioneer, and the green of deciduous trees which has replaced it belies the mountain's name. So high is this wall of green hill that only doublehead peers over it, and that by way of a gap in the ridge, a little of the purple haze of distance setting it apart, lest one take it for a part of the same mountain. But I fancy the gaze of the pioneer passing oftenest a little to the west of south, passing the smiling beauty of the valley and the stately cone of Kyrsarge to the summit of Iron

Mountain, where to this day one may see the broad, cultivated fields of what I believe to be the next highest farm in New England, and one still occupied by descendants of the pioneers that hewed it out on a broad terrace not far below the summit. This is the Hayes Farm, and it is a singular fact that, while, according to the surveys, the Hayes Farm is many hundred feet below this site of the ancient Hall homestead, and looks it. On the contrary, when looking across from the Hayes Farm, thinks himself several hundred feet above it. In the same way, Hall could look across to the Garrish Farm on Thorn Mountain, and would surely know that it was far below him. Yet on the Garrish Place, looking across the Hall's fields, I always feel sure that the

garish place is much the higher. As a matter of fact, a contour map places Hall's house 600 feet higher in the air than that of Hayes, and 800 higher than Garrish. In so much, at least, was the college-bred farmer superior to his good neighbors of other mountaintops. Farther westward, the highest farmer looked in his day, as one does now, upon an unbroken wilderness, where the giant stairs break the long levels of the Montalban range, and stand blue-black against the gold of the sunset. Only on the north and northwest was his view broken by the highest points of Wildcat Mountain, which sheltered him completely from the sweep of the winter winds. It is now, as it was then, a woodlot, and from it the forest steadily moves down into the open

spaces of this highest New England farm. The furs and spruces sit about in it now in groups, reminding one of dark-plumed aborigines that seem to have come back and to be holding councils once more in this clearing of the pale face. The unmoan grass stands deep all about these encroaching forest trees, and lacking the care of the farmer, has cured itself and waits in vain to be harvested. While all through it, the sunlight silvers the dry white panicles of the ever-lestone. the only flower of the season on these terraced fields, which so steadily and surely drift back to be again the forest, from which the college-bred pioneer with such labor reclaim them. There is a pungent aroma of old herb gardens about this silvery everlasting, though it is

essentially a wildflower, that seems to bear dreams of the pioneer grandmothers of the lovely Wildcat Valley. It is as if in the bright September sun they came back with silvery hair and white kerchiefs and caps, for one more stroll in the pleasant fields and one more look at the beautiful valley below, a landscape than which none in New England is more beautiful. The nasal twittering of red-breasted nut hatches led me up the hill above the highest cleared terrace into the forest that from its multiplicity of fascinating wood roads gives evidence of having always been the farm woodlot. The pioneer should certainly have loved this hill. It sheltered him on all parts of his farm, from the bite of winter winds out of the northwest. Out of its deep heart, it gave him water that he had

to but allow to run to his buildings, and from its top, the wood which he cut would coast downgrade to his fireplace. An hour before, it had been a silent forest filled with a yellow underglow of sunlight, doubly distilled from the ripening leaves of white and yellow birch. Now, in a moment, it was filled with quaint twittering and snatches of eerie song, with the nut hatches, came chickadees, and the red-breasted ones sang in part their song, at least an eerie imitation of it, such as only nut-hatches, could make. The nut-hatches are the goblin acrobatts of the deep wood. Gravity may exist where they perform, but it does not trouble them. They walk with utter disregard to it, and in their evolutions I expect any day to see one fly upside down. And if I

were mean enough to shoot one, I would as soon expect him to fall up into the sky as to fall down to the ground. Nor would I be much surprised if he hung like Mayamette's coffin suspended between heaven and earth. If Brownies ever tried to blow the notes of the chickadee song on tiny tin trumpets ranged in Palmer Cox Rose on mossy tree trunks, they no doubt get the same result that the red-breasted nut hatches did that day in the woodlot of the highest farm in New England. Beside this they sang little twittering ditties that were quite musical and altogether uncanny as well, and seemed to fill the golden woodland aisles with all sorts of suggestions of goblin adventures to be found there. Between me and the deep heart of the Carter-Mariah range was unbroken wilderness,

out of which might welcome any of the phantoms, the peacockets, were wont to declare they saw there. Climbing steadily toward the top of the long ridge, which swings round from the old farm to the summit of Wildcat, I thought I heard footsteps of that great white moose that breathed fire from his nostrils and turned back all arrows before they reached him. Nearing the top, I knew I heard him, or something just as good, an irregular stamping, which I stealthily approached from behind the screen of gray tree trunks and golden forest leaves. Almost at the top I could see the shaking of boughs from which the creature was browsing, and to me, approaching from below, and with the elfin incantations of the nut hatches still in my ears,

These seemed very high in the air. Some creature of prodigious size was just beyond, and in a moment more a turn of a rock corner revealed part of him. A long, lean, white neck I saw, and a head stretching high up to a maple limb, whence prehensile lips, plucked pink-cheeked leaves. Its mouth full, the creature turned a long face toward me and neighed, and the forest aised echoed the spluttering whinny in tones full as uncaned. It's mouth full, tanny in their laughter as had been those of the nut hatches, also vastly louder. Somebody's old white horse looked at me with a mild curiosity, as I tramped up to him on this ridge of the wildcat wilderness, and at sight of him, the spectral moose vanished into the past century there to remain with the Indians who claimed to have seen him. Spectral enough the old horse looked here in the deep shadows of the wood. He had yarded on the hilltop, much as deer do in winter. I found well-worn trails of his, leading hither and thither on the ridge, but none going away from it, and under the shade of a beach, in what had tried to be a thick bed of

spinulous wood ferns, was evidently his nightly bed. He had worn the earth bare in his clumsy, getting up and lying down. Far down the terraces of the old farm in sunny glades were pastured other horses and cattle. There they stayed, for the feed was good and water near, and they loved the sight, of the lower pasture bars that will later let them out to the road to stalls of which they dream. But here was a finer soul than these, a hermit that preferred the cool fragrance of woodfurn and the unmolested quiet of his wooded hilltop, from the loopholes of whose retreat he might look upon the world. I fancy him, the best horse of the herd. Now and then you will find a man like that, and I dare say such a one was the maker of the old farm. As I came down again into his highest field,

the sun was sinking behind Boots spur, and cool blue shadows stretched out across the low, sweet curves of the Wildcat River Valley. Against them, the pale smoke of supper fires rose lazily, and far over from the gorge below Carter-notch floated the hush of falling waters. The blue of the mountains to southward deepened, and only on their summits sat the rows of sunset fire. Behind me in the wood was now no sound of nut-hatches, but a single robin sat in a tree-top, and sang softly, as if to himself. On such a scene of peace and unsurpassed beauty, it is easy to fancy the college-bred pioneer looking at nightfall and finding it good. If his descendants descended through the pasture bars to be stall-fed in cities,

so much the worse for them. End of Chapter 18. Chapter 19 of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard. This Libre Fox recording is in the public domain. Summer's farewell, the blaze of its adieu to Mount Washington. Summer lingers yet just south of Mount Washington, and though often frowned away, as often returns to say goodbye, parting is such sweet sorrow. Already there have been days when the frown was deep, when the whore frost on the summit clung as white as snow in the sun, and refused to melt, even on the southerly slopes, when at night the cold of winter bit deep, and the lakes of the

clouds shone wan in the morning light under a coating of new black ice. Then summer has come back, dissolving the repentant frost into tears at a touch of warm lips, bending and quivering over the great gray dome of the summit, until, approaching from peaks to the southward, I have seen her presence surround all in a shimmering and folding of loving radiance. From the high ridge of Bootspur, I saw it thus, slipping back myself to say goodbye, of a day in late September. From no point in the mountains does one get a finer impression of the massive dignity of Washington Summit than from this. The spur is itself no mean mountain, rising with precipitous abruptness from between Tuckerman Ravine and the Gulf of Slides, bounding in rounding

thousand-foot ledges from Pinkham Notch to a height of more than 5,500 feet. It lifts the persistent climber to a veritable mizzen-top, whence he looks still upward to the main trunk of the summit, with the wonderful rock rift of Tuckerman Ravine between, dropping out of sight behind sheer cliffs at his feet. On such an autumn day, there is a mighty acceleration in thus floating in blue sky on such a pinnacle. The body is conscious that the spirit within it steps forth from peak to peak into limitless space and is ready to shout with the joy of it. Indian summer, which does not come down to the sea coast levels for another month, touches the high ranges now, and under its magic they remember spring. It paints the brown grasses, the sedges, and the leaves of

the three-toothed sink foil, which scantily streak the cone of Washington with a purple tint, and the gray rocks themselves ripen like grapes with a soft blue bloom in all shadows. To me, the finest of the four trails which lead to the summit of Booth Spur is that which comes up from Pinkham Notch by way of the Glen Boulder. Its start is through a forest primeval, the lumber, men have taken the spruce, to be sure, but here are birches along the footpath that may have been growing when Darby Field first came this way to the summit of Washington with his two Indians. It may be not. Birches are quick-growing trees, yet here are some that are almost three feet in diameter,

having the great solid trunks and shaggy, scant heads of foliage, which are characteristic of trees that reach maturity in a forest before it knows the axe. Whatever the trials of the trail, it is worthwhile to climb among such trees as these. It is a steep trail in legy spots, and it soon leads to slopes where the axe has not followed the spruce, onto a growth which the axe scorns, and on again to a dwarf tangle of furs that are hardly to be passed without the cutting of a canyon. Not in the mangroves of gulf swamps, nor in the rhododendron slicks of the southern Appalachians, can a traveler find a more determinedly dense impasse. pediment to his passage than in these mountain firs where they dwindle to chin height and interlace their

century-old stubs of branches. Farther up they shorten into knee-deep carpet, which hardly delays the passage, and from these emerges the great cliff on whose verge hangs the boulder. Heu does not believe that, quote, there were giants in those days, unquote, that they fought on the presidential range, and that the head of one cut off and petrified with fear rolled down to this spot where it, miraculously stopped, has probably never seen the boulder from the ledge about north of its point of poise. There it looks all these things. It has a George Washington nose, a Booker Washington chin, and the low forehead of the caveman. It has even an ear plugged with a bluish slaty rock quite different from the brown sandstone of which the hole is composed, as this is quite different

from the various rocks of the ledges round about. Motorists driving up the Glen Road can see the boulder ahead of them outlined against the sky. It looks from that point as if it might roll down and stop the car at any time. But if it looks insecure in its position to motorists in the highway till the alpinist who stands beside it, this appearance of instability is startling. Jokund Day never poised more on tiptoe on the misty mountain top than does this big rockhead on the verge of the cliff. I, for one, dislike to go directly below it. Someday it is going to roll on down the mountain, and that might be the day. In the clearness of the autumn air, all the forest of Pinkham Notch and its approaches lay far below my feet. The world below was a scotch plaid

of equally proportioned crimson and green, with a finer stripe of rich yellow. Every maple is at the height of its flame, but the birches of the valley still hold much of their green, at least from above. below them in the forest one walks as if at the bottom of a sea of golden light in which flecks of other color fall or spring into view at each new turn of the path the hay-scented ferns are almost as white as the bark of the canoe birches the brakes are a golden brown and all the under forest world is yellow with the leaves of all varieties of birch only the white rod sets blotches of maroon in its great oval leaves and shows among them its deep blue of clustering berries. But none of this reaches my eye as I sit high in air above it. Thence the world below is a scotch plaid, out of which the roar of Glen Ellis Falls rises, the falls themselves completely hidden within the plaid. More and more of the underworld of birch yellow comes to the surface as the trees climb the hill till at the last they spread a golden mist of color wonderful to behold.

At certain portions of the slope, the furs begin again and go on up the hill with the birch slender and beautiful, aspiring and inspiring, and even along among the bleak rocks they creep. Soft green mats of spreading limbs, flecked here and there with the yellow of creeping birches and the maroon of low blueberries, all this patterned among the exquisite lichen grays of the rocks. All the southerly ridge beyond the boulder is a rolling smoke of these golden birch tops prick through with the green black spires of spruce and fir, nor has any slope on any mountain more beauty to offer to the eye on this day in late September, when the air is like a crystal lens through which one looks into unmeasured distances and sees clearly. Behind the boulder,

terrace by terrace, the mountain rises to the top of slide peak. Whence one may see the magic of the air lenses change this mingling of vivid colors to a blend which is a rich violet and loses its red as the distance grows greater till it ends on the far horizon in a pure blue that's seems born of the very sky itself, and to sleep in its arms. With it, the eye floats over the ranges that rim the horizon half around, touching and soaring from wildcat and black onto boltface, and on again to be lost in the maze of hills that ride eastward into the dim distance of the state of Maine. More to the southward, doublehead lifts his twin peaks in massive dignity, and over thorn is Kyrsarge, almost airy in the contrast of its perfect cone.

On again southeast and south, flash lakes, silver in Conway and Ossipe, levels pond and in the far distance Sabago, lighting the softest blue toward a haze that one suspects is the sea. Due south, between peak after peak, between Pogis and Shakokura, and through a gap in the Ossipe range, lie the waters of Winipasaki, shining beneath the noonday sun. The gulf of slides beneath my feet was a vast bowl of russet gold decorated with Chinese patterns of deep green. In its very bottom, I saw a black stream rounding the edge of a level open meadow where the deep grass had been trodden into paths by the passing deer. All round about it, the spruce and furs set a bristling wall of pointed tops, and the quivering

air that filled the bowl to the brim was obviously a liquid. I could see it flow up, and over the ridge toward the summit of Bootspur, and as if to prove that it did so, a red-tailed hawk, flapped up from the firs that surround the little meadow, caught the updrift of this southerly breeze, and soared on it in easy spirals to a point just above the ridge. Here he caught another current that came up the rocky branch valley, a breeze resinous with the last big area of spruce in sight from the summits near Mount Washington, pungent with the smoke of the great woodcutter camps in its midst, and soared on up Bootspur. And as he did so, the sun flashed back in white fire, from a point in a ledge of the spur,

overhanging the gulf of slides. Somewhere in the highest hills hung once the great carbuncle, whose fame led many early settlers to dare disaster in mountain searches for precious gems. Tradition has it that the great gem vanished from its matrix long ago, perhaps it did, but something flashes white fire from a high cliff on the spur to the eye of him who gets the sun at just the right angle from slide peak. The carbuncle may be there yet. Certainly the ridge that leads up from the boulder is rich in matrices for gems. Out through its granite burst veins of sparkling quartz, dazzling white, pink and green. Embedded in this quartz are great crystals of silvery mica

and smaller ones of black tourmaline. There are spots along the trail that glitter like a Bowery Jewelers window. This profusion of gem-like stones is to be found all along the way to the high range of Bootspur and make it doubly fascinating. If the great carbuncle ever really hung high in the mountains, I fancy it is still not far from this neighborhood. Very likely it broke off from its cliff and lies now buried in the debris of slides at the bottom of the great precipice, which springs from the Gulf up to the top of the spur,

leaving only a fragment to dazzle my eyes from the top of slide peak. Perhaps the real thing is there yet, and I recommend the Glen Boulder Trail to present-day gem hunters. But from the mountaintops on the last days of September, all the world is one of gems. From Washington, the range and the southern peaks which rise from it showed ruby fires of sunlight transmitted by the colored leaves of creeping blueberries and the three-toothed sinkfoil. Lower emerald and bloodstone glinted among the dwarf firs, and lower yet were zones of gold for the setting of as many gems as the forest could furnish. All the blue stones of the lapidary showed their colors in the distance, while the woods of the lower slopes

were chrys, garnets, topaz, and all other stones which hold red, yellow, or green, glints in their hearts. Looking westward, only the center of the Fabian Plateau lacked this plating of interwoven gem colors. Instead, it was a level oasis of tender green, around which sat the great hotels in solemn sanctity. The perfect clearness of this still mountaineer was not only for the sight, but for the hearing. One's ear seemed to become a wireless telephone receiver, and sounds from great distances were plainly audible. Voices of other climbers. Voices of other climbers, I do not know how far away, seem to come out of the ledges of the high ridge of Buttspur, as I sat among them and looked toward the Great Grey Summit of Washington.

Among the Derry Vey Mountains in the northwest of Ireland, I have heard voices of children at play, a mile away, come out of a fairy wrath, or seem to come out of it, and here at far higher levels was a similar spell at work. Finally, I located other voices, seeing people on the summit of Monroe, and others down at the refuge hut near the lake of the clouds, talking to one another. That one party could hear the other at that distance was strange enough, but that I, a mile farther away than the people at the hut, could hear those on top of Monroe, was a still greater proof of the wonderful clearness of the air at that time.

Such a condition presages storm, and before night from the summit of Washington, I watched it materialize from thin air. In the sunlit stillness, a thin, long line of cumulostratus clouds appeared, circling the southern horizon from west to east. The line was broken in many places, and it was lower than the summit, for I could see clear sky and land through the brakes. It did not seem possible that such a line of disconnected clouds could bring storm, but they joined and thickened while I watched, and by and by, as if at a word of command, far to the south, light scuds were detached from them, and came scurrying in from beyond Jokokura, blotting out Tremont and Haystack, bear and moat, swallowing the Montalban Range and Rocky Branch Ridge in their floating fluff, coasting up and over Bootspur and blotting out Tuckerman's ravine.

They whirled in upon us, palpable, cotton-batting clouds, with a chill in their touch, and wrapped all the summit in gray obscurity. Again and again they broke and let me see all about, and each time I saw that the ring of cumulostratus clouds was denser at the bottom, and had moved in towards us from all the southern half of the horizon. The sunset, but we did not see it. The world was blotted out in a gray mass of scudding vapor that gradually became black night, out of which by and by rain came hissing on a wind that shook the buildings of the

tiny summit village beneath their clanking chains. Morning came, and noon of the next day. had changed from south to northwest, the sky in all valleys was clear, but still the dense clouds swirled about the cone of Washington and swathed the high ridge of the whole presidential range in masses of fleeting mist. No rain fell from this, but to stand in it was to gather and condense it in the pores of one's garments and become ringing wet. Feeling my way through this opaque blindness down the painted trail to Tuckerman Ravine, I was well down to the verge of the verge of the head wall before I could see below it. There the wind seems to make a funnel between the lion's

head and boots spur and draw the clouds through it so rapidly as to thin them. With the fall of a thousand streams splashing all about me, I saw the gray masses lift and through them the sun pouring its autumn gold upon the plaid of Pinkham Notch. The ravine below me was in shadow, but the fairy gold of that light seemed to fled back into it and infused all its dripping fur and wet rocks with rainbow colors. It decked this mighty chasm in the mightiest mountain, as if a bridle, and all along the downward trail by the rushing Cutler River, the firs shed diamonds and rubies with each touch of the wind, and the birches, yellow and black and white, held their autumn gold encrusted with precious stones. In such guise was the mounted

decked for my farewell to it, and though the slanting sun shone warm on the Glen Road when I reached it, I was wet with the parting tears, into which all this finery dissolved as I passed. The summit is lone now. The last train has taken the villagers to the base, and the village is boarded up. The hoar frost whitens it as I write, and the film of ice tells the clear eyes of the lakes of the clouds. Soon the snow will begin again to blow over the headwall into Tuckerman Ravine, and mass at the bottom into the glacier, which will once more stretch broad across the ravine next spring. Already the crimson of the rock maples, which flames the woodland, begins to sift down and leave the topmost twigs bear. Summer has said goodbye to the summit,

and though she looks often fondly back, she is well on her way south through the valleys. End of Chapter 19. End of White Mountain Trails by Winthrop Packard.