screen smaller."
The man hastily stepped aside, knocking over, as he did so, a blazing
brand, which he kicked viciously back into the fire.
Having carried the outworks, we approached the citadel. "Perhaps, sir,"
I ventured, "you can inform us where the landlord may be found?"
"You wanted dinner, I believe?" The tone in which this question was put
gave me goose-flesh. I could not speak, George dropped into a chair.
The colonel propped himself against the chimney-piece. I shrugged my
shoulders, and nodded expressively to my companions, who returned two
glances of eloquent dismay. Evidently nothing was to be got out of this
fellow.
"Dinner for one?" continued the eternal smoker.
"For three!" I exclaimed, out of all patience.
"For four; I shall eat double," added the colonel.
"Six!" shouted George, seizing the dinner-bell on the mantel-piece.
"Stop," said the man, betraying a little excitement; "don't ring that
bell."
"Why not?" demanded George; "we want to see the landlord; and, by Jove,"
brandishing the bell aloft, "see him we will!"
"He stands before you, gentlemen; and if you will have a little patience
I will see what can be done." So saying, he put his pipe on the
chimney-piece, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and went out,
muttering, as he did so. "The world was not made in a day."
In three-quarters of an hour we sat down to a funereal repast, the
bare recollection of which makes me ill, but which was enlivened by the
following conversation:
"How many inhabitants are in your tract?" I asked of the man who waited
on us.
"Do you mean inhabitants?"
"Certainly, I mean inhabitants."
"Well, that's not an easy one."
"How so?"
"Because the same question not only puzzled the State Legislature, but
made the attorney-general sick."
We became attentive.
"Explain that, if you please," said I.
"Why, just look at it: with only eight legal voters in the tract" (he
called it track), "we cast five hundred ballots at the State election."
"Five hundred ballots! then your voters must have sprung from the ground
or from the rocks."
"Pretty nearly so."
"Actual men?"
"Actual men."
"You are jesting."
My man looked at me as if I had offered him an affront. The supposition
was plainly inadmissible. He was completely innocent of the charge.
"You hear those men pounding away up the hill?" he demanded, jerking his
thumb in the direction indicated.
"Yes."
"Well, those are the five hundred voters. On election morning they came
to the polling-place with a ballot in one hand, and a pick, a sledge,
or a drill in the other. Our supervisor is a very honest, blunt sort of
man: he refused their ballots on the spot."
"Well?"
"Well, one of them had a can of nitro-glycerine and a coil of wire. He
deposited his can in a corner, hitched on the wire, and was going out
with his comrades, when the supervisor, feeling nervous, said,
"'The polls are open, gentlemen.'"
"Ingenious," remarked George.
The man looked astounded.
"He means dangerous," said I; "but go on."
"I will. When the votes were counted, at sundown, it was found that our
precinct had elected two representatives to the General Court. But when
the successful candidates presented their certificates at Concord, some
meddlesome city fellow questioned the validity of the election. The
upshot of it was that the two nitro-glycerites came back with a flea in
each ear."
"And the five hundred were disfranchised," said George.
"Why, as to that, half were French Canadians, half Irish, and the devil
knows what the rest were; I don't."
"Never mind the rest. You see," said George, rising, "how, with the
railway, the blessings of civilization penetrate into the dark corners
of the earth."
The colonel began his sacramental, "That beats--" when he was
interrupted by a second explosion, which shook the building. We paid our
reckoning, George saying, as he threw his money on the table, "A heavy
charge."
"No more than the regular price," said the landlord, stiffly.
"I referred, my dear sir, to the explosion," replied George, with the
sardonic grin habitual to him on certain occasions.
"Oh!" said the host, resuming his pipe and his fireplace.
We spent the remaining hours of this memorable afternoon sauntering
through the Notch, which is dripping with cascades, and noisy with
mountain torrents. The Saco, here nothing but a brook, crawls languidly
along its bed of broken rock. From dizzy summit to where they meet the
river, the old wasted mountains sit warming their scarred sides in the
sun. Looking up at the passage of the railway around Mount Willey, it
impressed us as a single fractured stone might have done on the Great
Pyramid, or a pin's scratch on the face of a giant. The locomotive,
which groped its way along its broken shell, stopped, and stealthily
moving again, seemed a mouse that the laboring mountain had brought
forth. But when its infernal clamor broke the silence, what demoniacal
yells shook the forests! Farewell to our dream of inviolable nature. The
demon of progress had forced his way into the very sanctuary. There were
no longer any White Mountains.
We passed by the beautiful brook Kedron, flung down from the utmost
heights of Willey, between banks mottled with colors. Then, high up on
our right, two airy water-falls seemed to hang suspended from the summit
of Webster. These, called respectively the Silver Cascade, and the
Flume withdrew the attention from every other object, until a sharp turn
to the right brought the overhanging precipice of Mount Willard full
upon us. This enormous mass of granite, rising seven hundred feet above
the road, stands in the very jaws of the gorge, which it commands from
end to end.
[Illustration: THE CASCADES, MOUNT WEBSTER.]
Here the railway seems fairly stopped; but with a graceful sweep it
eludes the mountain, and glides around its massive shoulder, giving, as
it does so, a hand to the high-road, which comes straggling up the sharp
ascent. The river, now shrunken to a rivulet, is finally lost to view
beneath heaped-up blocks of granite, which the infuriated old mountain
has hurled down upon it. It is heard painfully gurgling under the ruins,
like a victim crushed, and dying by inches.
Now and here we entered a close, dark defile hewn down between cliffs,
ascending on the right in regular terraces, on the left in ruptured
masses. These terraces were fringed at the top with tapering evergreens,
and displayed gaudy tufts of maple and mountain-ash on their cool gray.
Those on the right are furthermore decorated with natural sculptures,
indicated by sign-boards, which the curious investigate profitably or
unprofitably, according to their fertility of imagination.
For a few rods this narrow cleft continues; then, on a sudden, the rocks
which lift themselves on either side shut together. An enormous mass
has tumbled from its ancient location on the left side, and, taking a
position within twenty feet of the opposite precipice, forms the natural
gate of the Notch, through which a way was made for the common road
with great labor, through which the river frays a passage, but where
no one would imagine there was room for either. The railway has made a
breach for itself through the solid rock, greatly diminishing the native
grandeur of the place. All three emerge from the shadow and gloom of the
pass into the cheerful sunshine of a little prairie, at the extremity of
which are seen the white walls of a hotel.
The whole route we had traversed is full of contrasts, full of
surprises; but this sudden transition was the most picturesque, the most
startling of all. We seemed to have reached the end of the world.
IX.
_CRAWFORD'S._
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.
SHAKSPEARE.
All who have passed much time at the mountains have seen the
elephant--near the gate of the Notch.
Though it is only from Nature's chisel, the elephant is an honest one,
and readily admitted into the category of things curious or marvellous
constantly displayed for our inspection. Standing on the piazza of the
hotel, the enormous forehead and trunk seem just emerging from the
shaggy woods near the entrance to the pass. And the gray of the granite
strengthens the illusion still more. From the Elephant's Head, a title
suggestive of the near vicinity of a public-house, there is a fine view
down the Notch for those who cannot ascend Mount Willard.
The Crawford House, being built at the highest point of the pass,
nearly two thousand feet above the sea, is not merely a hotel--it is a
water-shed. The roof divides the rain falling upon it into two streams,
flowing on one side into the Saco, on the other into the Ammonoosuc.
Here the sun rises over the Willey range, and sets behind Mount Clinton.
The north side of the piazza enables you to look over the forests into
the valley of the Ammonoosuc, where the view is closed by the chain
dividing this basin from that of Israel's River. But we are not yet
ready to conduct the reader into this Promised Land.
My window overlooked a grassy plain of perhaps half a mile, the view
being closed by the Gate of the Notch, now disfigured by snow-sheds
built for the protection of the railway. The massive, full-rounded bulk
of Webster rose above, the forests of Willard tumbled down into the
ragged fissure. Half-way between the hotel and the Gate, over-borne by
the big shadow of Mount Clinton, extends the pretty lakelet which is
the fountain-head of the Saco. Beyond the lake, and at the left, is
where the old Notch House stood. This lake was once a beaver-pond, and
this plain a boggy meadow, through which a road of corduroy and sods
conducted the early traveller. The highway and railway run amicably side
by side, dividing the little vale in two.
[Illustration: ELEPHANT'S HEAD, WINTER.]
This pass, which was certainly known to the Indians, was, in 1771,
rediscovered by Timothy Nash, a hunter, who was persuaded by Benjamin
Sawyer, another hunter, to admit him to an equal share in the discovery.
In 1773 Nash and Sawyer received a grant of 2184 acres, skirting the
mountains on the west, as a reward. With the prodigality characteristic
of their class, the hunters squandered their large acquisition in a
little time after it was granted. Both the Crawford and Fabyan hotels
stand upon their tract.
Of many excursions which this secluded retreat offers, that to the
summit of Mount Washington, by the bridle-path opened in 1840 by Thomas
J. Crawford, and that to the top of Mount Willard, are the principal.
The route to the first begins opposite to the hotel, at the left; the
latter turns from the glen a quarter of a mile below, on the right.
Supposing Mount Washington a cathedral set on an eminence, you are here
on the summit of the eminence, with one foot on the immense staircase of
the cathedral.
Our resolve to ascend by the bridle-path was already formed, and we
regarded the climb up Mount Willard as indispensable. As for the
cascades, which lulled us to sleep, who shall describe them? We could
not lift our eyes to the heights above without seeing one or more
fluttering in the play of the breeze, and making rainbows in pure
diversion. President Dwight, in his "Travels," has no more eloquent
passage than that describing the Flume Cascade. How many since have
thrown down pen or pencil in sheer despair of reproducing, by words
or pigments, the aerial lightness, the joyous freedom; above all, the
exuberant, unquenchable vitality that characterize mountain water-falls!
Down the Notch is a masterpiece, hidden from the eye of the passer-by,
called Ripley Falls, which fairly revels in its charming seclusion.
Only a short walk from the hotel, by a woodland path, there is another,
Beecher's Cascade, whose capricious leaps and playful somersaults, all
the while volubly chattering to itself, like a child alone with its
playthings, fascinates us, as sky, water, and fire charm the eyes of an
infant. It is always tumbling down, and as often leaping to its feet to
resume its frolicsome gambols, with no loss of sprightliness or sign of
weariness that we can detect. Only a lover may sing the praises of these
mountain cascades falling from the skies:
"The torrent is the soul of the valley. Not only is it the Providence or
the scourge, often both at once, but it gives to it a physiognomy; it
gladdens or saddens it; it lends it a voice; it communicates life to it.
A valley without its torrent is only a hole."
They give the name of Idlewild to the romantic sylvan retreat, reached
by a winding path, diverging near the hotel, on the left. I visited
it in company with Mr. Atwater, whose taste and enthusiasm for the
work have converted the natural disorder of the mountain side into
a trysting-place fit for elves and fairies; but where one encounters
ladies in elegant toilets, enjoying a quiet stroll among the fern-draped
rocks. Some fine vistas of the valley mountains have been opened through
the woods--beautiful little bits of blue, framed in illuminated foliage.
One notes approvingly the revival of an olden taste in the cutting and
shaping of trees into rustic chairs, stairways, and arbors.
After a day like ours, the great fires and admirable order of the
hotel were grateful indeed. If it is true that the way to man's heart
lies through his stomach, the cherry-lipped waiter-girl, who whispered
her seductive tale in my too-willing ear at supper, made a veritable
conquest. My compliments to her, notwithstanding the penalty paid for
lingering too long over the griddle-cakes.
The autumn nights being cool, it was something curious to see the parlor
doors every now and then thrown wide open, to admit a man who came
trundling in on a wheelbarrow a monster log fit for the celebration of
Yule-tide. The city guest, accustomed to the economy of wood at home,
because it is dear, looks on this prodigality first with consternation,
and finally with admiration. When the big log is deposited on the
blazing hearth amid fusees of sparks, the easy-chairs again close around
the fireplace a charmed circle; and while the buzz of conversation goes
on, and the faces are illuminated by the ruddy glow, the wood snaps,
and hisses, and spits as if it had life and sense of feeling. The men
talk in drowsy undertones; the ladies, watching the chimney-soot catch
fire and redden, point out to each other the old grandame's pictures
of "folks coming home from meeting." This scene is the counterpart of
a warm summer evening on the piazza--both typical of unrestrained,
luxurious indolence. How many pictures have appeared in that old
fireplace! and what experiences its embers revived! Water shows us only
our own faces in their proper mask--nothing more, nothing less; but
fire, the element of the supernatural, is able, so at least we believe,
to unfold the future as easily as it turns our eyes into the past. If
only we could read!
When we arose in the morning, what was our astonishment to see the
surrounding mountains white with snow. Like one smitten with sudden
terror, they had grown gray in a night. Striking, indeed, was the
transformation from yesterday's pomp; beautiful the contrast between
the dark green below and the dead white of the upper zones. Thickly
incrusted with hoar-frost, the stiffened foliage of the pines and firs
gave those trees the unwonted appearance of bursting into blossom. Over
all a dull and brooding sky shed its cold, wan light upon the glen,
forbidding all thought of attacking the high summits, at least for this
day.
Dismissing this, therefore, as impracticable, we nevertheless determined
on ascending Mount Willard--an easy thing to do, considering you have
only to follow a good carriage-road for two miles and a half to reach
the precipices overlooking the Saco Valley.
Startling, indeed, by its sublimity was the spectacle that rewarded our
trouble a thousand-fold. Still, the sensations partook more of wonder
than admiration--much more. The unpractised eye is so utterly confounded
by the immensity of this awful chasm of the Notch, yawning in all its
extent and all its grandeur far down beneath, that, powerless to grasp
the fulness and the vastness thus suddenly encountered, it stupidly
stares into those far-retreating depths. The scene really seems too
tremendous for flesh and blood to comprehend. For an instant, while
standing on the brink of the sheer precipice, which here suddenly drops
seven or eight hundred feet, my head swam and my knees trembled.
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN THE NOTCH.]
First came the idea that I was looking down into the dry bed of some
primeval cataract, whose mighty rush and roar the imagination summoned
again from the tomb of ages, and whose echo was in the cascades, hung
like two white arms on the black and hairy breast of the adjacent
mountain. This idea carries us luck to the Deluge, of which science
pretends to have found proofs in the basin of the Notch. What am I
saying? to the Deluge! it transports us to the Beginning itself, when
"_Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters._"
You see the immense walls of Mount Willey on one side, and of Webster
on the other, rushing downward thousands of feet, and meeting in one
magnificently imposing sweep at their bases. This vast natural inverted
archway has the heavens for a roof. The eye roves from the shaggy head
of one mountain to the shattered cornices of the other. One is terrible,
the other forbidding. The naked precipices of Willey, furrowed by
avalanches, still show where the fatal slide of 1826 crushed its way
down into the valley, traversing a mile in only a few moments. Far down
in the distance you see the Willey hamlet and its bright clearing. You
see the Saco's silver.
Such, imperfectly, are the more salient features of this immense cavity
of the Notch, three miles long, two thousand feet deep, rounded as if
by art, and as full of suggestions as a ripe melon of seeds. I recall
few natural wonders so difficult to get away from, or that haunt you so
perpetually.
Like ivy on storied and crumbling towers, so high up the cadaverous
cliffs of Willey the hardy fir-tree feels its way, insinuating its long
roots in every fissure where a little mould has crept, but mounting
always like the most intrepid of climbers. Upon the other side, the
massed and plumed forest advances boldly up the sharp declivity of
Webster; but in mid-ascent is met and ploughed in long, thin lines by
cataracts of stones, poured down upon it from the summit. Only a few
straggling bushes succeed in mounting higher; and far up, upon the very
edge of the crumbling parapet, one solitary cedar tottered. The thought
of imminent destruction prevailed over every other. Indeed, it seemed
as if one touch would precipitate the whole mass of earth, stones, and
trees into the vale beneath.
Between these high, receding walls, which draw widely apart at the
outlet of the pass, mountains rise, range upon range. Over the flattened
Nancy summits, Chocorua lifts his crested head once more into view. We
pass in review the summits massed between, which on this morning were
of a deep blue-black, and stood vigorously forth from a sad and boding
sky.
From the ledges of Mount Willard, Washington and the peaks between are
visible in a clear day. This morning they were muffled in clouds, which
a strong upper current of air began slowly to disperse. We, therefore,
secured a good position, and waited patiently for the unveiling.
Little by little the clouds shook themselves free from the mountain, and
began a slow, measured movement toward the Ammonoosuc Valley. As they
were drawn out thinner and thinner, like fleeces, by invisible hands,
we began to be conscious of some luminous object behind them, and all
at once, through a rift, there burst upon the sight the grand mass of
Washington, all resplendent in silvery whiteness. From moment to moment
the trooping clouds, as if pausing to pay homage to the illustrious
recluse, encompassed it about. Then moving on, the endless procession
again and again disclosed the snowy crest, shining out in unshrouded
effulgence. To look was to be wonder-struck--to be dumb.
As the clouds unrolled more and more their snowy billows, other and
lower summits rose above, as on that memorable morn after the Deluge,
where they appeared like islands of crystal floating in a sea of
silvery vapor. We gazed for an hour upon this unearthly display, which
derived unique splendor from fitful sun-rays shot through the folds of
surrounding clouds, then drawing off, and again darting unawares upon
the stainless white of the summits. It was a dream of the celestial
spheres to see the great dome, one moment glittering like beaten silver,
another shining with the dull lustre of a gigantic opal.
I have since made several journeys through the Notch by the railway.
The effect of the scenery, joined with some sense of peril in the minds
of the timid, is very marked. Old travellers find a new and veritable
sensation of excitement; while new ones forget fatigue, drop the novels
they have been reading, maintaining a state of breathless suspense and
admiration until the train vanishes out at the rocky portal, after an
ascent of nearly six hundred feet in two miles.
In effect, the road is a most striking expression of the maxim,
"_L'audace, et toujours de l'audace_," as applied to modern engineering
skill. From Bemis's to Crawford's its way is literally carved out of
the side of the mountain. But if the engineers have stolen a march upon
it, the thought, how easily the mountain could shake off this puny,
clinging thing, prevailing over every other, announces that the mountain
is still the master.
There are no two experiences which the traveller retains so long or so
vividly as this journey through the great Notch, and this survey from
the ledges of Mount Willard, which is so admirably placed to command it.
To my mind, the position of this mountain suggests the doubt whether
nature did not make a mistake here. Was not the splitting of the
mountains an after-thought?
X.
_THE ASCENT FROM CRAWFORD'S._
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds.
With a diadem of snow.--_Manfred._
At five in the morning I was aroused by a loud rap at the door. In an
instant I had jumped out of bed, ran to the window, and peered out. It
was still dark; but the heavens were bright with stars, so bright that
there was light in the room. Now or never was our opportunity. Not a
moment was to be lost.
I began a vigorous reveille upon the window-pane. George half opened one
sleepy eye, and asked if the house was on fire. The colonel pretended
not to have heard.
"Up, sluggards!" I exclaimed; "the mountain is ours!"
"Do you know who first tempted man to go up into a high mountain?"
growled George.
"Satan!" whined a smothered voice from beneath the bedclothes.
The case evidently was one which demanded heroic treatment. In an
instant I whipped off the bedclothes; in another I received two violent
blows full in the chest, which compelled me to give ground. The pillows
were followed by the bolster, which I parried with a chair, the bolster
by a sortie of the garrison _in puris naturalibus_. For a few seconds
the mélée was furious, the air thick with flying missiles. By a common
instinct we drew apart, with the intention of renewing the combat, when
we heard quick blows upon the partition at the left, and scared voices
from the chamber at the right demanding what was the matter. George
dropped his pillow, and articulated in a broken voice, "Malediction! I
am awake."
"Come, gentlemen," I urged, "if you are sufficiently diverted, dress
yourselves, and let us be off. At the present moment you remind me of
the half-armed warriors on the pediment of the Parthenon."
"I take it you mean the frieze," said George, with chattering teeth.
The colonel was on all-fours, picking up the different articles of his
wardrobe from the four corners of the chamber. "My stocking," said he,
groping among the furniture.
"What do you call this?" inquired George, fishing the dripping article
from the water-pitcher.
"Eh! where the deuce is my watch?" redemanded the colonel, still seeking.