Sometimes the country people I met greeted me, as sometimes they still
do in New Hampshire, but commonly they passed in silence. I think the
mountains must have had something to do with hushing the people: far and
near, on every hand, they rise such bulks of silence. The chief of their
stately company was always the Dent-du-Midi, which alone remains
perpetually snow-covered, and which, when not hooded in the rain-bearing
mists of that most rainy autumn, gave back the changing light of every
hour with new splendors, though of course it was most beautiful in the
early sunsets. Then its cold snows warmed and softened into something
supernally rosy, while all the other peaks were brown and purple, and
its vast silence was thrilled with a divine message that spoke to the
eye. Across the lake and on its farther shores the mountains were dimly
blue; but nearer, in the first days of our sojourn, they were green to
their tops. Away up there we could see the lofty steeps and slopes of
the summer pastures, and set low among them the chalets where the
herdsmen dwelt. None of the mountains seemed so bare and sterile as
Mount Washington, and though they were on a sensibly vaster scale than
the White Mountains generally, I remembered the grandeur of Chocorua and
Kearsarge in their presence. But my national--not to say my
hemispheric--pride suffered a terrible blow as the season advanced. I
had bragged all my life of the glories of our American autumnal foliage,
which I had, in common with the rest of my countrymen, complacently
denied to all the rest of the world. Yet here, before my very eyes, the
same beautiful miracle was wrought. Day after day the trees on the
mountain-sides changed, and kindled and softly smouldered in a thousand
delicate hues, till all their mighty flanks seemed draped in the
mingling dyes of Indian shawls. Shall I own that while this effect was
not the fiery gorgeousness of our autumn leaves, it was something
tenderer, richer, more tastefully lovely? Never!
[Illustration: _Flirtation at the Fountains_]
The clouds lowering, and as it were loafing along, among the tops and
crags, were a perpetual amusement, and when the first cold came it was
odd to see a cloud in a sky otherwise clear stoop upon some crest, and
after lingering there awhile drift off about its business, and leave the
mountain all white with snow. This grew more and more frequent, and at
last, after a long rain, we looked out on the mountains whitened all
round us far down their sides, while it was still summer green and
summer bloom in the valley. The moon rose and blackened the mountains
below the crags of snow, which shone out above like one of her own dead
landscapes. Slowly the winter descended, snow after snow, keeping a line
beautifully straight along the mountain-sides, till it reached the
valley and put out our garden roses at last. The hard-wood trees lost
their leaves, and stretched dim and brown along the lower ranges; the
pines straggled high up into the snows. The Jura, far across the lake;
was vaguely roseate, with an effect of perpetual sunset; the
Dent-du-Midi lost the distinction of its eternal drifts; and the cold
not only descended upon us, but from the frozen hills all round us
hemmed us in with a lateral pressure that pierced and chilled to the
marrow. The mud froze, and we walked to church dry-shod. It was quite
time to fire the vestibule stove, which, after fighting hard and smoking
rebelliously at first, sobered down to its winter work, and afforded
Poppi's rheumatism the comfort for which he had longed pined.