SOURCES OF THE CONNECTICUT.

The Connecticut River comes from the northeast to its confluence with the Passumpsic, a stream of reduced volume, flowing down rapids. There is only sparse population above, and in New Hampshire, some distance east of Colebrook, is the famous Dixville Notch. This is an attractive ravine about ten miles long, cut through the isolated Dixville Range. It is not a mountain pass in the usual sense, but a wonderful gorge among high hills, the cliffs being worn and broken down into strange forms of ruin and desolation. Theodore Winthrop describes the Dixville Notch as "briefly, picturesque—a fine gorge between a crumbling, conical crag and a scarped precipice—a place easily defensible, except at the season when raspberries would distract sentinels." Approached from Colebrook to the westward, the view is disappointing, as it is entered at a high level, but after an abrupt turn to the right, the tall columnar sides are seen frowning at each other across the narrow chasm; cliffs of decaying mica slate presenting a scene of shattered ruin that is mournful to behold. To the right of the Notch, Table Rock rises five hundred and sixty feet above the road, being elevated nearly twenty-five hundred feet above the sea, and is ascended by a rude stairway of stone blocks called Jacob's Ladder. Its summit is a narrow pinnacle only eight feet wide, with precipitous sides. It gives an extensive view over the Connecticut Valley northward to the Connecticut Lakes, and over the upper Androscoggin Valley to the southeastward. Its most impressive sight, however, is much nearer, the narrow dreary chasm immediately below, with its broken palisades that seem almost ready to fall. Beyond is the Ice Cave, a deep ravine where snow and ice remain throughout the summer. Washington's Monument and the Pinnacle, remarkable rock formations, rise high on the north side of the Notch. Beyond the Notch southeastward is the Androscoggin, which small steamboats ascend to Lake Umbagog on the Maine boundary. Still farther eastward and deep in the Maine forests are the noted fishery waters of the Rangeley Lakes, which have polysyllabic names, such as Mooselucmaguntic, Mollychunkamunk, and Welokenebacook. They are elevated fifteen hundred feet above the sea and cover eighty square miles of surface.

We have now ascended the picturesque Connecticut River to its mountain sources. It has become only a brook, and having followed it up to the Canadian boundary of Vermont, it is found to come out of Northern New Hampshire, flowing westward from the Connecticut Lakes. The main lake of this group is twenty-five miles northeast of Colebrook, covering about twelve square miles, a favorite haunt of anglers, and navigated by a small steamboat. The second lake, four miles farther northeast through the forest, has about five square miles of surface, and the third lake is to the northward, covering two hundred acres. The Canadian northern boundary of New Hampshire is a low mountain range, and on its southern slope is the fourth and highest lake, at twenty-five hundred feet elevation above the sea, a pond of about three acres, in which the great New England river has its head. These Connecticut Lakes are in an almost unbroken forest.

THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.

To the eastward of the Connecticut River, which we have explored from its mouth to the source, lies one of the most attractive regions in America, the White Mountain district. It covers about thirteen hundred square miles, stretching forty-five miles eastward from the Connecticut to the Maine boundary, and being thirty miles wide from the Ammonoosuc and Androscoggin on the north to the base of the Sandwich range on the south. There are some two hundred of these mountains rising from a plateau elevated generally sixteen hundred feet above the sea. They cluster mainly in two groups, separated by a broad table-land ten to twenty miles wide, the western group being the Franconia Mountains and the eastern group the Presidential range, or White Mountains proper. Their great mass is of granite, overlaid by mica slate; their scenery is varied and beautiful; and the country has nowhere a more popular resort than these mountains in the summer. They send out from their glens and notches various rivers, westward to the Connecticut, eastward to the Androscoggin and Saco, and southward to the Merrimack. The Indians called the White Mountains Agiochook, meaning "the Mountains of the Snowy Forehead and Home of the Great Spirit," and held them in the utmost reverence and awe. They rarely ascended the peaks, as it was believed no intruder upon these sacred heights was ever known to return. The legend was that the Great Spirit once bore a blameless chief and his squaw in a mighty whirlwind to the summit, while the world below was overspread by a flood destroying all the people. It was said that the great Passaconaway, the wizard-king at Pennacook, was wont to commune with celestial messengers on the summit of Agiochook, whence he was finally borne to heaven. The first white man who visited these mountains was Darby Field, who came up from Portsmouth on the seacoast in June, 1642, by the valley of the Saco. The Indians tried to dissuade him, saying he would never return alive, but he pressed on, attended by two seashore Indians, passing through cloud-banks and storms, reaching the highest peak, whence he saw, as he related, "the sea by Saco, the Gulf of Canada, and the great lake Canada River came out of;" and he found many crystals that he thought were diamonds, from which the range long bore the name of the "Chrystal Hills." Towards the close of the eighteenth century colonists began moving into the outlying glens; in 1792 Abel Crawford lived on the Giant's Grave, now Fabyan's; in 1803 a small inn was built there; and in 1820 a party of seven ascended and slept on the summit of Mount Washington, giving the principal peaks the names they now have.

From the Connecticut River the chief route of entrance to the White Mountain region is by railway up the Ammonoosuc River alongside its swift-flowing amber waters, and through the villages of North Lisbon and Littleton, then coming to Bethlehem Junction, whence a short narrow-gauge railroad leads steeply up the hill-slope westward to Maplewood and Bethlehem. This is one of the most populous resorts of the district—Bethlehem Street—a well-kept highway, stretching two miles along a plateau upon the northern hill-slope at an elevation of almost three hundred feet above the river. When old President Dwight, in his early wanderings over New England, first saw this place, it was known as the "Lord's Hill," and he recorded it as remote and sterile, having "only log huts, recent, few, poor and planted on a soil singularly rough and rocky," but he saw "a magnificent prospect of the White Mountains and a splendid collection of other mountains in this neighborhood." It is now an aggregation of fine hotels and summer boarding-houses, the whole "Street" having a grand view of the imposing Presidential range, seen nearly twenty miles to the eastward over the Ammonoosuc Valley, while other mountain ranges are to the north and west, so that Bethlehem is in a vast amphitheatre, presenting, when the clouds permit, an environment of unsurpassed magnificence. To the southward, the visitors climb Mount Agassiz, rising twenty-four hundred feet, formerly known as the Peaked Hill, and get an unrivalled view of mountains all around the horizon, the Green Mountains of Vermont being plainly visible beyond the Connecticut River to the westward. The southern flanks of Mount Agassiz are drained by the pretty little Gale River, flowing through a deep glen westward to the Ammonoosuc at North Lisbon. Down in this glen, to the southwest of Bethlehem, is the village of Franconia, with numerous hotels and boarding-houses, while to the southwest of the glen rises Sugar Hill, another popular resort, with its great hotels set high on the hilltop, and having superb views of the Franconia and White Mountains to the eastward, and far away westward over the Connecticut Valley where the horizon is enclosed by the long line of the Green Mountains. It is a breezy and health-giving place.

THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN.

To the southward of Bethlehem is the Franconia group, of which Mount Lafayette is the crowning peak, its pyramidal summit rising fifty-two hundred and seventy feet. A notch is cut down into the group, and through this, the Franconia or Profile Notch, another narrow-gauge railway going up-hill for ten miles in the forest, traverses the flanks of Lafayette and leads to the Echo Lake and Profile House, the most extensive hotel in the region. This is in Coös County, the mountain county of northern New Hampshire, getting its strangely pronounced name from the Indian word cooash, meaning the "pine woods," with which almost the whole country was then covered. Here lived the Abenaqui tribe, known as the "swift deer-hunting Coosucks." At the highest part of the Notch, where its floor broadens sufficiently for a few acres of smooth surface between the enormous enclosing mountains, is built the hotel and its attendant cottages, standing between two long, narrow lakes at the summit of the pass, the waters flowing out respectively north and south, from the one, Echo Lake to Gale River and the Ammonoosuc, and from the other, Profile Lake to the Pemigewasset, seeking the Merrimack. The Pemigewasset means "the place of the Crooked Pines," and Profile Lake used to be called the "Old Man's Washbowl." On its western side rises Mount Cannon, forty-one hundred feet high, on the southeastern face of which is the "Old Man of the Mountain," the noted Franconia Profile. The mountain rises abruptly from the edge of the lake, and twelve hundred feet above the water is this "Great Stone Face," about which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote so famously. It is a remarkable semblance of the human countenance, and can be properly seen from only one position. Move but a short distance either north or south from this spot, and the profile becomes distorted and is soon obliterated. It is composed of three distinct ledges of granite projecting from the face of the mountain, one forming the forehead, another the nose and upper lip, and a third the chin. These three ledges are in different vertical lines, the actual length of the profile being forty feet, and they make an overhanging brow, a powerful and clearly-defined nose, and a sharp and massive projecting chin, the very mark of complete decision of character, so that the realism of the profile is almost startling. The Old Man's severe and somewhat melancholy gaze is directed towards the southeast over the lake, as if looking earnestly down the Notch.

The white man's discovery of this profile was made in the early nineteenth century by two road-makers, mending the highway through the Notch. Stooping to wash their hands in the lake, just at the right spot, they casually looked up and saw it, being struck instantly by the wonderful facial resemblance. "That is Jefferson," said one of them, Thomas Jefferson then being President of the United States, and the stern countenance certainly looks like some of his portraits. There he is, gazing far away, with sturdy, unchanging expression, as he has done for thousands of years. Thomas Starr King, who has so well described these mountains, regards the "Great Stone Face" as "a piece of sculpture older than the Sphinx—an imitation of the human countenance which is the crown of all beauty, that was pushed out from the coarse strata of New England, thousands of years before Adam." Yet a slight change from the proper position for view greatly alters the profile. Move a few paces northward, and the nose and face are flattened, only the projecting forehead finally being seen. Go a short distance to the southward, and the Old Man's decisive countenance quickly deteriorates into that of a toothless old woman wearing a cap, and soon the lower portion of the face is so distorted that the human profile is obliterated. The Cannon Mountain bearing the famous profile is a majestic ridge named from a spacious granite ledge on its steep slope, presenting, when observed from a certain position below, the appearance of a cannon ready for firing. Its summit rises seven hundred feet above the profile.

From the Profile Lake, the Pemigewasset River flows southward, deep down in the narrow Franconia Notch, the stream descending over five hundred feet in five miles. Here is the "Flume," and beyond it the gorge widens, giving a view which Thomas Starr King has described as "a perpetual refreshment," for it extends far away southward over the broadening intervale, one of the fairest scenes in nature, stretching many miles to and beyond Plymouth. The "Flume" is made by a brilliant little tributary brook dashing along the bottom of a fissure for several hundred feet, bordered by high walls rising sixty to seventy feet above the torrent and only a few feet apart. The water rushes towards the Pemigewasset between these smooth granite walls, and the awe-struck visitor walks through in startled admiration. The "Pool" is beyond, a deep, dark basin, into which the Pemigewasset falls, surrounded by a high rocky enclosure, making an abyss over a hundred feet across and one hundred and fifty feet deep. There is also another pellucid green basin below, into which the river tumbles by a pretty white cascade, this being a huge pothole originally ground out by the action of boulders whirled around in it by the current. A galaxy of peaks environ this pleasant glen in the Franconia and Pemigewasset ranges, the highest of them, Mount Lincoln, rising fifty-one hundred feet, and having Mount Liberty, a lower peak, to the southward.

TO PLYMOUTH AND BEYOND.

Emerging from the Franconia Notch, the broadened valley reaches the attractive village of North Woodstock, another cluster of hotels and summer boarding-houses in an attractive location. The Pemigewasset receives its eastern branch, passes other villages, is swollen by the brisk torrent of the Mad River, and then, amid lower mountains and broader vales, but still with the most delicious views, comes to the typical White Mountain outpost town of Plymouth, at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Baker Rivers, the latter coming in from the northwest. Captain Baker with a company of Massachusetts rangers, early in the eighteenth century, attacked an Indian village here, and his name was given the tributary stream. The Puritan colonists, however, did not actually settle Plymouth until 1764. The town is full of summer cottages and boarding-houses, is noted for its manufacture of fine buckskin gloves, and has as its chief relic the little old building, then the court-house, in which Daniel Webster made his first speech to a jury. It was here that Nathaniel Hawthorne suddenly died in May, 1864. He was travelling with his intimate friend, ex-President of the United States Franklin Pierce, and stopping overnight at a hotel, was found dead in his room next morning, having passed quietly away while sleeping. Far away beyond Plymouth the bright Pemigewasset flows, receiving the outlets of the Waukawan Lake, and of the beautiful and island-dotted Squam Lake, its enclosing hills being most superb sites for summer villas. This is the "mountain-girdled Squam" of which Whittier sings, and a giant pine tree is pointed out on its banks where the poet used to sit and watch the lake by hours, and in honor of which he wrote the Wood Giant, one of his most admirable poems. The Pemigewasset joins the outlet stream of Lake Winnepesaukee at Franklin, and they together form the noble Merrimack, which, in its useful flow to the sea, turns so many New England mill-wheels. The Pemigewasset and its branches drain the southern slopes of the Franconia ranges in a vast primeval forest, whose inner solitudes are rarely explored. Upon its eastern verge, far up on the southwestern slope of Mount Willey, is Ethan's Pond, said to be the most elevated source of the Merrimack, twenty-five hundred feet above the sea. Its most remote source is the Profile Lake, at the head of the Pemigewasset, over which the "Great Stone Face" mounts guard. Thus writes Thoreau of the Merrimack:

"At first it comes on, murmuring to itself, by the base of stately and retired mountains, through moist, primitive woods, whose juices it receives, where the bear still drinks it and the cabins of settlers are far between, and there are few to cross its stream; enjoying in solitude its cascades still unknown to fame; by long ranges of mountains of Sandwich and of Squam, slumbering like tumuli of Titans, with the peaks of Moosilauke, the Haystacks and Kearsarge reflected in its waters; where the maple and the raspberry, those lovers of the hills, flourish amid temperate dews; flowing long and full of meaning, but untranslatable as its name, Pemigewasset, by many a pastured Pelion and Ossa, where unnamed muses haunt, tended by Oreades, Dryads and Nereids, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Hippocrene:

"Where it meets the sea is Plum Island, its sand ridges scalloping along the horizon like the sea-serpent, and its distant outline broken by many a tall ship, leaning, still, against the sky. Standing at its mouth, looking up its sparkling stream to its source,—a silver cascade which falls all the way from the White Mountains to the sea,—and behold a city on each successive plateau, a busy colony of human beavers around every fall. Not to mention Newburyport and Haverhill, see Lawrence and Lowell, and Nashua and Manchester and Concord, gleaming one above the other."

THE WHITE MOUNTAIN NOTCH.

The most remarkable pass in this attractive mountain district is the great White Mountain Notch, through the heart of the range. The valley of the Ammonoosuc, farther ascended from Bethlehem Junction, soon becomes an enormous chasm, cut deeply down, and sweeping grandly around from the south towards the east, disclosing in magnificent array the splendid galaxy of Presidential Peaks as it is carved along their western bases. This Notch is formed by the headwaters of the Ammonoosuc rising among the foothills of Mount Washington, flowing out towards the west, and by the Saco River, flowing southeast to the Atlantic. The Maine Central Railway avails of this remarkable pass to get through the White Mountains, and bring the traffic of northwestern New England and Canada down to the sea. To the northward arises the Owl's Head, around which this railway circles after emerging from the western portal of the Notch, and on the northern flanks of this mountain are the head-streams of Israel River, over beyond which is Mount Starr King. Here is Jefferson, another gathering of hotels and cottages, enjoying one of the finest views of the White Mountain range, a popular resort, from which there are grand drives around the northern side of the Presidential range, seventeen miles eastward to Gorham on the Androscoggin. It was on this route that the famous view of these mountains was painted by George L. Brown—the "Crown of New England," owned by the Prince of Wales. Jefferson Hill has been described by Starr King as "the ultima thule of grandeur in an artist's pilgrimage among the New Hampshire mountains." Seven miles northwest, down the Israel River, is Lancaster, with nearly four thousand people, another favorite resort, though with more distant mountain views.

Where the Ammonoosuc, now become so small, curves around from the east towards the south at the western portal of the Notch, is Fabyan's, and here are located some of the great hotels of the district, right in front of Mount Washington. Between Fabyan's and Crawford's, four miles southward, the Presidential Range is the eastern border of the Notch and is passed in grand review. The headspring of the Ammonoosuc is on the slope of the mountain alongside Crawford's, where the floor of the valley is at its highest elevation, nineteen hundred feet above the sea and three hundred and thirty feet above Fabyan's. Higher than this the massive walls of the Notch rise some two thousand feet farther, and then slope backward up to the mountain summits, which are much higher, but invisible from the bottom of the valley. In front of Crawford's, where there is a rather broader space, one looks southward at the little oval lake which is the source of Saco River. Just beyond is the "Gate of the Notch," where the rocky projections of the huge mountains on either hand come out and almost close the passage, leaving an opening of only a few feet width for the diminutive Saco, here a mere rill, to start on its career, soon becoming a vigorous mountain torrent, leaping and bounding down the canyon. Upon the left hand of the stream the rocks have been cut out to give the wagon-road room, and on the right hand the railroad has hewn its route through the granite, the three being closely compressed between the high cliffs towering above. The Elephant's Head, formed of dark rocks, with trunk and eye well fashioned, looks down upon this "Gate," and just beyond, another cliff presents the semblance of an Indian papoose clinging to its mother's back. The little Saco soon cuts the Notch deeply down, such is its steep descent, so that in a short distance it becomes a vast ravine. Thus, with the railway high up on a gallery upon the mountain side, and the road deep down by the Saco, the ravine is cleft between Mounts Webster and Willard, the latter, as the chasm bends, falling sharply off, a tremendous precipice of steep and bare rock, when Mount Willey appears beyond. Thus the Notch deepens and broadens, becoming an enormous chasm, with the rapid river down in the bottom, constantly increasing in volume. The Saco is said to have been thus named by the Indians because of the mass of water it brings down, the word meaning "pouring out."

About three miles below the "Gate," the Notch broadens into a sort of basin enclosed by the bare walls of Mount Willard to the westward and Mount Willey to the south, curving around the long crescent-shaped slope of Mount Webster, which makes the northern border. Here is the Willey House, the scene of the Willey Slide, the great tragedy of the Notch, a small and antiquated inn, now adjoined by a modern hotel. In August, 1826, there was a terrific landslide down the slope of Mount Willey behind the old house, then kept by Samuel Willey, from whom the mountain was afterwards named. A heavy storm after a long drouth had made a flood in the Saco, and Willey, fearing an overflow, deserted his house in the night, with his family of nine persons, to seek higher ground. Suddenly the slide came down the mountain and the flight was fatal, the avalanche of rocks and dirt overwhelming them all, while a convenient boulder behind the house so deviated it that, although almost covered with rubbish, the building was uninjured. A traveller who afterwards came through the Notch found the half-buried inn deserted, with the doors open, the supper-table spread, and a Bible lying open upon it, with a pair of spectacles on the page, evidently just as they had been left in the sudden flight. Owing to the bend in the Notch there is an unrivalled view down it from the summit of Mount Willard, which thus stands practically at the head of the deep pass. The southern face of this mountain is a vast and almost perpendicular precipice, out on the brow of which the observer stands to look down the deep valley stretching far away, and enclosed between mountains rising nearly two thousand feet above him on either hand, so that the view has a singular individuality, as if one were looking at it through a camera. The depth of the gorge and the precipitous front of the mountain make the Notch a tremendous gulf. The deeply concave chasm is scooped out like an immense cylinder, having the inside covered with dense green foliage, and grandly bending around to the left until lost afar off behind the distant projecting slope of Mount Webster. The railroad stretches, a streak of brown, along the right-hand wall of the valley, twisting in and out about the promontories. Down in the bottom the thick forest hides the wagon-road and the bed of the Saco until they come out in a flat cleared green spot in front of the Willey House. The towering mountain slopes are scratched and scarred where slides have come down, and two or three bright little ribbons of white water are suspended on their sides, making cascades that help fill the river beneath. Beyond the outlet of the Notch, the eastern background is a vast sea of mountain ranges and billowy peaks, having the bold, white, pyramidal crown of proud Chocorua rising behind them. This splendid scene, regarded by many as the finest in the White Mountains, had a peculiar charm for Anthony Trollope on his American visit. He did not usually view America with favor, but he emphatically wrote: "Much of this scenery, I say, is superior to the famed and classic lands of Europe," adding "I know nothing, for instance, on the Rhine equal to the view from Mount Willard and the mountain Pass called the Notch." Most experienced observers are convinced that as an impressive exhibition of a deep mountain canyon with an enchanting background, this is not surpassed in Switzerland.

MOUNT WASHINGTON.

The Fabyan House, in front of Mount Washington, stands upon the location of the "Giant's Grave," which was an elongated mound of sand and gravel formed by the waves of an ancient lake, reacting from the adjacent mountain slopes, and rising about fifty feet. Being high, long and wide, it was just the place for a house. The tradition is that once a fierce-looking Indian stood upon this mound at night, waving a flaming torch and shouting "No paleface shall take root here; this the Great Spirit whispered in my ear." The successive burnings of hotels on this site would seem to indicate this as prophetic, and in fact no hotel did stand there any length of time until the projectors of the present large building, after the last one was burnt, as if to avoid fate, had the mound making the "Giant's Grave" levelled and obliterated. Here was built the earliest inn of the White Mountains in 1803 by a sawmill owner on the Ammonoosuc River, named Crawford. His grandson, Ethan Allen Crawford, the famous "White Mountain Giant," was the noted guide who made the first path to ascend Mount Washington and built the first house on its summit. Now, the mountain is ascended from this western side by an inclined-plane railway, reached by an ordinary railway extending from Fabyan's five miles across to the base of the mountain. The railway to the summit is about three miles long, with an average gradient of thirteen hundred feet to the mile, the maximum being thirteen and one-half inches in the yard. It is worked by a cog-wheel locomotive acting upon a central cogged rail, and the ascent is accomplished in about ninety minutes. It is an exhilarating ride up the slope, for, as the car is elevated, the horizon of view widens decidedly to the west and northwest, while the trees of the forest get smaller and smaller, and their character changes. The sugar-maples, yellow birches and mossy-trunked beeches, with an occasional aspen or mountain ash, are gradually left behind in the valley, being replaced on the higher slope by white pine and hemlock, white birch, and dark spruces and firs hung with gray moss. These gradually becoming smaller, soon the only trees left are a sort of dwarf fir intertangled with moss. Then, rising above the limit of trees, there is only a stunted arctic vegetation, and this permits a grand and unobstructed view all around the western horizon.

The route of the railway goes over and up various steep trestles, the most startling of all being "Jacob's Ladder," elevated about thirty feet and having the steepest gradient. Here is a perfect arctic desolation, the surface being broken blocks and rough stones of schist and granite, cracked, honeycombed and moss-grown, having endured the storms and frosts of centuries. There is a little vegetation where it may get root, the reindeer-moss, saxifrage clumps and sandwort of dreary Labrador or Greenland. The view covers a wide expanse far away westward to the Green Mountains, the landscape being everywhere dark forests and peaks, with the massive slopes of Mount Clay nearer to the northward, and the whole Presidential range, Mounts Jefferson, Adams and Madison, stretching beyond. As one looks over the vast, dark, undulating wilderness of peaks, it can be realized how the flood of emotion made an entranced observer exclaim, in the hearing of Mr. Starr King, "See the tumultuous bombast of the landscape." Nearing the summit, the railway gradient is less steep, and here an opportunity is given to peer over the edge of the "Great Gulf," a profound abyss on the eastern mountain slope between Washington, Clay and Jefferson. This hollow gulf, its sides and bottom covered with dark trees, relieved by a little glistening pond at the bottom, stretches out to the narrow valley along the eastern base of the range, known as the Glen, down into which one can look at an angle of about forty-five degrees. Rounding the mountain summit, the train halts at a broad platform in front of the Summit Hotel.

The top of Mount Washington is the highest elevation in the United States east of the Rockies and north of the Carolinas. It is what may be described as an arctic island, elevated sixty-two hundred and ninety feet, in the temperate zone, and displaying both arctic vegetation and temperature, the flora and climate being alike that of Greenland. An observatory gives a higher view over the tops of the buildings, and the first great impression of it is that the view seems to be all around the world, limited only by the horizon. In every direction are oceans of billowy peaks, the whole enormous circuit of almost a thousand miles, embracing New England, New York, Canada and the sea. The grand scene is at the same time gloomy. The almost universal forests overspread everything with a mournful pall of sombre green. The summit is spacious, and the contour of the mountain can on all sides be plainly seen. Its slope to the westward, like all of the Presidential range, is steeper than to the eastward, down which a wagon-road zigzags into the Glen. Upon the eastern side, two long spurs seem to brace the mountain, though profound ravines are there cut into it. The southern slope of the summit pitches off suddenly, while to the north there is a more gradual descent, both the railway and wagon-road approaching that way. The original Tip-Top House, the first inn erected, is preserved as a curiosity, a low and damp structure built of the rough stones gathered on the mountain. The newer hotel is of wood, with a steep roof, and is chained down to the rocks to prevent the gales from blowing it over. There is a weather-signal station at the summit, one of the most important posts in the country.

THE GRAND MOUNTAIN VIEW.

The Indians always held the White Mountains in reverent awe. They were the religious shrine of the Pennacooks, who roamed over the region between the mountains and the sea. The early historian Josselyn in the seventeenth century recorded, of these Indians: "Ask them whither they go when they dye; they will tell you, pointing with their finger, to Heaven, beyond the White Mountains." Passaconaway, the great wizard-chief of the Pennacooks, who was finally converted to Christianity by the Apostle Eliot, is said to have lived to the great age of one hundred and twenty years, and then to have been translated. The Pennacook tradition was that in the cold of mid-winter he was carried away from them in a weird sleigh drawn by wolves, that took him to the summit of Mount Washington, whence he was straightway received into Heaven:

The first house on the mountain, built by Ethan Allen Crawford in 1821, was a small stone cabin having the floor covered with moss for bedding, the only furniture being a chest to contain blankets, and a stove; a roll of sheet-lead serving as the "register," on which the guests scratched their names and the date of visit. This cabin was swept away by a terrific storm in August, 1826. Some time later an eccentric individual took possession of the summit, naming it "Trinity Height," and called himself the modern "Israel of Jerusalem," proposing to inaugurate in this exalted place a new Order, styled "The Christian or Purple and Royal Democracy." With an eye to business, he put toll-gates on the bridlepaths and taxed each visitor a dollar. There were bitter quarrels about the ownership for years afterwards, and the first winter ascent was made by a sheriff, who went up to serve a writ in 1858, and found frost over a foot thick enveloping everything. The lawsuits, however, were ultimately fought out and settled, and the present owners have been undisturbed for years.

The view from the summit is widespread. The most distant objects that have been recognized are Mount Beloeil, northwest in Canada, and Mount Ebeeme, northeast beyond the Moosehead Lake in Maine, each one hundred and thirty-five miles away. These distant mountain tops are said to be brought into view only by the aid of atmospheric refraction, in raising them, as they are actually below the horizon. Also northeast is Mount Abraham, sixty-eight miles away; and were it not for this, Maine's greatest mountain, Katahdin, in the wilderness of the upper Penobscot, might be seen, but Abraham obstructs the view. Katahdin, rising nearly fifty-four hundred feet, is one hundred and sixty-five miles northeast. Saddleback, at the head of the Rangeley Lakes, is seen sixty miles away, and Bald Mountain, to the right, one hundred miles off in Maine. To the eastward is seen Mount Megunticook, in the Camden range, on Penobscot Bay, one hundred and fifteen miles off. To the east and southeast for many miles is the ocean between Casco Bay and Cape Ann. The sea, however, is never well viewed from Mount Washington, because it is so nearly the color of the sky at the horizon as to be difficult of acute discernment. The moving vessels, however, can be readily seen by the aid of a glass. The bright waters of Sebago Lake are to the southeast, and beyond are the shores of Casco Bay and the city of Portland, sixty-seven miles off. The low round swell of Mount Agamenticus shows faintly above the horizon, seventy-nine miles south-southeast, and to the right there is also a faint trace of the Isles of Shoals, ninety-six miles off. To the southeast, twenty-two miles, is the sharpest and noblest peak of all in the galaxy of view, the high, white, pyramidal top of Chocorua, having the broad island-studded Lake Winnepesaukee to the right, with the distant double peak of Mount Belknap seen over its clear waters. Just to the west of south, and one hundred and four miles distant, is the faint rounded summit of Mount Monadnock, near the southwest corner of New Hampshire, and nearer is Mount Kearsarge, seventy miles off, and appearing much similar. The Nelson Pinnacle, farther away, is to the right of Kearsarge. The most distant mountain discernible in that direction is Mount Wachusett, one hundred and twenty-six miles off. To the southwest are seen Ascutney and the twin Killington Peaks, near Rutland, Vermont, eighty-eight miles away. To the west are seen plainly the two Green Mountain peaks of Mansfield and the Camel's Hump, seventy-eight miles off, and over the northern slope of the latter can be faintly detected the great Adirondack Mount Whiteface, one hundred and thirty miles distant. Such is the splendid circuit of mountains forming the horizon for Mount Washington. Among the striking objects in the view are the deep river valleys as they go out from the Presidential range. The Peabody flows through the Glen north to the Androscoggin, which can be traced far northeast. The Ellis flows south to the Saco, which goes out through the Notch and away southeast. The valley of the Ammonoosuc runs off westward, where along the horizon is the great trough of the Connecticut Valley stretching all across the scene. Lakes and ponds are studded among the dark summits, and at the observer's feet are the springs feeding many great rivers of New England, the Merrimack, to the southward, also having its sources in this great wilderness of mountains, which on all sides sends out babbling brooks and silvery cataracts to bear their waters down to old ocean.

THE GLEN AND NORTH CONWAY.

The wagon-road from Mount Washington summit down to the base, is on the eastern side, and is a little more than eight miles long, with an average gradient of one to eight, descending into the Glen and displaying magnificent views. The descent occupies about one hour, and the ascent five hours. On the southeastern side of the mountain is Tuckerman's Ravine, a huge gorge enclosed by rocky walls a thousand feet high. This ravine usually displays the "Snow Arch" until late in August, formed by a stream flowing out from under the huge masses of snow piled up in winter, until it gradually melts away and collapses. The main Glen is formed by the deep and thickly-wooded Pinkham Notch at the eastern base of Mount Washington, its floor being at two thousand feet elevation, and this Notch continues north and south in deeply-carved stream beds, the Peabody River flowing northward to the Androscoggin at Gorham and the Ellis River southward to the Saco. The Peabody descends rapidly to the Androscoggin, entering it at about eight hundred feet elevation, the active town of Gorham being located here in a beautiful situation, and having two thousand people, at the northern gateway to the White Mountains. The Androscoggin, having drained the eastern mountain slopes, flows away into the State of Maine to seek the Kennebec, and thence the sea. In the Glen, in the coaching days, the old Glen House was the headquarters at the foot of the road down Mount Washington, but it was burnt in 1894, and has not been rebuilt. To the eastward, bounding the Glen, rise the Wild Cat Ridge and the impressive Carter Dome, which would be a grand mountain elsewhere, but here is dwarfed by the overshadowing Presidential range on the western side. From the Pinkham Notch the little Ellis River goes southward, and below the outlet of Tuckerman's Ravine is the beautiful Crystal Cascade, where it pours down eighty feet over successive step-like terraces. Another lovely cataract it makes is the Glen Ellis Fall, which is considered the finest in the White Mountains, on the slope of the Wild Cat Ridge. The stream slides down an inclined plane of twenty feet over ledges, and then falls seventy feet through a deep groove, twisted by bulges in the rocks and making almost a complete turn. Thus sliding, foaming and falling, the stream leaps nearly a hundred feet into a dark green pool beneath. The Glen broadens as it progresses southward, and soon becomes a widened intervale, having many houses for summer boarders.

Here is the pleasant village of Jackson in a broad basin, surrounded by low mountains, making splendid views in all directions. There are the Tin, Iron, Thorn and Moat Mountains, with others, the intervale being almost covered with hotels, boarding-houses, and the accessories of a popular summer resort, and having pretty cottages perched on the hill-slopes all about. This pleasant resting-place was originally called New Madbury, but at the opening of the nineteenth century it was named in honor of President John Adams. It continued contentedly as Adams until his son John Quincy became President, and in 1828, when politics ran high and John Quincy Adams was again a candidate, it happened that all the votes in the town of Adams but one were given to his competitor, Andrew Jackson, who was elected, whereupon the town changed its name to Jackson. Since then it has had a quiet history excepting once, when, in 1875, they were building the railroad through the White Mountain Notch, and the bears, scared by the powder-blasts of the builders, came in droves to Jackson and almost captured the town from the frightened inhabitants. Just beyond Jackson, in Lower Bartlett, the Ellis flows into the Saco in a magnificent environment, the Ellis and the Eastern Branch from the Carter range coming in together, and making the Saco a great river. This is another paradise for the seeker after the picturesque. From the little church of the village, looking down over the Saco intervales, when flooded with sunset light, gives a most fascinating view. An enraptured visitor has written of this landscape seen from the church door: "One might believe that he was looking through an air that had never enwrapped any sin, upon a floor of some nook of the primitive Eden." Bartlett was named in honor of Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and its pioneer settler, John Poindexter, came eighty miles on foot through the wilderness from Portsmouth, dragging his few household effects on a hand-sled, his wife riding an old horse, with the feather-bed for a saddle, and carrying the baby in her arms.

The Saco Valley broadens below, and Intervale, another summer village, is passed, and then North Conway, one of the most popular of the White Mountain resorts. It spreads along a low sloping terrace on the eastern verge of the widening valley, and looks out upon the river with the elongated and massive ridge of Moat Mountain grandly rising beyond. The town is largely built along a pleasant tree-bordered street, having the Presidential range spread in magnificent array to the northwest, sixteen miles away. To the southward the valley opens over long stretches of fertile lowlands until the Saco turns sharply to the eastward, seeking the sea. To the northward, the immediate guardian of the valley is Mount Kearsarge, sometimes called Pequawket, rising thirty-three hundred feet. Kearsarge means the "pointed pine mountain," and its name was given the famous warship which fought and sunk the privateer "Alabama." It is the beauty of the surroundings which gives North Conway its charm, and the valley is called the "Arcadia of the White Hills," where the harshness of the granite ramparts beyond are in strange contrast with the genial repose of these meadows, and the delicate curves of the long, swelling hills. The restfulness of the scene is its attraction, everything contributing to its serenity; even distant Mount Washington is said to "not seem so much to stand up as to lie out at ease across the north; the leonine grandeur is there, but it is the lion, not erect, but couchant, a little sleepy, stretching out his paws and enjoying the sun." Proud Chocorua, which is not far away, is also said to even appear "a little tired," as seen from North Conway, and as if looking wistfully down into

These Conway intervales of the Saco were the Indian valley of Pequawket, and its people have long been known as the Pigwackets. An Indian village first occupied the site of North Conway, gradually giving place to the rude huts of the colonists. It progressed greatly by the trade through the mountain district, before the advent of the railway, and was the chief stage-coach headquarters in those days. Now it is quiet and restful, the excitements of the coaching times being gone. Three miles below, the magnificent valley makes its grand bend to the eastward, and the swelling Saco flows out through the State of Maine and to the sea at the twin towns of Saco and Biddeford.

LAKE WINNEPESAUKEE.

The southern verge of the White Mountains has many lower peaks and ridges, including the Ossipee and Sandwich ranges, and finally they all run off into the serrated shores of the extensive and beautiful Lake Winnepesaukee, cut by long, sloping promontories and abounding in islands. Thirteen miles southward from North Conway, near Madison, is the largest erratic boulder of granite known to exist, which was brought down and dropped there by the great glacier and is estimated to weigh eight thousand tons. It is seventy-five feet long, forty wide, and from thirty to thirty-seven feet high. Lake Winnepesaukee washes all the southeastern flanks of the mountain region, and has many peaks in grand array around its northern borders. The Indians were so impressed with the attractive scenery of the lake that they gave it the poetical name, meaning "the Smile of the Great Spirit." The Sandwich Mountains are spread across its northern horizon, showing the rocky summit of Mount Tecumseh, rising over four thousand feet; Tripyramid and its great "Slide," marked along its face, where a vast mass of rocks and forest went down the slope in the rainy season of 1869, moving over a distance of two miles and falling twenty-one hundred feet; the broad, rounded summit of the Sandwich "Dome;" the sharp peak of Whiteface, also scratched by a wide landslide on its southern slope; the lofty top of Passaconaway, rising forty-two hundred feet; and the proud apex of Chocorua, regarded as the most picturesque of all these mountains. Its much-admired peaks do not rise as high as some of the others, thirty-five hundred feet, but are built of a brilliant crystalline labradorite, called Chocorua granite, presenting a striking appearance, and being entirely denuded of trees. Chocorua was an Indian prophet of the Pequawkets, whose family was slain by the whites, and he took a terrible revenge. A reward was offered for his scalp, and his pursuers followed him to the mountain top and shot him down. When dying, he invoked the curses of the Great Spirit upon them, and the mountain now bears his sonorous name. For years afterwards the curses came true; pestilence raged in the adjacent valleys, cattle could not be kept, for they all died, and the people submitted humbly to the affliction, believing it to be the realization of the Indian's imprecation. But one day a scientific fellow wandered that way, and being of an investigating turn, he soon found the sickness was due to muriate of lime in the water. After that discovery the Indian's curse went for naught. Now the whole country roundabout is healthy, and filled with the balsamic atmosphere which invigorates the admiring thousands who come to see the noble mountain. Thus sings Whittier of it in Among the Hills, after a storm: