House or Dolly Cop's or at Waterville; or with a gorge behind the house,
which you may thread and thread and thread day in and out, and still not
come out upon the cleft rock from which flows the first drop of the lovely
stream, as you may do at Jackson. It means living front to front, lip to
lip, with Nature at her loveliest, Echo at her most mysterious, with
Heaven at its brightest and Earth at its greenest, and, all this time,
breathing, with every breath, an atmosphere which is the elixir of life,
so pure and sweet and strong. At Greely's you are, I believe, on the
highest land inhabited in America. That land has a pure air upon it. Well,
as I say, we were staying in the White Mountains. Of course the young
folks wanted to go up Mount Washington. We had all been up Osceola and
Black Mountain, and some of us had gone up on Mount Carter, and one or two
had been on Mount Lafayette. But this was as nothing till we had stood on
Mount Washington himself. So I told Hatty Fielding and Laura to go on to
the railroad-station and join a party we knew that were going up from
there, while Jo Gresham and Stephen and the two Fergusons and I would go
up on foot by a route I knew from Randolph over the real Mount Adams.
Nobody had been up that particular branch of Israel's run since Channing
and I did in 1841. Will Hackmatack, who was with us, had a blister on his
foot, so he went with the riding party. He said that was the reason,
perhaps he thought so. The truth was he wanted to go with Laura, and
nobody need be ashamed of that any day.

I spare you the account of Israel's river, and of the lovely little
cascade at its very source, where it leaps out between two rocks. I spare
you the hour when we lay under the spruces while it rained, and the little
birds, ignorant of men and boys, hopped tamely round us. I spare you even
the rainbow, more than a semicircle, which we saw from Mount Adams.
Safely, wetly, and hungry, we five arrived at the Tiptop House about six,
amid the congratulations of those who had ridden. The two girls and Will