It is not very much of a walk from the Glen House up the Eastern face of Mount Washington—less than three hours at a leisurely pace will accomplish it; and on a fine day it would be next to impossible to lose one's-self, if alone. Half the distance or thereabouts, your track lies through a wood, acceptable enough as offering shelter from a July sun, but curtailing your views annoyingly. However, all things end; and if your range of sight be somewhat "cabined, cribbed, confined," at the start, you have no cause for complaint on that score after once emerging from covert, for the rocks, bleak, bare, and irregular, that are scattered all around, though large enough to compel a careful picking of the way between them by no means limit the vision. But the approach has been a hundred times described, and I will only say of it, at the risk of repetition, that he who comes up from the Glen House, and fails to turn his eye continually over his right shoulder, to dwell lovingly upon the near and noble outlines of Mounts Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, has no appreciation of this sort of scenery.

The morning had been superlatively fine, and troops of mounted dames and damsels and cavaliers made the various pathways lively with their glee. But caprice is the rule of these high regions; and when I was within ten minutes of the summit, clouds of misty vapour came suddenly scudding up, whence I knew not, but shutting out a peep here and a vista there, as they caracolled in fantastic evolutions. Presently, to these kaleidoscopic effects succeeded a slight hailstorm—it was rain visibly beneath us, attended with thunder and lightning—but anon all was comparatively clear again, and from the congregated spectators went up many a genuine burst of enthusiastic admiration, as point after point opened out or was shut in by the scud.

The two rough stone buildings upon the small plateau that crowns the mountain, built for the accommodation of travellers, are called respectively the "Summit" and the "Tip-top" House. Once rivals, they now form a single establishment—one being used as a restaurant, the other as a dormitory. On this particular day, nearly a hundred persons must have refreshed themselves in the former—a dozen or fifteen in the latter; and I must own, it was not without a sense of relief that I saw the last of the descending parties set forth about 2 P. M., being myself of the select few about to take the chance of sunset and sunrise.

For the afternoon, then—for the interval of time was to be occupied—a guide was summoned, to show half-a-dozen of us the wonders of Tuckerman's Ravine, a cul-de-sac between two great buttresses of Mount Washington, that prop it up towards the South and West. The sides of this ravine are very precipitous the head of it being formed of layers of rock, at an angle of about ninety-five degrees, over which a cascade precipitates itself, fed by the springs and melted snows above. In the bed of this hollow, to which the descent is sufficiently sharp to gratify the keenest amateur pedestrian, the accumulated snow of the winter, blown over from the impending heights, lies packed in such enormous masses that it seldom entirely disappears until the latter part of August. At the period of my visit, on Friday, the 29th of July, a huge portion thereof remained, and the famous "Snow-Arch" was not only visible but practicable. This natural curiosity is a cave channelled out from the vast snow bank as a passage for the descending waters, the roof of which, gradually melting away, leaves height and space for walking along this gallery as it were in the very bed of the torrent. You enter perforce, be it observed, where the stream emerges. The length was certainly not less than two hundred feet, the breadth of the tunnel perhaps forty or fifty. Of the thickness of the roof I cannot speak, not having essayed it; but the little knot of adventurers trusted that it would not cave-in whilst they were groping their difficult way, one after the other, wet-footed and in semi-obscurity, up-stream, from end to end of the arched way. The object of the exploration it would be difficult to define. It certainly was not scientific; it offered no rare beauties; it might have been very well imagined, without the trouble and subsequent risk—but it was an adventure, and it had its charm. Day-light appeared as we neared the waterfall—luckily not very full—which, as I have already said, comes down the head of the ravine and is the origin of the "Arch" itself. What next? The snow had separated bodily from the face of the rocks to the width of two or three feet, as you see ice fields in a thaw detach themselves from the land whereto they have been joined. We could therefore emerge, and clamber up the abrupt face of the rocks, though the first start was not inviting, inasmuch as we had to hoist ourselves up by unequal pressure upon soft snow on one side and hard rock on the other. The alternative was a return. This would have been inglorious; up we went. It was a rough business. The guide had been over the ground once before, this season—so he said, at least—but he "harked back" occasionally, as though not quite certain of his way. It seemed impossible to diverge either to the right or left, and so gain the comparatively easier slope. We were doomed to mount, in the hope of finding successive steps, inasmuch as a retracing of those taken was not for a moment to be thought of; descent in such cases is always far more dangerous and troublesome. It was fortunate that in crossing twice or thrice the waterfall itself, we were not pumped on to any serious extent. I was moistened only, being garnished with a Macintosh; and I have only two scars now left on my shins, the result of scraping too close an acquaintance with sundry rocks. The whole affair lasted between three and four hours. I cannot recommend it, save to very enthusiastic mountaineers, or to ci-devant jeunes hommes anxious to test the effects of Time upon their powers of walking and of endurance.

Regaining the hurricane-deck of the Tip-top House—for the roof is the principal promenade, and often times assuredly deserves the name I give it, how gratefully, as the sun went down, stole the sense of ineffable grandeur over the somewhat wearied frame! It was a superb evening; and though it would not suit me to cull a leaf from the Guide-book, and tell all that is therein narrated, I must mention one particular wherein this locality is notable, if not quite unique. I think I remember something of the kind, but not so marked, at sunrise as seen from the summit of Etna; but not thus, on the Righi and Faulhorn in Switzerland, on the Pic du Midi de Bigorre in the Pyrenees, or on other peaks that I have climbed in the days of long ago, to salute the coming or speed the parting day. The nearest approach to it that I have seen, was at the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh. I allude to the wonderful distinctness and regularity with which the shadow of the great cone itself is traced, at sunset, striding over heights and lowlands, mound and lake—all the intervening surface, in fact, between the spectator and the far distant horizon—until it contracts almost to a point where earth and sky merge into one. The sharpness of these converging parallel lines of shadow in that luminous atmosphere absolutely astounded me. They were as crisp, as clearly defined, as those that you may see in antique pictures of Jacob's Dream, leading ladder-wise from Heaven to the head of the slumbering Patriarch. Sunrise, next morning—for I was again favoured with clear weather and only sufficient frost to render the roof of the restaurant slightly slippery—sunrise, I say, reserved all this. The narrow lines, now on the Western horizon, broadened out and came upwards and forwards, as in the evening they had elongated and gone down. It was in truth a rare spectacle, not to be forgotten, and individualizes this natural observatory.

As for the view itself, it has been described ad nauseam, and I have only a few words to say about it. It happened, as it often does happen, that I fell in with an untravelled admirer of the prospect spread out before us, not charmed however with it more than I was myself. But he would persist in drawing from me an answer to the common question—"how does this compare with some of the famous points of view in the Swiss Alps?" Such tests I hold to be absurd, thanking my stars that I can unreservedly enjoy all fair things that are good of their kind. And so I told the inquirer this simple fact. If, in a mountainous country, varied, broken, studded with lakes, and rife with all the elements of the picturesque, you ascend some such superior elevation as this, you have, looking downwards, a striking panoramic scene, like this in its general features—more striking perhaps than beautiful, though this is all matter of taste. The difference lies herein. Here, you plunge your look downward, or sweep it over surrounding objects—and that's the end of it. In those other Alps, you add to the four or five or six thousand feet, below you, as much above—and it is that upward glance which takes in the marvels of glacier and snow-field and inaccessible peaks. My new acquaintance asked for no more comparisons, but let me enjoy myself in my own quiet way.

The walk down Mount Washington to Crawford's at the Great Notch, as I believe it is called, is rather a long affair. It must be ten miles, and parts of it are of the roughest. It took me four hours, in company with two intelligent and companionable young students of Harvard College, travelling (in the true way) a-foot, with knapsacks on their backs. But we hurried it too much, especially as the ridge over and along Mount Pleasant, and some of its fellows bearing Presidential names, abound in points of view worth dwelling on. Moreover I was foot-galled; and this reminds me that, inasmuch as I cannot to-day conclude my rambling reminiscences, I may as well wind up with a touch of information and of advice. The one is intended for the benefit of pedestrians who make excursions of this sort; the other for stay-at-homes in flat countries, who have no definite notion whatever of the ups and downs of hilly regions.

In the first place, then, you who walk are painfully aware that a sore foot is almost a calamity, if it befall you whilst en route. Remedy there is none; be thankful that there is an infallible preventive, of whose unfailing excellence I can speak with unreserved commendation. On its simple merits I once averaged in Switzerland twenty-five miles a day, for thirty successive days; and this without gall or blister. Fool that I was, to neglect it, two or three weeks ago. Nothing is easier. Ere you start in the morning, soap or grease the naked foot thoroughly, and then draw the stocking over it. Wash off, with a dash of brandy in the water, on finishing your day's work. The play of the foot is the preservative against abrasion—a certain one, I assure you.

In the second place, if—passing your life amid prairies or savannahs—you are sometimes puzzled to comprehend allusions to buttresses, shoulders, ridges, peaks, cones, ravines, and the various terms in use among enthusiastic mountaineers, I think I can put you on a very simple explanatory track. Next time you lie in bed, with a few spare moments for reflection upon this grave topic, just turn on to your back and elevate one knee or both knees. The coverlid or sheet will immediately assume—I am serious in saying—a curiously correct semblance, I might almost term it a model in relief, of the face of any mountainous country. Laugh not, but try it. A slight movement on your part varies the form and outline and relative bearing of hill and vale, raises a pinnacle here, or there sinks a gorge precipitously steep. If I had the misfortune to be confined to bed by sickness—excluding gout, which might render the process impossible—I could thus, with the aid of a map and some tables of distances, design a passable fac-simile of the leading White Mountains themselves. Why Yankee ingenuity should not long ago have manufactured papier-machÉ plans thereof, in relief, altogether passes my comprehension. They would sell well as souvenirs of travel.