# Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 21

We were in the morning express southward bound. We had caught our last glimpse of the far blue Pilots and of the black cone of Cherry mountain. Lafayette had disappeared on our right, the North Twin was sinking behind the ragged heaps of rock through which the upper Amonoosuc fights its way. Now Deception and the rude Rosebrook ledges hem us in, and then the whistle arouses such echoes as even Fabyan's historic old tin horn could never have evoked. Fabyan's has been passed, and we go spinning on across the valley, lovingly looking up to where we can see the black dot of an engine, with its white feather of smoke, climbing that vast pyramid of lapis lazuli they call Mount Washington. We halt in the rear of the Mount Pleasant House, and are reinforced by a troop of homegoing merry-makers, laden with trophies, flirtations and freckles. Before they have got fairly settled in their seats we emerge from a deep cutting and the brakeman calls "Crawford's!" which is "short" for The Crawford House.
Elbowing our way through the crowd at the station, we look about us, up and down a small elongated vale or glen, closely girt by high wooded hills. On rising ground at the right (northward) stands the big white hotel, its lawn sloping down to the station and to a tiny lake, in the middle of which a fountain-pipe is sending up a strong jet, blown to one side like a geyser. Out of the lower end of this lakelet trickles a thread of water which makes its escape a hundred rods below, through a black crevice in the rocks where protruding ledges of the opposite hills all but join. That stream is the head of the Saco, and that narrow portal is the Gate of the Notch. The mountain behind us is Tom,—that in front Clinton; and the little avenue cut through the trees yonder is the beginning of the Crawford bridle-path to Mount Washington. "We are now in the midst of a little plateau, about two thousand feet above the sea. It is the highest point of the valley, and the water flows from it in both ​directions, the spring near the house discharging its contents down through the notch into the Saco, and that at the stables emptying itself into a tributary of the Amonoosuc, and reaching the sea through the Connecticut."
Though well-known to the Indians, used by them in war raids, and heard of by the whites in the days of the old French-and-Indian troubles, it was not until 1771 that this pass (which is the Notch par excellence) of the White Mountains, may be said to have been made ​known to people generally. In that year, Thomas Nash, a hunter, saw, from the top of Cherry mountain this deep cleft in the mountains, and, by way of exploration, passed down the Saco river through its gorge, going on to Portsmouth, where he told Governor Wentworth of his happy discovery. "Wishing to test the value of the pass as a route of commerce, Wentworth requested him to bring a horse through it from Lancaster, offering as a reward in case of success the tract now called Nash and Sawyer's Location, extending from the Gate of the Notch to a point beyond the Fabyan House, and including 2,184 acres. Nash associated with himself a fellow-pioneer by the name of Sawyer, by whose aid he lowered the unfortunate horse over the cliffs and drove him through the rocky river until they emerged at Conway. A road was soon built here 'with the neat proceeds of a confiscated estate,' and a direct route was formed between the coast and the upper Coös country, which had previously been accessible only by a long detour around the south side of the mountains. The first article of merchandise carried through from Lancaster was a barrel of tobacco; and the first freight up from the coast was a barrel of whiskey, most of which was consumed on the way, 'through the politeness of those who helped to manage the affair.'"
The grant soon passed out of the hands of the improvident owners, and other settlers built cabins along the route. Among these were the Rosebrooks, Willeys, and Crawfords. They were such people as are drawn in the Leatherstocking Tales, and Abel Crawford might have stood for Leatherstocking himself. He was six feet four in height, and a wonder in strength, even among the big frontiersmen of those athletic days. His two elder sons, Erastus and Ethan Allen, were even taller than their father: Ethan, in fact, measured fully seven feet, and was of prodigious strength. The home of the Crawfords' (built, I think, about 1793) was twelve miles below the Gate of the Notch, and half way between stood Willey's house. Captain Rosebrook's family at the Giant's Grave (Fabyan's), and the farmers at North Conway, were their nearest neighbors.
The view from Mount Willard is down the notch, and possesses singular beauty. Bayard Taylor asserted that as a simple picture of a ​mountain pass, seen from above, it could not be surpassed in Switzerland. "Under our feet," he writes, "yawned the tremendous gulf of the notch, roofed with belts of cloud, which floated across from summit to summit nearly at our level; so that we stood, as in the organ-loft of some grand cathedral, looking down into its dim nave. At the farther end, over the fading lines of some nameless mountains, stood Chocorua purple with distance, terminating the majestic vista. It was a picture which the eye could take in at one glance; no landscape could be simpler or more sublime. The noise of a cataract on our right high up on Mt. Willey, filled the air with a far, sweet, fluctuating murmur, but all around us the woods were still, the harebells bloomed, and the sunshine lay warm on the granite." The top is about 2,570 feet above the sea, and the road after winding its way up by an easy grade affording many pleasant outlooks, leads out to the brink of a great cliff, whence the whole gorge of the Saco, and the sweep of its steep walls, are under your eye, while many a mountain peak may be recognized, from Jefferson in the northeast, to where, "about south-southwest the weird white crown of Chocorua peers over the dark ridge of Bear mountain." As the distance from the hotel is not too great, many persons find it pleasanter to walk to the top of Mt. Willard, although mountain-wagons are sent twice a day, or oftener, from the Crawford House. The best time to go is toward evening.
The guide-book's further caution, however, is no longer needed, namely: "You should be careful as soon as you arrive, to book your name at this place for a horse to Mount Washington, if you intend to make the ascent within a few days, as often all the ponies are engaged for a day or two beforehand." That was some twenty-five years ago. The price of a horse for the ride up and back, with guides to accompany the party, was only $4.00 to each person. A few still make the ascent each year, and a great many walk down the path. The danger and excitement of it are as great as ever, and severe casualties have occurred upon it, above timber line, within the past two years.
​"What do you flatter yourself a reader can make out of such a description as that?" asks Prue in somewhat scornful criticism, after she has glanced over my note-book.
"Little that is very definite, my dear. Yet the words are quite as orderly as that struggle of rocks against torrent in the steep forests here at the base of Mount Clinton, which they call Gibb's falls! Now the idylic little stream on the other side of the valley is very different,—let us walk over there."
Returning to the hotel, we light our cigars and join the line of elegant strollers who drift down past the bowling-alley, across the bridge spanning the railway-cut and out upon a plank-walk that leads towards the thicket of young oaks sloping slowly up toward Mount Tom. A broad path leads into this sapling grove and we loiter along it, pausing here and there to catch the notes of a thrush that is beginning to salute the evening from his secluded retreat. After a few minutes we come to a stream-bed, among whose bowlders and gravel clear brown water is gently finding its way in a dozen friendly streamlets, which part but come together again, only to separate and rejoin in a new place, as a bevy of persons might leisurely pass among the trees of an open wood without disturbing their sociability.
Above the pool, is a sloping apron or incline of granite whose ledge-edges have been worn smooth and somewhat overgrown with moss, down which two currents, divided by a jutting diamond of rock above, unite in a merry slide. This is one of the very best standpoints to see the cataract and the clear pool at its foot; and, now that the water is low, we can walk out on the smooth slanting rock and pick our way along the stream-bed; or we may cross to the other bank, where a rude path, getting foothold on roots of trees, and rocks, and earth, helps us to mount to the higher parts of the cascade, as well as by remaining on this side.
There is a turn ahead hiding the upper part of the stream, but we can see a narrow bridge thrown across the little ravine, upon which stands a group of ladies, whose bright dresses look very gay against the sunlit foliage. Climbing up there, we find ourselves overlooking a very pretty and quiet little double waterfall, whose veil of misty white hangs down a vine-clad trough in the granite, and whose musical crashing is not loud enough to o'ermaster, nor be inharmonious with, the golden-mouthed thrush whose evening hymn still floats up to us out of the depths of the woods.
Such is Beecher's cascade, concerning which Henry Ward Beecher, and Starr King, and I know not how many other poets and preachers, have written such rhapsodies of word-expression as I can never emulate. Nor do I wonder,—for truly the place is pretty and inspiring; and you may ramble along the path to higher, and perhaps even more delicious bits of sylvan water scenery, where this wanton little heiress of the hill-snows flings its bubble-pearls by handfuls into the lap of ​the stolid rocks, and lifts its bright lips to the sunbeam's kiss just before coquettishly darting away down some cascade.
This waterfall is maidenly and coy, pretty and to be sung to. The other is virile and lusty; and the splendor of its charge down the mountain, is magnificent.
Next morning, the weather being beautiful, we decided to take a long walk down the Notch road, and hence declined the courteous invitations given us by two or three groups of amiable people to join them in a wagon-party, in the same direction. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, we trudged away, as blithe as larks. It is noticeable with what an increase of elasticity and solidity of nerve we step out now, compared with our powers of walking and enjoying a walk when we first left home. None of us had been ill, much less feeble, yet had more nervousness, or less vigor, than belonged to proper health. This proper health had now been recovered, and it was with the self-reliance of athletes and the glowing enjoyment of childhood that we set off upon our walk along the railroad track, ready to breast a slope, or leap a torrent, or tramp for many miles if necessary.
The railway alluded to, is the Portland and Ogdensburg,—Prue enquired whether "P. & O." did not stand for Peaks and Ocean, which runs from Portland to Fabyan's. Leaving the Union Station in Portland it skirts, in Maine, the shores of Sebago lake, passes around the foot of Mount Pleasant, traverses the Fryeburg part of the Saco valley, so renowned for the great battles of Lovewell's war (see Chapter III.), exposing lovely landscapes toward the west all the way, and enters the mountains at North Conway, where it is joined by the Boston & Maine's tracks. For a long time that remained the terminus, and the dashing six-horse coaches which once carried passengers so gayly up this old turnpike to Bemis, Crawford's, and Fabyan's, are all well remembered, and much regretted by old travellers. But by-and-by, money and skill found itself able to hew a long niche-like shelf along the precipitous western side of the dark defile, and, in 1875-6, the impertinent locomotive had passed through its own Gate of the Notch (since the old portal was too narrow), and was flaunting its smoke in the very face of Mount Washington. Pushing northward, the railroad followed down the Amonoosuc to Fabyan's, where it connected with the Boston & Lowell. This accomplished, it had become possible to pass by rail from Boston, Portsmouth or Portland, directly through the heart of the mountains to northern Vermont, Montreal, and Quebec. The hurried traveller between the towns of Lake Champlain or Lower Canada and the New England seaports can therefore see the main features of the White Mountains, without any interruption of his journey, by coming this way,—and that is a great boon.
​By the time I had expounded these facts (as I greatly enjoyed doing, for the preacher-blood of my exegetical ancestors runs strong in my veins) we had come to the Gate of the Notch.
The little plateau-valley where the Crawford House stands was once the bed of a lake, held in its oval basin by a barricade of rock at the lower end, extending from that naked bluff, well named Elephant Head, at the foot of Mount Jackson, across to the protruding base of Mount Willard. Over this, a magnificent waterfall then poured with copious volume and an unbroken fall, wearing a deep pit at the outer foot of the natural dam. But as the years went on this waterfall cut a deeper and deeper trough for itself, undermining the frost-cracked rocks on either side, and causing huge fragments to fall from their crags into the gorge below, until at last the cataract had cut a narrow gap in the dam down to the level of the bottom of the lake, which was thus wholly drained away except the little Saco pond still sparkling like a sapphire in the dark setting of the shaggy hills.
Into this gorge, only twenty-six feet in width, cut by the primitive glacier-fed river, and now occupied, half by a slender torrent and half by the turnpike, we follow the latter along the left wall, leaving the railway track to pursue a higher level on the right-hand side.
But it is not until we get twenty rods or so below the portal along the descending road cut into the eastern wall of the Notch, that we begin to perceive how really picturesque the scene is. There the rude, lofty, buttressed wall on the right (as we look back, or upward, toward the Gate) is seen in perspective, and across the tree-filled gorge at our feet, whose depth it is difficult to determine, where the corners of great rocks are dimly discerned through the curtaining foliage and the steady roar of white water sounds in deep diapason above the rustling of the wind,—across this chaotic and resounding chasm rise the bald terraces of a cliff where the foundations of Willard are bared to our eyes in marbled and banded granite, here rough and protuberant, giving mosses, ferns, and blossoming plants a foothold, there smooth, polished, and adorned only with the purple and crimson stains of water. The lowermost part is really separated by a deep gash from the main cliff, but we cannot detect this, and the whole front appears to be one solid escarpment, richly covered with weather-stains and the gay decoration of autumn leaves.
We should have missed the best of this, had we ridden, for the trees along the roadside obscure the view; but we crept through them to where a kind of balcony of jutting rock hung over the bank (you can easily find the place) whence we had a clear view of the chasm, of the jumble of fallen rocks below the Gate, the gray slides thrown down by the railway makers, the gandy wall above, and the dark crest of the Mount Willey range overtopping the whole picture, which was almost as upright before us as if set upon some gigantic easel.
We could see nothing of the steeps upon our own side, on account ​of the overhanging trees and crags, until we had wandered a quarter of a mile or so farther down through the grove, along a winding road which now and then disclosed a noble peak in advance. There we came to a great knoll of bare granite that promised an outlook, and a moment's scrambling took us to its top.
The knoll keeps its promise, as we turn our eyes backward toward the Gate, which we can no longer look straight through, as before. At the head of the cañon looms the superb façade of Willard, black and stern as iron, and so steep and smooth that only here and there can a little close-clinging brush keep a foothold upon its face. The rounded summit is almost equally bare and rocky, its scant shrubbery looking like the sparse tufts of wool on an old African's half-bald pate, and I wonder it wasn't called Niggerhead.
At the right, on the eastern side of the gorge and over the Gate, towers the dome of Mount Jackson, a "beetling cliff," in truth, even bolder (from our point of view) than its vis-a-vis, yet much less imposing, because its face is a slope of trees instead of the ledges and slides breaking Mount Willard's front into picturesque groupings of rocks. Down the Notch the lofty cone of Mount Willey dominates the landscape, and presently we come to a place on the road, where the trees on each side framed into a panel of golden leaves just these two peaks, Willey and Jackson—one before and the other behind us—producing a very striking tableau.
When we had gazed our fill at this sight, we walked on down the road, which was by no means deserted or silent, toward the two cascades that descend from the dark shoulders of Mount Webster like a white stole down the black gown of a priest. There seems to be uncertainty as to which should be called the Silver cascade and which the Flume, but we choose to believe that to the first or upper one, the latter name belongs. There is also much difference of opinion among the many writers who have described them in glowing terms, as to which is the prettier, and we debated it, not only with those whom we found climbing about them to get new points for admiration, but even in our own trio. I liked the Silver cascade the better, while Prue and Baily gave preference to the Flume. The beauty of both must depend upon the amount of water coming down.
The Flume is so called from the square-sided and deep channel the swift water has cut for itself in the soft granite at the point where the road bridges the stream, and the word is a very appropriate one. The torrent comes first into view from an invisible crevice in the forest, near the crest of the great hill, and almost at once divides into two parts, parted by a dense company of spruces crowded upon an island-crag; nor, as you stand upon the bridge in the road, can you see where these parts reunite again. But presently a broad single stream, sheeted with spray, comes leaping toward you, then, falling short, gathers into the funnel of the Flume beneath your feet and goes ​plunging down to the invisible Saco through an arch of interlaced boughs, fallen logs, and rocks, into which the sun strikes, this autumn day, as if through a cathedral window.
The Silver cascade has the most volume, is more torrential, and so steep that it is almost an unbroken fall for some hundreds of feet. "As you stand on the piazza of the hotel, you see this same stream far up the mountain, full a mile distant, leaping over the rocks and flashing in the sunlight like a silvered pinnacle of some mountain shrine. But as you stand on the bridge, or at the very base of the fall, which you can reach with care, the water seems pouring over the edge of the precipice. Just after a heavy rain the huge rock, which just below the summit usually divides the current, is almost entirely concealed by the spray. Like the most of mountain falls, it rather glides over the surface of the ledge than leaps in a clear, unbroken sheet from the summit to the base. At first the water is diffused over a broad surface, and in times of a drought is divided into several small streams. Before it reaches the base, however, all the water is compressed into a very narrow channel. Then, hurrying along over a comparatively level bed, it again, as it reaches the bridge, plunges down a distance of some twenty feet, and, driving through the flume, disappears among the bushes on the opposite side of the road. There is, perhaps, no place on this side of the mountains which so enchains one by its loveliness as the Silver cascade. You may spend hours around it, and yet long to return to its solitary beauty. The very height of the mountains, rising almost perpendicularly on each side of you, causes you to feel the impressiveness and power of the rushing torrent."
Continuing our walk under the base of Mount Webster, we got more and more out of the Notch proper into what is termed the Crawford glen, where the forested heights of Willey, Field, and Cevalon were reared almost to the zenith on the west, and Webster's unclimbable scarp hung over us against the cast. Mount Webster is the southernmost of the Presidential range. It is 4,000 feet in height, and from it the White Mountains, proper, run in a pretty straight northeasterly direction to Mount Washington, increasing regularly in height. The summits of both Webster and Jackson, its next-of-kin, are attainable, but it is an exceedingly difficult undertaking, and the reward in scenery is slight. The great feature of Mount Webster (formerly called Notch mountain), is its west side, "where it slopes to the Saco valley in a steep wall, free from foliage and striped with brilliant colorings by the slides which have laid bare the bed rock."
The Mount Willey range, which runs from Mount Willey to Mount Tom, rewards the climber much better. Its principal peak, named after the Willey family who were overwhelmed by the great avalanche from its side in 1826, is 4,330 feet high, and therefore overlooks ail the neighborhood; but the view is no more satisfactory than that to be attained from several other peaks much more easily accessible.
​There are, however, some fine cataracts, Ripley's and the Arethusa especially, upon the southern flanks of this range. The latter is on Bemis brook, about two miles north of Bemis station, or six and one half miles from the Crawford House, and offer to an adventurous person a capital excursion.
The falls are 176 feet high, and are surrounded by old trees, and rugged groups of water-worn bowlders. The best point of view is about 100 feet below the falls, where their long white line is seen through the foliage.
We had now come within sight of the old Willey House, and not caring to visit it, turned back and were walking homewards when we met a mountain-wagon half full of the casual acquaintances that one makes as he journeys leisurely from inn to inn, where the same faces are encountered again and again, and where the free-and-easy sociability of a walk to some summit or a scramble together in some wild ravine, may introduce a life-friendship.
"Get in with us!" cried these people gayly. "You don't want to walk all the way back again. We're going down to Bartlett to get dinner, and then come back on the express. There's lots of room—come on!"
I was willing, and I saw Baily casting longing looks at the back seat, where sat a very pretty brunette,—she was from Michigan, and had all that debonair archness and freedom which is so refreshing to the eastern eye, when, as in this case, it animates perfect decorum and style; but Prue hesitated, not because she didn't want to go, nor because there was any reason under the sun why she shouldn't, but simply out of that meaningless contrariness, or self-denial, characteristic of her incomprehensible sex, always is so ready to give away the rose and keep the thorns.
Ignoring her hesitation, I coolly lifted her up beside the jolly matron of the party, and climbed in behind with the brunette (who welcomed me with just the least bit of well-bred surprise), leaving Baily, mad as a hornet, to find a seat by the driver, throwing me a look of deadly enmity over his shoulder, while my wife's eyes gleamed like that legendary carbuncle hidden in these same old hills. I began to believe the bad spirits reputed to inhabit this dark gorge had entered into the whole party.
Rounding the mighty scarp of Mount Webster, we came into a somewhat broader park, where a rear rank of mountains, west of the lower half of the Presidential range, burst suddenly into view—noble and picturesque summits, bearing names given long ago by the learned Dr. Bemis Giant's Stairs, with its terraced ledges atop; Resolution, where Davis resolved anew to continue the making of his almost forgotten path to Mount Washington along the high Montalban ridge, upon which these summits stand like sentinel boxes upon a Chinese ​wall; Crawford, wearing a jaunty tuque of granite and the name of the hero who dwelt at its base (the old Mount Crawford tavern still stands there); and two or three others. Opposite, and in advance, towered spruce-clothed peaks on the edge of the great Pemigewasset wilderness, along whose base the railway was supported three or four hundred feet above our turnpike.
In the midst of this triangular park, just at the foot of Mount Webster, the Mount Washington river—straight as a birch sapling—came down to join the Saco,—crooked as a whiplash; and here (it was only a few minutes after starting) I discovered that I felt great anxiety to talk with the driver, and asked Baily if he would be good enough. to exchange seats with me.
"Why, of course, old fellow, if you really insist upon it; but I am exceedingly comfortable here."
"Ah, that's just it!" I answered, for I wasn't going to confess my real motive; "you're far too comfortable; so I propose to root you out, and make you earn your passage by entertaining Miss Michigan with an account of your adventures."
"Oh, I'm sure he couldn't be more entertaining than you have been!" and she said it so heartily that for an instant I was deceived.
But the change was made; and then,—well, you know how it is on a summer day when all at once the clouds vanish and the radiant sun lights up and warms everything? That was the effect of this simple manoeuvre. I don't discuss the philosophy of it, or attempt to palliate my part in the mischief,—I simply state the facts.
Next, we rattled over Nancy's bridge, recalling its pathetic romance,—no story brings the pioneers closer, and makes them seem more akin to us than the sad fate of this faithful heart; passed Sawyer's rock, the rum-scented legend of which is of an wholly opposite stripe; and in due time reached Upper Bartlett, which Starr King concisely described as in his day "only a long, winding lane among steep hills, cool with thick, dark, green verdure."
"Upper Bartlett," we read, "is a station on the P. & O. railroad, near which a small hamlet has arisen. It is in the centre of a picturesque amphitheatre of mountains, having Carrigain, the Nancy range, Tremont, and Haystack on the west; Hart's and Willoughby ledges, Mts. Parker, Crawford, Resolution, Langdon, and Pickering on the north; Kiarsarge and Moat on the east; and Table and Bear mountains on the south. Numerous excursions may be made from this point over the adjacent peaks; and there is rich trouting in Albany brook and other tributaries of the Saco.…Mt. Carrigain is seen to the best advantage here, and Champney made his celebrated painting of it from near the old mill. The formidable and frowning peaks which surround the hamlet are finely contrasted with the rich and narrow intervales of the Saco."
Many of the adjacent mountains are ascendable, and the views from ​the summits of Langdon and Tremont, in particular, have been pronounced of a high degree of grandeur." Carrigain is more remote, jungle-girt and difficult of access, but is higher than any other (4,678 feet) and divided from Mt. Lowell (3,850 feet) by the Carrigain notch, whose walls are remarkably precipitous. It has often been surmounted, however, even by ladies.
Upper Bartlett has long been an important outlet and milling point for the lumbering operations in the Pemigewasset basin; and within the past year a railway has been pushed into the wilderness as far as the Albany intervales. A new and entertaining side-trip is thus opened to tourists, in regard to which I shall have more to say presently.
​When the north-bound express came along, we boarded it, on our return to Crawford's.
That ride by railroad through the Notch is, to most travellers, the crowning and best-remembered experience of their White Mountain journeyings.
​Moving on we find ourselves encircled by mountains not easy to keep track of by a novice, even though he has a map open before him. The most conspicuous features are the grandly piled ledges of Hart mountain, on the right, over which the Crawford peaks are heaped together like Ossa upon Pelion. The deep cañon of Nancy's brook withdraws our eyes to the valley, and we see the old Mt. Crawford tavern, just before halting at Bemis station. The venerable Dr. Samuel Bemis, who owned a region measured by a great many square miles, of which this was a part, and who lived near here for half a century, nearly alone, but in a very comfortable manner, is destined to become the chief historical figure of the locality, for his deeds, records and names are identified with the district.
At Upper Bartlett begins one of the steepest railway inclines in the east,—116 feet to the mile, as far as the Gate of the Notch. Two locomotives are used on heavy trains, and you note the sonorous pantings of the laboring machines as, with herculean force, they strain to the task. The speed is nowhere great, yet it is by no means slow, and there is no symptom of stopping. The rhythmic snortings of the iron horse, and the grind of the wheels upon the rails, are echoed from "cliff and scar" in one sullen roar, which adds mightily to the impressiveness of the effect.
Mt. Crawford, with its curious, overhanging pinnacle, like a Canadian tuque, is now in full view among the squarer, more forbidding summits across the gorge, which is sinking rapidly beneath our steady, upward progress along the flank of Nancy mountain. The track bends incessantly, cuts a way through promontories, edges around the spurs along a rocky balcony, and leaps cataract-torrents by the help of trusty bridges.
A bewildering array of heights looms up ahead, but presently we separate one vast crag from the rest and keep our eye upon it. A deep ravine intervenes, and the train glides out upon a long bridge, suspended eighty feet in the air. We lean over the rail at the side of the open observation-car and shrink a little at the depth beneath us. From this bridge the glorious alcove down which flows the Mt. Washington river is opened to our view, with dozens of first-rate heights en echelon on each side close by Washington in the place of honor at the head. Then we are face to face with the enormous, impending façade of Frankinstein cliff,—the most majestic escarpment in the mountains,—"a black and castellated pile of precipices," as Samuel Drake calls it. "Thrust out before us, athwart the pass," he exclaims, a black and castellated pile of precipices shot upward to a dizzy height, and broke off abruptly against the sky. Its bulging sides and regular outlines resembled the clustered towers and frowning battlements of some antique fortress built to command the pass. Gashed, splintered, defaced, it seemed to have withstood for ages the artillery of heaven and the assaults of time. With what solitary grandeur it lifted its mailed front above the ​forest and seemed even to regard the mountains with disdain! Silent, gloomy, impregnable, it wanted nothing to recall those dark abodes of The Thousand and One Nights, in which malignant genii are imprisoned for thousands of years. This was Frankenstein. We at once accorded it a place as the most suggestive of cliffs. From the other side of the valley the resemblance to a medieval castle is still more striking. It has a black gorge for a moat, so deep that the head swims when crossing it; and to-day, as we crept over the cat's-cradle of a bridge thrown across for the passage of the railway, and listened to the growling of the torrent, far down beneath, the whole frail structure seemed trembling under us.
"But what a contrast! What a singular freak of nature! At the foot of this grizzly precipice, clothing it with almost superhuman beauty was a plantation of maples and birches, all resplendent in crimson and gold. Never have I seen such masses of color laid on such a background. Below, all was light and splendor; above, all darkness and gloom. Here, the eye fairly revelled in beauty, there, it recoiled in terror. The cliff was like a naked and swarthy Ethiopian up to his knees in roses."
This passed, by a great curve sweeping around it, the real Notch is entered, and the Willey House, 500 feet below, appears at the foot of the hill. We are now high upon Mt. Willey, and crossing the track of the avalanche that swept such devastating tumult into this valley sixty years ago. It is worth while to look backward and watch the shapely and entangled summits recede and regroup themselves. The ponderous, purple-hued front of Willard seems to bar the way ahead, while opposite us the shaggy walls of Webster and Jackson, mottled with autumn colors, scarred with slides and "breaking out" in black blotches of rock, rise sharply up from the Saco cañon, where we look far down into a dense mass of variegated foliage and get glimpses of the bright stream. This is the very chasm itself and we are awed, interested, full of admiration, overwhelmed with an embarrassment of riches in scenery. Then comes a breathless leap across the chasm of Willey brook—a perilous rush along the outskirts of the mountain wall—a gliding from under the dark battlements of Willard—a passage between the stately pillars of the new Gate of the Notch—and then with a triumphant blast of the whistle, we emerge into the sunlight and space of the little park at Crawford's station.