of the traveler. He was truly a fugitive from us--or, more
probably, in spite of the gentlemanly graces my imagination had lent
him, a collier returning to his shanty in the forest. The apparition had
spoiled our twilight walk. The brief twilight of October was shortened
by the mountains that rise like walls on either side of the road, and
Alice hurried forward, so that we had no time to look for the cascades,
and forms of animals, and profiles of men, that we had been forewarned
we should see on the hill-sides. The stars were coming out, and the full
moon--indicated by the floods of silver light it sent up from behind
Mount Webster--when we passed through the portal of the 'Notch' and came
upon the level area where the 'Crawford House' now stands.

Here we found my father, already seated in a rocking-chair by a broad
hearthstone and a roaring, crackling fire. And beside these cheering
types of home-contentments, he had found a gentleman from the
low-country, with whom he was already in animated discourse. The
stranger was a fine, intelligent, genteel-looking person, who proved to
be a clergyman whom Alice had once before met at the Flume-House. He is
a true lover of nature and explorer of nature's secrets, a geologist,
botanist, etc., etc., and he most wisely comes up to the high places at
all seasons, whenever he feels the need of refreshment to his bodily and
mind's eye. Perhaps he finds here an arcana for his theology; and I am
sure that after a study here he may go hence a better as well as a wiser
man, and better able, by his communings here, to inform and mold the
minds of others. No teachers better understood the sources and means of
mental power and preparation than Moses and Mohammed; and their studies
were not in theological libraries, but in the deepest of nature's
solitudes.

Perhaps our friend has no direct purpose beyond his own edification in
his rambles in the mountains. He is familiar with every known resort
among them, and most kindly disposed to give us thoroughfare travelers
information. He made for us, from memory, a pencil-sketch of the peaks
to be seen from Mount Willard, with their names. We verified them
to-day, and found the outline as true as if it had been daguerreo-typed.
An observation so keen, and a memory so accurate, are to be envied.

This house, at the Mountain Notch, is called the Crawford House. The old
Crawford House, familiar to the pioneer travelers in this region, stands
a few