and friendships worth making.

The comfort of leaving same things to the imagination was impressed upon
our travelers when they left the narrow-gauge railway at the mountain
station, and identified themselves with other tourists by entering a
two-horse wagon to be dragged wearily up the hill through the woods. The
ascent would be more tolerable if any vistas were cut in the forest to
give views by the way; as it was, the monotony of the pull upward was
only relieved by the society of the passengers. There were two bright
little girls off for a holiday with their Western uncle, a big,
good-natured man with a diamond breast-pin, and his voluble son, a lad
about the age of his little cousins, whom he constantly pestered by
his rude and dominating behavior. The boy was a product which it is the
despair of all Europe to produce, and our travelers had great delight in
him as an epitome of American "smartness." He led all the conversation,
had confident opinions about everything, easily put down his deferential
papa, and pleased the other passengers by his self-sufficient,
know-it-all air. To a boy who had traveled in California and seen the
Alps it was not to be expected that this humble mountain could afford
much entertainment, and he did not attempt to conceal his contempt for
it. When the stage reached the Rip Van Winkle House, half-way, the shy
schoolgirls were for indulging a little sentiment over the old legend,
but the boy, who concealed his ignorance of the Irving romance until his
cousins had prattled the outlines of it, was not to be taken in by any
such chaff, and though he was a little staggered by Rip's own cottage,
and by the sight of the cave above it which is labeled as the very
spot where the vagabond took his long nap, he attempted to bully
the attendant and drink-mixer in the hut, and openly flaunted his
incredulity until the bar-tender showed him a long bunch of Rip's hair,
which hung like a scalp on a nail, and the rusty barrel and stock of the
musket. The cabin is, indeed, full of old guns, pistols, locks of hair,
buttons, cartridge-boxes, bullets, knives, and other undoubted relics
of Rip and the Revolution. This cabin, with its facilities for slaking
thirst on a hot day, which Rip would have appreciated, over a hundred
years old according to information to be obtained on the spot, is
really of unknown antiquity, the old boards and timber of which it is
constructed having been brought down from the Mount