wthorne "savagized" as a boy, our hearts beat at sight of a sign
saying "White Mts." Just that! Abrupt but alluring. White birches were
like rays of moonlight striping the dark woods, and there was the
incense smell of balsam firs. We sniffed the perfume joyously and
reminded each other--Jack and I--that Maine is America's Scotland: like
Scotland for beauty of lake and forest and mountain; like Scotland, too,
"hard for the poor, and a playground for the rich."

Along a rough but never bad country road we flashed past lake after
lake--Sebago the biggest--and ahead of us loomed far-off blue heights
like huge incoming waves sweeping toward an unseen shore. No longer did
we need a sign-post to point us to the mountains; but there were some
things by the way that surprised us. Suddenly we found ourselves coming
on the "Bay of Naples," a big sapphire sheet of water ringed in with
some perfectly private little green mountains of its own. It was as if
we had dreamed it, when we plunged into forests again, deep, mysterious
forests of hemlock. Cowbells tinkled faintly, as in Switzerland, though
we saw no cows, and there was no other sound save the sealike murmur of
the trees--that sound which is the voice of Silence. Lakes and ponds lay
at the feet of dark slopes, as if women in black had dropped their
mirrors and forgotten to pick them up.

[Illustration: "The air is spiced with the fragrance of balsam fir ...
on the way to Crawford Notch"]

We were back in New Hampshire again for the night, for we stopped in
North Conway, at a hotel in a great garden. If it had liked, it could
have called the whole valley its garden, for it is a vast flowery lawn
with mountains for a wall. Such a strange wall, with a high-up
stone shelf on which you might think the brave Pequawket Indians had
left the images of their gods, beyond the reach of white men. They had a
fine village of wigwams where our hotel stands now, facing the mountains
it's named for, and the trees and the Saco River haven't forgotten their
old masters' songs of war and of hunting.

[Illustration: map]*

This part of the world must be the intimate, hidden home of balsam firs.
The air is spiced with their fragrance, and not only the gay little
shops at North Conway, but each farmhouse and cottage we passed next
day, going on to Crawford Notch, sold pillows of balsam fir.

By this time we began to pity and patronize ourselves, because we had
thought that nothing could be as