White Doe of the mountains which appears to travellers now and then,
bringing them good luck. Of course _some_ people would say it was just
an ordinary, _cafe-au-lait_-coloured deer, with the sun shining on it to
make it look white; because there are still deer in the mountains: but
you and Monty wouldn't be so banal!

We saw lakes and forests, dark, impenetrable pines, and baby woods of
white and gold and palest green; rivers and brooks that are cousins to
the brooks and rivers of Scotland; rocks like enchanted elephants lying
down fast asleep in surging foam, and green pools clear as glass to
their pearl-stored depths. The Flume, in its different way, was as
memorable as the Great Stone Face. So flashing white was the swift water
it seemed to send out troops of flying spirits which vanished as we
looked, or else crossed on a bridge of rainbow to the blue mountains
that walled the distance.

Sunapee has a river and a lake, and our hotel was great fun, with a
dining-room which pretends to be a glorified log cabin. Next day we had
lost the superlative beauty of the mountains. It was just very pretty
country, where the mountains sent the baby foothills to play and sun
themselves. By and by, however, the Green Mountains began to float
before us, not in the least green, but darkly blue against the pale-blue
sky, like background mountains in Stained-Glass-Window Land; and Vermont
opened adorably. The door of the State was set in a wall of beautiful
forests, wild forests which might have been discovered by us for the
first time if a great suspension bridge hadn't given away the story of
civilization. The mountains pretended to be wild also, though they were
low and softly wooded. But along our roadside lay piles of
good-smelling, newly sawn wood, which we feared that men, not brownies,
had placed there; and now and then we passed, in the midst of apparent
wildness, a mild-looking elderly farmhouse.

[Illustration: "I shall always think of Vermont as the State of wild
lawns and gardens"]

Towns had a way of appearing where we least expected to see them;
Chester, for instance, which had nothing to lead up to it. (But there
was a delicious luncheon in it!) And the instant we had passed out from
its street of stately trees we were deep in the country again. I don't
know why Vermont should have the greenest grass and trees in the world,
and more varieties of wild flowers growing in thick borders by
brooks and roadsides. Yet