o keep himself before the public?

From the time I left my hotel until I was fairly above the dwarf spruces
below the summit of Lafayette, I was never for many minutes together out
of the hearing of thrush music. Four of our five summer representatives
of the genus _Turdus_ took turns, as it were, in the serenade. The
veeries--Wilson's thrushes--greeted me before I stepped off the piazza.
As I neared the Profile House farm, the hermits were in tune on either
hand. The moment the road entered the ancient forest, the olive-backs
began to make themselves heard, and halfway up the mountain path the
gray-cheeks took up the strain and carried it on to its heavenly
conclusion. A noble processional! Even a lame man might have climbed to
such music. If the wood thrush had been here, the chorus would have been
complete,--a chorus not to be excelled, according to my untraveled
belief, in any quarter of the world.

To-day, however, my first thoughts were not of birds, but of the
mountain. The weather was all that could be asked,--the temperature
perfect, and the atmosphere so transparent as to be of itself a kind of
lens; so that in the evening, when I rejoined my companions at the
hotel, I found to my astonishment that I had been plainly visible while
at the summit, the beholders having no other help than an opera-glass!
It was almost past belief. I had felt some dilation of soul, it was
true, but had been quite unconscious of any corresponding physical
transformation. What would our aboriginal forerunners have said could
they have stood in the valley and seen a human form moving from point to
point along yonder sharp, serrated ridge? I should certainly have passed
for a god! Let us be thankful that all such superstitious fancies have
had their day. The Indian, poor child of nature,

"A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,"

stood afar off and worshiped toward these holy hills; but the white man
clambers gayly up their sides, guide-book in hand, and leaves his
sardine box and eggshells--and likely enough his business card--at the
top. Let us be thankful, I repeat, for the light vouchsafed to us; ours
is a goodly heritage; but there are moods--such creatures of hereditary
influence are we--wherein I would gladly exchange both the guide-book
and the sardine box for a vision, never so indistinct and transient, of
Kitche Manitoo. Alas! what a long time it is since any of us have been
able to see the invisible. "In the mountains,"