s. We had
been told of parties who had essayed the ascent from this side, and
had returned baffled and bewildered. In a tangle of primitive
woods, the very bigness of the mountain baffles one. It is all
mountain; whichever way you turn--and one turns sometimes in such
cases before he knows it--the foot finds a steep and rugged ascent.

The eye is of little service; one must be sure of his bearings and
push boldly on and up. One is not unlike a flea upon a great shaggy
beast, looking for the animal's head; or even like a much smaller
and much less nimble creature,--he may waste his time and steps, and
think he has reached the head when he is only upon the rump. Hence I
questioned our host, who had several times made the ascent, closely.
Larkins laid his old felt hat upon the table, and, placing one hand
upon one side of it and the other upon the other, said: "There Slide
lies, between the two forks of the stream, just as my hat lies
between my two hands. David will go with you to the forks, and then
you will push right on up." But Larkins was not right, though he had
traversed all those mountains many times over. The peak we were
about to set out for did not lie between the forks, but exactly at
the head of one of them; the beginnings of the stream are in the
very path of the slide, as we afterward found. We broke camp early
in the morning, and with our blankets strapped to our backs and
rations in our pockets for two days, set out along an ancient and in
places an obliterated bark road that followed and crossed and
recrossed the stream. The morning was bright and warm, but the wind
was fitful and petulant, and I predicted rain. What a forest
solitude our obstructed and dilapidated wood-road led us through!
five miles of primitive woods before we came to the forks, three
miles before we came to the "burnt shanty," a name merely,--no
shanty there now for twenty-five years past. The ravages of the
barkpeelers were still visible, now in a space thickly strewn with
the soft and decayed trunks of hemlock-trees, and overgrown with
wild cherry, then in huge mossy logs scattered through the beech and
maple woods. Some of these logs were so soft and mossy that one
could sit or recline upon them as upon a sofa.

But the prettiest thing was the stream soliloquizing in such musical
tones there amid the moss-covered rocks and boulders. How clean it
looked, what purity! Civilization corrupts the streams as it
corrupts the Indian; o