and the last stragglers wore "a tortured, waning look." The forest
threshold was crossed; but yet a little higher a slope of mountain
meadow dipped to the south-west, towards a bright stream trickling under
ice and icicles; and there, in a grove of the beautiful silver spruce,
our travellers resolved to encamp for the night. The trees were small of
size, but so exquisitely arranged that one might well ask what artist's
hand had planted them--scattering them here, grouping them there, and
training their shapely spires towards heaven. "Hereafter," says Miss
Bird, "when I call up memories of the glorious, the view from this
camping-ground will come up. Looking east, gorges opened to the distant
plains, there fading into purple-grey. Mountains with pine-clothed
skirts rose in ranges, or, solitary, uplifted their grey summits; while
close behind, but nearly 3,000 feet above us, towered the bald white
crest of Long's Peak, its huge precipices red with the light of a sun
long lost to our eyes. Close to us, in the caverned side of the peak,
was snow that, owing to its position, is eternal. Soon the after-glow
came on, and before it faded a big half-moon hung out of the heavens,
shining through the silver-blue foliage of the pines on the frigid
background of snow, and turning the whole into fairyland."

This passage shows--what, indeed, is sufficiently evident in every page
of Miss Bird's travel-books--that she possesses, as every traveller
ought to possess, the artist's temperament, and that if she cannot
transfer the scenes she loves to the canvas, she knows how to reproduce
them in words that have the glow of light and life. A sense of the
beautiful, and a power of expressing that sense so as to make it felt by
others, is the primary and indispensable qualification of the traveller.
He must have eyes to see and ears to hear; and that his fellow may be
the wiser, better, and happier for his enterprise, he must have the
faculty of describing what he has seen and heard in language of
adequate force and clearness.

With a great fire of pine-logs to protect them against the rigour
of the night--for the thermometer marked twelve degrees below
freezing-point--our travellers passed the hours of darkness. When the
sun rose, they too arose; and it was well to do so, as sunrise from a
mountain top is such a spectacle of glory as few eyes have the happiness
to look upon. From the chill grey peak above them, with its eternal
snows and