ernity.

One and another has a preference, choosing rather this than that, and
claiming the palm for a third; but with you there is no comparison.
Each is perfect in his kind. Each bodies his own character and
breathes his own expression.

O to be here through long, long summer days, drenched with coolness and
shadow and solitude, cool, cool, cool to the innermost drop of my hot
heart's-blood!

Never!

Why do I linger among the mountains? You have seen them all. Nay,
verily, I could believe that eyes had never looked upon them before.
They were new created for me this summer-day. I plucked the flower of
their promise. I touched the vigor of their immortal youth.

But mountains must be read in the original, not in translation. Only
their own rugged language, speaking directly to eye and heart, can
fully interpret their meaning. What have adjectives, in their wildest
outburst, to do with rocks upheaved, furrows ploughed, features
chiselled, thousands and thousands of years back in the conjectured
past? What is a pen-scratch to a ravine?

For speed and ease cars are, of course, unsurpassed; but for romance,
observation, interest, there is nothing like the old-fashioned coach.
Cars are city; coaches are country. Cars are the luxurious life of
well-born and long-purses people; coaches are the stirring, eventful
career of people who have their own way to make in the world. Cars
shoot on independent, thrusting off your sympathy with a snort; coaches
admit you to all the little humanities, every jolt harmonizes and
adjusts you, till you become a locomotive world, tunefully rolling on
in your orbit, independent of the larger world beneath. This is
coaching in general. Coaching among the White Mountains is a career by
itself,--I mean, of course, if you take it on the outside. How life
may look from the inside I am unable to say, having steadfastly avoided
that stand-point. When we set out it rained, and I had a battle to
fight. First, it was attempted to bestow me inside, to which, if I had
been a bale of goods, susceptible of injury by water, I might have
assented. But for a living person, with an internal furnace well fed
with fuel, in constant operation, to pack himself in a box on account
of a shower, is absurd. What if it did rain? I desired to see how
things looked in the rain. Besides, it was not incessant; there were
continual liftings of cloud and vapor, glimpses of clear sky, and a
constant chan