than feathers, cover the rocks and roots. There are shadows never broken
by the sun, and dark, cool springs of icy water hidden away in the
crevices. You feel a sense of antiquity here which you can never feel
among the maples and birches. Longfellow was right when he filled his
forest primeval with "murmuring pines and hemlocks."

The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier and more rugged the
vegetation becomes. The pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the
hemlocks disappear, and the balsams can go no farther. Only the hardy
spruce keeps on bravely, rough and stunted, with branches matted
together and pressed down flat by the weight of the winter's snow, until
finally, somewhere about the level of four thousand feet above the sea,
even this bold climber gives out, and the weather-beaten rocks of the
summit are clad only with mosses and Alpine plants.

Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior
dignity to be naturally bald.

Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet of the needful height,
cannot claim this distinction. But what Nature has denied, human labour
has supplied. Under the direction of the Adirondack Survey, some years
ago, several acres of trees were cut from the summit; and when we
emerged, after the last sharp scramble, upon the very crest of the
mountain, we were not shut in by a dense thicket, but stood upon a bare
ridge of granite in the centre of a ragged clearing.

I shut my eyes for a moment, drew a few long breaths of the glorious
breeze, and then looked out upon a wonder and a delight beyond
description.