MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY



THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.


It was now the middle of September. We had come since sunrise from
Bartlett, passing up through the valley of the Saco, which extends
between mountainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often
as level as a church-aisle. All that day and two preceding ones we
had been loitering towards the heart of the White Mountains,--those
old crystal hills, whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our
distant wanderings before we thought of visiting them. Height after
height had risen and towered one above another till the clouds began
to hang below the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of
the slides, those avalanches of earth, stones, and trees, which
descend into the hollows, leaving vestiges of their track hardly to
be effaced by the vegetation of ages. We had mountains behind us
and mountains on each side, and a group of mightier ones ahead.
Still our road went up along the Saco, right towards the centre of
that group, as if to climb above the clouds in its passage to the
farther region.

In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the
Northern Indians, coming down upon them from this mountain rampart