onveyance. It
would be mortified to hear the talk of the excursionists, which is more
about the quality of the tables and the beds, and the rapidity with
which the "whole thing can be done," than about the beauty and the
sublimity of nature. The mountain, however, was made for man, and not
man for the mountain; and if the majority of travelers only get out
of these hills what they are capable of receiving, it may be some
satisfaction to the hills that they still reserve their glories for the
eyes that can appreciate them. Perhaps nature is not sensitive about
being run after for its freaks and eccentricities. If it were, we could
account for the catastrophe, a few years ago, in the Franconia Notch
flume. Everybody went there to see a bowlder which hung suspended
over the stream in the narrow canon. This curiosity attracted annually
thousands of people, who apparently cared more for this toy than
for anything else in the region. And one day, as if tired of this
misdirected adoration, nature organized a dam on the side of Mount
Lafayette, filled it with water, and then suddenly let loose a flood
which tore open the canon, carried the bowlder away, and spread ruin far
and wide. It said as plainly as possible, you must look at me, and not
at my trivial accidents. But man is an ingenious creature, and nature
is no match for him. He now goes, in increasing number, to see where the
bowlder once hung, and spends his time in hunting for it in the acres
of wreck and debris. And in order to satisfy reasonable human curiosity,
the proprietors of the flume have been obliged to select a bowlder and
label it as the one that was formerly the shrine of pilgrimage.

In his college days King had more than once tramped all over this
region, knapsack on back, lodging at chance farmhouses and second-class
hotels, living on viands that would kill any but a robust climber, and
enjoying the life with a keen zest only felt by those who are abroad at
all hours, and enabled to surprise Nature in all her varied moods. It
is the chance encounters that are most satisfactory; Nature is apt to
be whimsical to him who approaches her of set purpose at fixed hours. He
remembered also the jolting stage-coaches, the scramble for places, the
exhilaration of the drive, the excitement of the arrival at the hotels,
the sociability engendered by this juxtaposition and jostle of travel.
It was therefore with a sense of personal injury that, when he reached
Bethle