er, in June or July,
when the camping season begins, there runs the stream away full and
singing, with no visible reinforcement other than an icy trickle from
some high, belated dot of snow. Oftenest the stream drops bodily from
the bleak bowl of some alpine lake; sometimes breaks out of a hillside
as a spring where the ear can trace it under the rubble of loose stones
to the neighborhood of some blind pool. But that leaves the lakes to be
accounted for.

The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also
unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brows is guessed
at. It is always a favorite local tradition that one or another of the
blind lakes is bottomless. Often they lie in such deep cairns of broken
boulders that one never gets quite to them, or gets away unhurt. One
such drops below the plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds over,
perilously, nearing the pass. It lies still and wickedly green in its
sharp-lipped cap, and the guides of that region love to tell of the
packs and pack animals it has swallowed up.

But the lakes of Oppapago are perhaps not so deep, less green than gray,
and better befriended. The ousel haunts them, while still hang about
their coasts the thin undercut drifts that never quite leave the high
altitudes. In and out of the bluish ice caves he flits and sings, and
his singing heard from above is sweet and uncanny like the Nixie's
chord. One finds butterflies, too, about these high, sharp regions which
might be called desolate, but will not by me who love them. This is
above timber-line but not too high for comforting by succulent small
herbs and golden tufted grass. A granite mountain does not crumble with
alacrity, but once resolved to soil makes the best of it. Every handful
of loose gravel not wholly water leached affords a plant footing, and
even in such unpromising surroundings there is a choice of locations.
There is never going to be any communism of mountain herbage, their
affinities are too sure. Full in the tunnels of snow water on gravelly,
open spaces in the shadow of a drift, one looks to find buttercups,
frozen knee-deep by night, and owning no desire but to ripen their fruit
above the icy bath. Soppy little plants of the portulaca and small,
fine ferns shiver under the drip of falls and in dribbling crevices.
The bleaker the situation, so it is near a stream border, the better
the cassiope loves it. Yet I have not found it on the poli