ove was very marked. It was like the passage from the street into
the temple. Here we paused awhile and ate our lunch, and refreshed
ourselves with water gathered from a little well sunk in the moss.

The quiet and repose of this spruce grove proved to be the calm that
goes before the storm. As we passed out of it, we came plump upon
the almost perpendicular battlements of Slide. The mountain rose
like a huge, rock-bound fortress from this plain-like expanse. It
was ledge upon ledge, precipice upon precipice, up which and over
which we made our way slowly and with great labor, now pulling
ourselves up by our hands, then cautiously finding niches for our
feet and zigzagging right and left from shelf to shelf. This
northern side of the mountain was thickly covered with moss and
lichens, like the north side of a tree. This made it soft to the
foot, and broke many a slip and fall. Everywhere a stunted growth of
yellow birch, mountain-ash, and spruce and fir opposed our progress.
The ascent at such an angle with a roll of blankets on your back is
not unlike climbing a tree: every limb resists your progress and
pushes you back; so that when we at last reached the summit, after
twelve or fifteen hundred feet of this sort of work, the fight was
about all out of the best of us. It was then nearly two o'clock, so
that we had been about seven hours in coming seven miles.

Here on the top of the mountain we overtook spring, which had been
gone from the valley nearly a month. Red clover was opening in the
valley below, and wild strawberries just ripening; on the summit the
yellow birch was just hanging out its catkins, and the claytonia, or
spring-beauty, was in bloom. The leaf-buds of the trees were just
bursting, making a faint mist of green, which, as the eye swept
downward, gradually deepened until it became a dense, massive cloud
in the valleys. At the foot of the mountain the clintonia, or
northern green lily, and the low shadbush were showing their
berries, but long before the top was reached they were found in
bloom. I had never before stood amid blooming claytonia, a flower of
April, and looked down upon a field that held ripening strawberries.
Every thousand feet elevation seemed to make about ten days'
difference in the vegetation, so that the season was a month or more
later on the top of the mountain than at its base. A very pretty
flower which we began to meet with well up on the mountain-side was
the painted trilliu