en in the season when
the niggard frost gives them scant leave to run. They make the most of
their midday hour, and tinkle all night thinly under the ice. An ear
laid to the snow catches a muffled hint of their eternal busyness
fifteen or twenty feet under the canon drifts, and long before any
appreciable spring thaw, the sagging edges of the snow bridges mark out
the place of their running. One who ventures to look for it finds the
immediate source of the spring freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed
with the reek of melting drifts, all the gravelly flats in a swirl of
waters. But later, 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 clot 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 cup, 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 unpromisi