he gap
where the people have to pass. Following round the panorama, you come to
the Ossipees and the Sandwich Mountains, peaks innumerable and nameless,
and of every variety of fantastic shape. Down their vast sides are
displayed the melancholy-looking slides, contrasting with the fathomless
woods.

"But the lakes,--you see lakes, as well as woods and mountains, from the
top of North Hill. Newfound Lake in Hebron, only eight miles distant,
you can't see; it lies too deep among the hills. Ponds show their small
blue mirrors from various quarters of the great picture. Worthen's Mill-
Pond and the Hardhack, where we used to fish for trout in truant,
barefooted days, Blair's Mill-Pond, White Oak Pond, and Long Pond, and
the Little Squam, a beautiful dark sheet of deep, blue water, about two
miles long, stretched an id the green hills and woods, with a charming
little beach at its eastern end, and without an island. And then the
Great Squam, connected with it on the east by a short, narrow stream, the
very queen of ponds, with its fleet of islands, surpassing in beauty all
the foreign waters we have seen, in Scotland or elsewhere,--the islands
covered with evergreens, which impart their hue to the mass of the lake,
as it stretches seven miles on east from its smaller sister, towards the
peerless Winnipesaukee. Great Squam is as beautiful as water and island
can be. But Winnipesaukee, it is the very 'Smile of the Great Spirit.'
It looks as if it had a thousand islands; some of them large enough for
little towns, and others not bigger than a swan or a wild duck swimming
on its surface of glass."

His wit and sarcasm were generally too good-natured to provoke even their
unfortunate objects, playing all over his editorials like the thunderless
lightnings which quiver along the horizon of a night of summer calmness;
but at times his indignation launched them like bolts from heaven. Take
the following as a specimen. He is speaking of the gag rule of Congress,
and commending Southern representatives for their skilful selection of a
proper person to do their work:--

"They have a quick eye at the South to the character, or, as they would
say, the points of a slave. They look into him shrewdly, as an old
jockey does into a horse. They will pick him out, at rifle-shot
distance, among a thousand freemen. They have a nice eye to detect
shades of vassalage. They saw in the aristocratic popinjay strut of a
counterfeit Dem