wake, constituting really too much of a good
thing. I have wondered if the little reptiles were singing in concert,
or whether every one peeped on his own hook, their neighbor hood only
making it a chorus. I incline to the opinion that they are performing
together, that they know the tune, and each carries his part, self-
selected, in free meeting, and therefore never discordant. The hour rule
of Congress might be useful, though far less needed among the frogs than
among the profane croakers of the fens at Washington."

Here is a sketch of the mountain scenery of New Hampshire, as seen from
the Holderness Mountain, or North Hill, during a visit which he made to
his native valley in the autumn of 1841:--

"The earth sphered up all around us, in every quarter of the horizon,
like the crater of a vast volcano, and the great hollow within the
mountain circle was as smoky as Vesuvius or Etna in their recess of
eruption. The little village of Plymouth lay right at our feet, with its
beautiful expanse of intervale opening on the eye like a lake among the
woods and hills, and the Pemigewasset, bordered along its crooked way
with rows of maples, meandering from upland to upland through the
meadows. Our young footsteps had wandered over these localities. Time
had cast it all far back that Pemigewasset, with its meadows and border
trees; that little village whitening in the margin of its inter vale; and
that one house which we could distinguish, where the mother that watched
over and endured our wayward childhood totters at fourscore!

"To the south stretched a broken, swelling upland country, but champaign
from the top of North Hill, patched all over with grain-fields and green
wood-lots, the roofs of the farm-houses shining in the sun. Southwest,
the Cardigan Mountain showed its bald forehead among the smokes of a
thousand fires, kindled in the woods in the long drought. Westward,
Moosehillock heaved up its long back, black as a whale; and turning the
eye on northward, glancing down the while on the Baker's River valley,
dotted over with human dwellings like shingle-bunches for size, you
behold the great Franconia Range, its Notch and its Haystacks, the
Elephant Mountain on the left, and Lafayette (Great Haystack) on the
right, shooting its peak in solemn loneliness high up into the desert
sky, and overtopping all the neighboring Alps but Mount Washington
itself. The prospect of these is most impressive and satisfactor