far down among the inaccessible woods that darken the hollows
that stretch between their bases. A cloud was creeping up to perch and
rest awhile on the highest top of Great Haystack. Vulgar folks have
called it Mount Lafayette, since the visit of that brave old Frenchman in
1825 or 1826. If they had asked his opinion, he would have told them the
names of mountains couldn't be altered, and especially names like that,
so appropriate, so descriptive, and so picturesque. A little hard white
cloud, that looked like a hundred fleeces of wool rolled into one, was
climbing rapidly along up the northwestern ridge, that ascended to the
lonely top of Great Haystack. All the others were bare. Four or five of
them,--as distinct and shapely as so many pyramids; some topped out with
naked cliff, on which the sun lay in melancholy glory; others clothed
thick all the way up with the old New Hampshire hemlock or the daring
hackmatack,--Pierpont's hackmatack. You could see their shadows
stretching many and many a mile, over Grant and Location, away beyond the
invading foot of Incorporation,--where the timber-hunter has scarcely
explored, and where the moose browses now, I suppose, as undisturbed as
he did before the settlement of the State. I wish our young friend and
genius, Harrison Eastman, had been with me, to see the sunlight as it
glared on the tops of those woods, and to see the purple of the
mountains. I looked at it myself almost with the eye of a painter. If a
painter looked with mine, though, he never could look off upon his canvas
long enough to make a picture; he would gaze forever at the original.

"But I had to leave it, and to say in my heart, Farewell! And as I
travelled on down, and the sun sunk lower and lower towards the summit of
the western ridge, the clouds came up and formed an Alpine range in the
evening heavens above it,--like other Haystacks and Moosehillocks,--so
dark and dense that fancy could easily mistake them for a higher Alps.
There were the peaks and the great passes; the Franconia Notches among
the cloudy cliffs, and the great White Mountain Gap."

His health, never robust, had been gradually failing for some time
previous to his death. He needed more repose and quiet than his duties
as an editor left him; and to this end he purchased a small and pleasant
farm in his loved Pennigewasset valley, in the hope that he might there
recruit his wasted energies. In the sixth month of the year of hi