Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/27

Rh hand, close to the railroad, the Kalmia glauca in bloom, as we are whirled past. Arrived at Troy station at five minutes past eleven, and shouldered our knapsacks, steering northeast to the mountain, its top some four miles off. It is a pleasant, hilly road, leading past a few farmhouses, where you already begin to sniff the mountain or at least up-country air. Almost without interruption we had the mountain in sight before us, its sublime gray mass, that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat color. Probably these crests of the earth are for the most part of one color in all lands,—that gray color of antiquity which nature loves, the color of unpainted wood, weather stain, time stain; not glaring nor gaudy; the color of all roofs, the color of all things that endure, the color that wears well; color of Egyptian ruins, of mummies, and all antiquity, baked in the sun, done brown,—not scarlet, like the crest of the bragging cock, but that hard, enduring gray, a terrene sky color, solidified air with a tinge of earth.

We left the road at a school-house, and, crossing a meadow, began to ascend gently through very rocky pastures. The neighboring hills began to sink, and entering the wood we soon passed Fassett's shanty, he so busily at work inside that; He did not see us, and we took our dinner by the rocky brookside in the woods just