Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/322

312 cold, strange and weird as condensed clouds, of which, nevertheless, you make tea! surrounded by dryish bogs in which, perchance, you may detect traces of the bear or loup cervier.

We got the best views of the mountains from Conway, Jefferson, Bethlehem, and Campton. Conway combines the Italian (?) level and softness with Alpfhe peaks around.—Jefferson offers the completest view of the range a dozen or more miles distant, the place from which to behold the manifold varying lights of departing day on the summits.—Bethlehem also afforded a complete but generally more distant view of the range, and, with respect to the highest summits, more diagonal.

Campton afforded a fine distant view of the pyramidal Franconia Mountains, with the lumpish Profile Mountain. The last view, with its smaller intervals and partial view of the great range far in the north, was somewhat like that from Conway.

It is remarkable that what you may call trees on the White Mountains (i. e., the forest), cease abruptly, with those about a dozen or more feet high, and then succeeds a distinct kind of growth, quite dwarfish and flattened, and confined almost entirely to fir and spruce, as if it marked the limit of almost perpetual snow, as if it indicated a zone where the trees were