Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/190

 i8o

��Lake Winnipiseogee in October.

��many have rocky shores. Now we creep around a green and grassy point, now under an ancient tree whose gnarled and drooping arms al- most sweep our deck. Again we are lost in the solemn shadow of a stern and lofty cliff, whose perpendicular front is seamed and shattered by the great angular notches peculiar to granite in which feldspar largely pre- dominates. Over the beetling brow of this cliff leans a dark, densely tuft- ed, rugged pine, with one huge pro- jecting limb that runs out horizontally far over the water, like the arm of a black giant stretched out in silent threatening toward lake and sky ; or perhaps as a guardian sentinel over the deep and shadowy dell, carpeted with winter-green, that winds inland from the foot of the cliff.

We pass Bear island and Rattle- snake island, the former a large, green, sloping isle, with an outline not unlike the back of a bear ; the other a small, dome-like shaped islet, which in for- mer times abounded with the crotalus horridus, many of which were of un- usually large size. Rattlesnakes ex- ceeding ten feet in length were fre- quently found on this island, but the species is nearly extinct in this section. Beyond Bear island, as the steamer shoots across a little bay, we get a noble view of the Sandwich range, the most striking picture, perhaps, to be seen on the lake. As you look up the bay between Red Hill on the left and the Ossipee Mountains on the right, the whole chain is seen several miles away. At the first glance the mountains almost seem to be floating in the air, and we almost expect to see them fade away the next moment. But, no, there they are, though looking

��weird and unsubstantial, lonely Cho- corua, who seems to have pushed his fellows away from him, standing farthest away in the north-west. The hills are sleeping, and the water around you has the same quality of a still ecstasy. That is dreaming too — dreaming, perhaps, of the splendor of old days, when the red man's craft alone disturbed its bosom.

Another view, scarcely less lovely and much more grand and exciting, is where one gets a passing glimpse of Mount Washington from the steamer's deck. We have passed the westerly declivity of the Ossipee range, and, looking across a low slope of the Sandwich range and far back of them, we see a dazzling white spot gleaming on the northern hori- zon. As we look, it mounts higher and higher into the sky, add assumes a majesty that is unmistakable. Why should old Whiteface, which seems, at a careless glance, much higher by its nearness, or the hauglity Chocorua, produce less jo3^ous, less sublime emotions than that tinted etching on the northern sky ? That mountain in the north, dimgra3'in the distance except the dome that is crowned with winter, is Mount Wash- ington, the king of the White Moun- tains. Towering from its plateau built for its throne, more than fifty miles away, is the crest that has no rival in our northern latitude this side the Rocky Mountains, and from which a wider area can be measured by the eye than can be seen elsewhere on the eastern side of the Mississijipi.

The little craft steams on. Now we float through a still, deep cove, around whose margins the great pike basks under the broad green lily-pads.

�� �