Page:The heart of Monadnock (IA heartofmonadnock00timl).pdf/18

 and remoteness of its winter garment of ice and snow, sparkling like a million diamonds, or now impalpable, mysterious, dimly vast in a shroud of cloud,—but they may not, cannot, understand what it grows to mean to the mountain lover who dwells close to its shrine and knows it as a lover knows the heart of his mistress. Not only to look out from it, but to look deeply into it, gives us the inexhaustible lore that is hidden in the mountain's mighty heart.

All through the sweeping forests that clothe the climbing, precipitous mountain sides, are innumerable woodland trails sometimes clearly defined, sometimes merely blazed and often almost invisible save to the trained eye; up on the bare, wide cliffs above the tree-line the directions are only marked by tiny cairns—two or three stones placed one on the other. It is not hard for the inexpert to lose his way. Miles of these sun-flecked narrow paths thread through deep, quiet forests, broken constantly by the out-cropping crags, showing