amazing velocity of one hundred and eighty miles an hour. Clouds are apt to hover about the summit, and on the journey up or down you are likely to pass through The Presidential Range, so called because its peaks bear the names of six early Presidents of the United States their gray mists. The view from the top is very widereaching on a clear day, and Mount Katahdin in Maine can be seen off on the northeastern horizon one hundred and fifty miles away. Every three hundred feet above the sea level brings the temperature down about one degree, which means a difference of twenty degrees in the case of the summit of Mount Washington. The air there is nearly always cool, and in winter the mercury has been known to go down to fifty degrees below zero. Aside from the mountains themselves and their wild notches there are several attractions, such as Echo Lake, the Old Man of the Mountain, and the Flume, which every visitor wishes to see. Echo Lake in the Franconia Notch is a dainty body of water with steep wooded heights rising from its borders. If you stand on the shore opposite the bluffs, your voice or the report of a pistol or the notes of a bugle come back with startling clearness on a quiet day. Only a mile away is Profile Lake, from which the woods sweep up a precipitous slope for more than a thousand feet, and you see near the summit the grim stone features of the Old Man outjutting from a tremendous cliff. The face itself is forty feet in length, but the beholder does not realize its great size at such a distance, and marvels most that it is The Old Man of the Mountain SO strikingly human. The Indians were its original discoverers, and you wonder what impression was made on them by that strange face gazing forth from the brow of the wilderness mountain. cleft nine hundred The Flume is an almost straight feet long and sixty or more deep. Its perpendicular walls are only a few feet apart, and a little stream rushes down the shadowy depths with much noise and turmoil. The stream enters the upper end of the Flume by a leap from the brow of a precipice in a graceful cascade. Formerly there was an enormous suspended boulder in the Flume, so firmly wedged between the cliffs that it seemed destined to stay there until doomsday. But in 1883 a violent thunderstorm started a landslide up beyond the cleft, and all the rubbish came down through and carried along the boulder. The mass of rocks and earth and trees was deposited some distance below. Whether the boulder was broken into fragments, or whether it lies buried entire in the débris, no one knows. There are lookout places on the mountains where men are watching for fires all the summer through. The men have telescopes, and their lookouts are connected with the villages by telephone. As soon as they see the smoke of a fire starting they telephone down, and men are soon on the spot putting it out. Soon after the beginning of the present century "Old Man Thompson," a famous White Mountain hunter, died at the age of ninety-five. He came to the mountains in his youth when some of the people were and Old Man Thompson He set a trap, and caught foxes, coons, mink, and still living in log houses. About 1870 he killed the last wolf ever seen in the region. A man had drawn a dead ox out in his pasture, saw the wolf eating the ox. the creature. He hunted marten for their furs. Occasionally he would get an otter, and he secured many a deer and bear. Bears are shot and trapped in the mountains even |