About three miles below the "Gate," the Notch broadens into a sort of basin enclosed by the bare walls of Mount Willard to the westward and Mount Willey to the south, curving around the long crescent-shaped slope of Mount Webster, which makes the northern border. Here is the Willey House, the scene of the Willey Slide, the great tragedy of the Notch, a small and antiquated inn, now adjoined by a modern hotel. In August, 1826, there was a terrific landslide down the slope of Mount Willey behind the old house, then kept by Samuel Willey, from whom the mountain was afterwards named. A heavy storm after a long drouth had made a flood in the Saco, and Willey, fearing an overflow, deserted his house in the night, with his family of nine persons, to seek higher ground. Suddenly the slide came down the mountain and the flight was fatal, the avalanche of rocks and dirt overwhelming them all, while a convenient boulder behind the house so deviated it that, although almost covered with rubbish, the building was uninjured. A traveller who afterwards came through the Notch found the half-buried inn deserted, with the doors open, the supper-table spread, and a Bible lying open upon it, with a pair of spectacles on the page, evidently just as they had been left in the sudden flight. Owing to the bend in the Notch there is an unrivalled view down it from the summit of Mount Willard, which thus stands practically at the head of the deep pass. The southern face of this mountain is a vast and almost perpendicular precipice, out on the brow of which the observer stands to look down the deep valley stretching far away, and enclosed between mountains rising nearly two thousand feet above him on either hand, so that the view has a singular individuality, as if one were looking at it through a camera. The depth of the gorge and the precipitous front of the mountain make the Notch a tremendous gulf. The deeply concave chasm is scooped out like an immense cylinder, having the inside covered with dense green foliage, and grandly bending around to the left until lost afar off behind the distant projecting slope of Mount Webster. The railroad stretches, a streak of brown, along the right-hand wall of the valley, twisting in and out about the promontories. Down in the bottom the thick forest hides the wagon-road and the bed of the Saco until they come out in a flat cleared green spot in front of the Willey House. The towering mountain slopes are scratched and scarred where slides have come down, and two or three bright little ribbons of white water are suspended on their sides, making cascades that help fill the river beneath. Beyond the outlet of the Notch, the eastern background is a vast sea of mountain ranges and billowy peaks, having the bold, white, pyramidal crown of proud Chocorua rising behind them. This splendid scene, regarded by many as the finest in the White Mountains, had a peculiar charm for Anthony Trollope on his American visit. He did not usually view