MR. BARNES DISCOVERS A VALUABLE CLUE.
Immediately after the wedding Mr. Mitchel and his bride started west,
intending to spend their honeymoon in the Yosemite Valley, having
promised Mrs. Remsen and Dora, however, to join them in the White
Mountains before the end of the season. About the first of July the
Remsens and the Van Rawlstons went to Jefferson, New Hampshire, a small
town along the base of the Pliny Range of mountains, from which a
magnificent view of the Presidential Range, only ten miles away, is to
be obtained. About the middle of the month Mr. Randolph determined to
visit the same place, and was intensely disgusted on alighting from the
stage, which reaches the Waumbeck Hotel about eight o'clock at night, to
be greeted familiarly by Mr. Alphonse Thauret. It was evident that his
rival did not intend to lose any chance to win the hand of Dora Remsen.
If one has anything of the artistic in his nature he could scarcely fail
to enjoy himself at Jefferson. The town is practically a single road,
well up the side of the mountain range. Thus the hotels all look out
over a long and beautiful valley. From the piazza of the Waumbeck, on a
clear day, no less than thirty-five mountain peaks can be easily
counted, the Green Mountains over in Vermont being visible as a distant
line of blue, and not in the total.
Of course the most conspicuous and most admired peak is Mount
Washington. One who has not visited the region might suppose that he
would soon become sated with the sight of the same mountains day after
day. This is a great error. All the mountains, and especially Mount
Washington, are ever presenting new aspects. All changes of atmosphere
produce corresponding variations. The shadows of passing clouds, the
effects at sunrise or at sunset, the moonlight, the partly cloudy
weather when the top of the mountain is hidden, the mists, and the rain,
all offer such totally different coloring and picturesque effects that
the artistic eye is never tired.
Dora was an artist in every fibre of her being, as one would know who
listened to her talking to Mr. Randolph half an hour after his arrival,
as they sat together on the piazza. In his delight to be with her and to
hear her, he would have forgotten the very existence of Mr. Thauret were
it not that he sat near them in the rotunda at the end of the piazza,
and so shared the entertainment that she offered.
"What a pity," she was saying, "that you did not come up yesterday. You
have missed the grandest sights that mortal ever beheld. I suppose on
your trip up you saw nothing beautiful in the rain-storm that we had
this afternoon?"
"Nothing whatever," said Mr. Randolph. "However it may have been here
among the mountains, the rain did not make the valleys more attractive.
Indeed I thought it simply a beastly day."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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