The path up Cannon Mountain (which, by the way, is called Cannon Mountain because a rock on what looks like the summit from the Profile House resembles a cannon) started in near the hotel, and lost no time about ascending. It began to go up with the first step, in fact, through an evergreen forest, and it never stopped going up till it emerged from the evergreens upon bare rock, two miles away, directly across the Notch from the point on Lafayette where the path reaches the end of Eagle Cliff. “Looks as if you could almost throw a stone across,” said Peanut. The boys now saw that the real summit of Cannon was a mile away to the west, and instead of looking down, as they had expected to do, upon the top of Bridal Veil falls on the west side, where their real mountain trip had begun, they were a long distance from the falls. The Old Man lay to the south of them, and it was toward him they made their way, standing presently on top of the precipice above his massive forehead, and looking southward through the Notch. What a view it was! The ground below their feet fell sheer away out of sight, fifteen hundred feet to the valley below. To the right was the great wall of Kinsman, to the left the bare scarred ridges of Lafayette, Lincoln, Haystack and Liberty, along which they had plodded the day before. In the green Notch between they could see the white road and the little Pemigewassett River flashing through the trees, on their way to the Flume House, and far off, where the Notch opened out into the sunny distances, the town of North Woodstock. Beyond the opening, the boys could see the far blue mountains to the south. “That’s what the Old Man of the Mountain is forever looking at, boys,” said Mr. Rogers. “Not a bad view, eh?” “It’s wonderful!” said Lou. The Scouts now lay down on the rocks, and Mr. Rogers opened the book to the story of “The Great Stone Face.” “This story,” he began, “was written in Berkshire County, pretty close to our home--in Lenox, in a little red house at the head of Stockbridge Bowl, in the summer of 1851, when Hawthorne was living there. It isn’t exactly about this particular Old Man of the Mountain, as you will see from the description. It’s really about a sort of ideal great stone face. But of course it was suggested to Hawthorne by this one.” Then he read the story aloud. I wish all my readers, before they go any further in this book, would get Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales,” and read it, too, right now. If you’ve read it before, read it again. And try to imagine, as you read it, that Rob and Lou and Frank and Art and Peanut were listening to it, not in school, not in a house, but sitting fifteen hundred feet above the Notch, almost on the forehead of the Great Stone Face itself, and looking off at exactly the same view he looks at, fifty miles into the blue distance.