At high noon, as I had planned, I came to the top of the mountain. The observatory was full of chattering tourists, while three individuals of the same genus stood on the rocks below, two men and a woman, the men taking turns in the use--or abuse--of a horn, with which they were trying to rouse the echo (a really good one, as I could testify) from Mount Cleveland and the higher peaks beyond. Their attempts were mostly failures. Either the breath wandered about uneasily inside the brazen tube, moaning like a soul in pain--abortive mutterings, but no “toot”--or, if a blast now and then came forth, it was of so low a pitch that the mountains, whose vocal register, it appears, is rather tenor than bass, were unable to return it effectively. “I can’t get it high enough,” one of the men said. But they had large endowments of perseverance--a virtue that runs often to pernicious excess--and seemingly would never have given over their efforts, only that a gentleman’s voice from the observatory finally called out, in a tone of long-suffering politeness, “Won’t you please let up on that horn, just for a little while?” The horn-blowers, not to be outdone in civility, answered at once with a good-natured affirmative, and a heavenly silence, a silence that might be felt, descended upon our ears. Neither blower nor pleader will ever know how heartily he was thanked by a man who lay upon the rocks a little distance below the summit, looking down into the Franconia Valley. The scene is of exquisite beauty; beauty, moreover, of a kind that I especially love; but for the first half-hour I looked without seeing. It is always so with me in such places, I cannot tell why. Formerly I laid my disability to the fact that the eye had first to satisfy its natural curiosity concerning the details of a strange landscape; its instinctive desire to orient itself by attention to topographical particulars; and no doubt considerations of this nature may be supposed to enter more or less into the problem. But Mount Agassiz offered me nothing to be puzzled over; I felt no need of orientation nor any stirrings of inquisitiveness. On my left was the Mount Washington range, in front were Lafayette and Moosilauke, with the valley intervening, and on the right, haze-covered to-day, rose peak after peak of the Green Mountains. These things I knew beforehand. I had not come to this Pisgah-top to study a lesson in geography, but to enjoy the sight of my eyes. Still I must practice patience. Time--indispensable Time--is a servant that cannot be hurried, nor can his share of any work be done by the cleverest substitute. “Beautiful!” I said, and felt the word; but the beauty did not come home to the spirit, filling and satisfying it. I wonder at people who scramble to such a peak, stare about them for a quarter of an hour, and run down again contented. Either the plate is preternaturally sensitive, or the picture cannot have been taken.