I took my full share of the discussion, but half an hour of it sufficed, and I went back again to commune with myself upon the rocks. The sunshine was warm, but the breeze tempered it till I found it good. And the familiar scene was lovelier than ever, I began to think. Here at my feet stood the little house, down upon which I had looked with such rememberable pleasure on my first visit to Agassiz, I know not how many years ago. Then a man was cutting wood before the door. Now there is nobody to be seen; but the place must still be inhabited, for I hear the tinkle of a cowbell somewhere in the woods, and a horse is pasturing nearer by. Only three or four other houses are in sight--not reckoning the big hotel and a few far-away roofs in Franconia--and very inviting they look, neatly painted, with smooth, level fields about them. It is my own elevation that levels the fields, I am quite aware (when I stop to think of it), as it is distance that softens the contours of the mountains, and the lapse of time that smooths the rough places out of past years; but for the hour I take things as the eye sees them. We come to these visionary altitudes, not to look at realities but at pictures. Distance is a famous hand with the brush. To omit details and to fill the canvas with atmosphere, these are the secrets of his art. A comfortable thing it is to lie here at my ease and yield myself to the great painter’s enchantments. My eye wanders over the landscape, but not uneasily; nay, it can hardly be said to wander at all; it rests here and there, not trying to see, but seeing. Now it is upon the road, spaces of which show at intervals, while I imagine the rest--a sentimental journey; now upon a far-off grassy clearing among woods (Mears’s or Chase’s), homely enough, and lonely enough--and familiar enough--to fit the mood of the hour; now upon the distant level reaches of the Landaff Valley. But the beauty of the scene is not so much in this or that as in all together. I say now, as I said twenty years ago, “This is the kind of prospect for me:” a broken valley, fields and woods intermingled, with mountains circumscribing it all; a splendid panorama seen from above, but not from too far above; from a hill, that is to say, rather than from a mountain. An hour of this luxury and I return to the tower, where the musician and the keeper are still in conference. The keeper, especially, is a man much after my own mind. He knows the people who live in the three houses below us, and speaks of them racily, yet in a tone of brotherly kindness. I call his attention to two women whom I have descried in the nearest pasture, a bushy place, yellow with goldenrod and pointed with young larches and firs. They wear men’s wide-brimmed straw hats (a black-and-tan collie is with them), and one carries a broad tin dish, which she holds in one hand, while she picks berries with the other. Pretty awkward business, an old berry-picker thinks.