The thrushes had followed him. It was he, and not a human intruder, to whom they had been addressing themselves. Soon the owl flew a little further away (it was wonderful how large he looked in the air), the thrushes still after him; and in a few minutes more he took wing again. This time several robins joined the hermit and the olive-back, and all hands disappeared up the mountain side. Probably the pursuers were largely reinforced as the chase proceeded, and I imagined the big fellow pretty thoroughly mobbed before he got safely away. Every small bird has his opinion of an owl. What interested me as much as anything connected with the whole affair was the fact that the olive-back, even in his excitement, made use of nothing but his mellow staccato whistle, such as he employs against the most inoffensive of chance human disturbers. Like the chickadee, and perhaps some other birds, he is musical, and not over-emphatic, even in his anger. Again and again I rested to admire the glory of Mount Lafayette, which loomed more grandly than ever, I was ready to declare, seen thus partially and from this point of vantage. Twice, at least, I had been on its summit in such a fall day,--once on the 1st of October, and again, the year afterward, on a date two days earlier. That October day was one of the fairest I ever knew, both in itself (and perfect weather is a rare thing, try as we may to speak nothing but good of the doings of Providence) and in the pleasure it brought me. For the next year’s ascent, which I remember more in detail, we chose--a brother Franconian and myself--a morning when the tops of the mountains, as seen from the valley lands, were white with frost or snow. We wished to find out for ourselves which it was, and just how the mountain looked under such wintry conditions. The spectacle would have repaid us for a harder climb. A cold northwest wind (it was still blowing) had swept over the summit and coated everything it struck, foliage and rocks alike, with a thick frost (half an inch or more in depth, if my memory is to be trusted), white as snow, but almost as hard as ice. The effect was strangely beautiful. A dwarf fir tree, for instance, would be snow white on one side and bright green on the other. As we looked along the sharp ridge running to the South Peak, so called (the very ridge at the face of which I was now gazing from the Lonesome Lake path), one slope was white, the other green. Summer and winter were divided by an inch.