A bubble of home-life adheres to this stern peak. Determination and perseverance have built two stone cottages, rough and squat, where you may, if you have no mercy, eat a fine dinner that has been wearily dragged over eight miles of hillocky, rutty roads, and up eight miles of mountain; and drink without any compunction clear, cold water that the clouds have distilled without any trouble, and the rocks have bottled up in excellent refrigerators and furnish at the shortest notice and on the most reasonable terms, except in very dry weather. Or if a drought drinks up the supply in the natural wells, there is the Lake of the Clouds, humid and dark below, where you may see--I do not know--the angels ascending and descending. The angels of the summit are generally armed with a huge hoop, which supports their brace of buckets as they step cautiously over the cragged rock fragments. If you are ambitious to scale the very highest height, you can easily mount the roof of the most frivolously named Tip-top House, and change your horizon a fraction. If you are gregarious and crave society, you can generally find it in multifarious developments. Hither come artists with sketch-books and greedy eyes. Hither come photographers with instruments, and photograph us all, men, mountains, and rocks. Young ladies come, and find, after all their trouble, that "there is nothing but scenery," and sit and read novels. Haud ignota loquor. Young men come, alight from their carriages, enter the house, balance themselves on two legs of their chairs, smoke a cigar, eat a dinner, and record against their names, "Mount Washington is a humbug,"--which is quite conclusive as concerning the man, if not concerning the mountain. There is one man in whose fate I feel a lively curiosity. As we were completing our descent, twisted, frowzy, blown to shreds, burnt faces, parched lips, and stringy hair, a solitary horseman might have been seen just commencing his ascent,--the nicest young man that ever was,--daintily gloved, patently booted, oily curled, snowily wristbanded, with a lovely cambric (prima facie) handkerchief bound about his hyacinthine locks and polished hat. What I wish to know is, how did he get along? How did his toilette stand the ascent? Did he, a second Ulysses, tie up all opposing winds in that cambric pocket-handkerchief? or did Auster and Eurus and Notus and Africus vex his fastidious soul? They say--I do not know who, but somebody--that Mount Washington in past ages towered hundreds of feet above its present summit. Constant wear and tear of frost and heat have brought it down, and its crumbling rock testifies to the still progress of decay. The mountain will therefore one day flat out, and if we live long enough, Halicarnassus remarks, we may yet see the Tip-top and Summit Houses slowly let down and standing on a rolling prairie. Those, therefore, who prefer mountain to meadow should take warning and make their pilgrimage betimes.