within the orthodox dimensions, it must turn. If the knob would not yield, the way must, and, in consequence, its lengthened bitterness is long drawn out. A line that continually doubles on itself is naturally longer than one which goes straight to the mark. Mount Washington is little more than a mile high; the road that creeps up its surly sides is eight miles long. Frost and freshet are constant foes; the one heaves and cracks, and the other tears down through the cracks to undermine and destroy. Twenty-seven new culverts, we were told, had been made, within the space of a mile and a half, since last year; and these culverts are no child's play, but durable works,--aqueducts lined with stone and bridged with plank, large enough for a man to pass through with a wheelbarrow, and laid diagonally across the road, so that the torrents pouring down the gutter shall not have to turn a right angle, which they would gladly evade doing, but a very obtuse one, which they cannot in conscience refuse; and, as the road all the way is built a little higher on the precipice side than on the mountain side, the water naturally runs into the gutter on that side, and so is easily beguiled into leaving the road, which it would delight to destroy, and, roaring through the culvert, tumbles unwarily down the precipice before it knows what it is about. I have heard it said, that the man who originated this road has since become insane. More likely he was insane at the time. Surely, no man in his senses would ever have projected a scheme so wild and chimerical, so evidently impossible of fulfilment. Projected it was, however, not only in fancy, but in fact, to our great content; and so, tamely but comfortably, an untiring cavalcade, we leave the peaceful glen set at the mountain's base, and wind through the lovely, lively woods, tremulous with sunshine and shadows, musical with the manifold songs of its pregnant solitudes, out from the woods, up from the woods, into the wild, cold, shrieking winds among the blenched rocks and the pale ghosts of dead forests stiff and stark, up and up among the caverns, and the gorges, and the dreadful chasms, piny ravines black and bottomless, steeps bare and rocky leading down to awful depths; on and on, fighting with maddened winds and the startled, wrathful wraiths, onward and upward till we stand on the bleak and shivering, the stony and soulless summit.