From the Ledge the road continues its zigzag way up the steep and around dangerously narrow terraces, over which a party of excursionists in a six-horse wagon tumbled to their death on the 3d of July, 1880, the only accident that has ever occurred in making the remarkable descent here, however perilous appears the passage; and this tragedy was due to a drunken driver. In describing the ascent above Midway House, Mr. Drake thus writes: “A sharp turn around a ledge, and the southeast wall of Tuckerman’s Ravine rose up like a wraith out of the forest. Nearer at hand was the Head of Huntington’s, while to the right the cone of Washington loomed up gradually, more than a thousand feet higher. A little to left you look down into the gloomy depths of Pinkham defile, the valley of Ellis River and the Saco Valley to North Conway. The blue course of the Ellis, which is nothing but a long cascade, the rich green of the Conway intervales, the blanched peak of Chocurua, the sapphire summits of Ossipee Mountains were presented in conjunction with the black and humid walls of the ravine, and the iron-gray moss of the great dome. The crag on which I stood leans out over the mountain like a bastion, from which the spectator sees the deep-entrenched valleys, the rivers which wash the feet of the monarch, and the long line of summits which partake of his grandeur while making it all the more impressive. From here the striking spectacle of four great northern peaks, their naked summits, their sides seamed with old and new slides, and flecked with snow, constantly enlarged. There were some terrible rents in the side of Clay, red as half-closed wounds, and in one place the mountain seemed riven to its center. It was this gulf that the first climber said it was such a precipice he could scarce discern the bottom. The rifts in the walls of the ravine, the blasted fir-trees leaning over the abyss, and clutching the rocks with a death-grip, the rocks themselves, tormented, formidable, impending, astounded by their vivid portrayal of the formless, their suggestions of the agony in which these mountains were brought forth.” [Illustration: UPPER JACKSON FALLS, WILD-CAT RIVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE.]