It was almost an all-day's climb from the nearest railway station to the New Springs. You took the stage in the first freshness of the morning; you went gaily along for a few miles through a fair grazing country; then the stage began to climb, and it climbed and climbed until you wondered where and when the thing was going to stop. Every now and then driver and passengers got down and walked. Here it was shady, with wonderful banks of rhododendron, with ferns and overhanging trees, and here it was sunny and hot, with the wood scrub or burned, and the only interesting growth huckleberries and huckleberries and huckleberries, dwarf under the blazing sun, with butterflies flitting over them. Up here you had wonderful views; you saw a sea of mountains, tremendous, motionless waves; the orb as it had wrinkled when man and beast and herb were not. At last, somewhere on the long crest, having been told that you must bring luncheon with you and having provided yourself at the railway station with cold bread and fruit and hard-boiled eggs, you had luncheon. It was eaten near a bubbling spring with a water-trough at which the horses were drinking, and eaten with the most tremendous appetite. By now you were convinced that the air up here was blowing through a champagne bottle. Luncheon over and the horses rested, on went the stage. Quite in the mid-afternoon you began to go down the mountain. Somewhat later, in a turn by a buckwheat field waving white in the summer wind, the driver would point with his whip--"Right down there--there's the New Springs! Be there in an hour now." It might be "right down there," but still the New Springs was pretty high in the world, away, away above sea level. You always slept at the New Springs under blankets, you nearly always had a fire in the evening; even the heat of the midday sun in the dog days was only a dry, delightful warmth. Hardly anywhere did the stars shine so brightly, the air was so rare and fine. The New Springs boasted no imposing dwellings. There was a hotel, of faint, old, red brick, with a pillared verandah, and there were half a dozen one-story frame cottages, each with a small porch and growing over it its individual vine. Honeysuckle clambered over one, and hops over another, and a scarlet bean over a third, and so on. There was an ice-cold sulphur spring where the bubbles were always rising, and around it was built a rustic pavilion. Also there existed a much-out-of-repair bowling-alley. "Yes, there's the New Springs," said the driver, pointing with his whip. "But, Lord! it stopped being new a long time ago."