Keeping the grander points of this fine prospect before us as we continue our ascent, every step reveals more distinctly the volcano-like crest and seamed bosom of Lafayette, than which not Washington himself, though five hundred feet taller, presents a form of more august character. Lafayette is not only distinguished over his fellows by his height, but also by the rocky bareness of his peaked summit, that descends with converging rows of ravines and hemlock-topped cliffs into an immense verdant basin presented toward us. In fine weather, the dry rocks of these ravines shine like bars of silver, and after heavy rains they glisten with the torrents disappearing into the vast shadowy basin below. No tourist that has made this ascent to the _Notch_ during the dog-days, can forget the grateful change of the hot, treeless road, for the shady coolness of the wooded avenue he enters at the top, and through whose green twilight his now recruited steeds drag him merrily for two miles to the _Lafayette House_ at the entrance of the Notch. Just before reaching the hotel, we see through the fine birchen groves, skirting our avenue, _Echo Lake_, a small sheet of water of great depth and transparency, the mountainous sides of which clothed with an unbroken forest of dreary hemlock, deprive it of all beauty of _setting_, or of interest aside from its marvelously distinct echoes. The Franconia _Notch_ hardly deserves more than the name of a _pass_--even for its narrowest point near the Lafayette House, where it is about a quarter of a mile in width. It has no such _jaws_--projecting _tusks_, and other palpable signs of violent disrupture, as make the expressive title of "_Notch_" so fitly applied to its great rival in the White Mountains. Still its features are distinctive, and grandly _unique_, and though not so sublimely rugged as those of its rival, they are infinitely more picturesque, and this peculiar difference of character extends to all the scenery lying within the two rival regions. But the wonder and pride of the Franconia Notch is the "_Old Man_" of the Profile Mountain, that forms its western wall, and which, ascending on the north side with a gradual wooded slope, to a height of two thousand feet, abruptly terminates in a perpendicular rocky precipice, five hundred feet high, which in a bare "granite front" extends along the eastern face of the mountain for two miles. An exquisite sheet of water, in size and purity similar to Echo Lake, lies between the mountain and our road, from which through a clearing, we have an admirable view of the mountain, rising wave-like from its lake--its rich rolling groves, overtopped by a pinnacle of rock, like the comb of a breaking billow, and in the fantastic outlines of that granite crest, juts out as perfect an outline of an _old man's head_, as human hand itself could execute! [Illustration: PROFILE MOUNTAIN.]