Who would care to lose his life in ascending White Mountain by a new trail? But Mont Blanc—that is different. Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains; They crowned him long ago, but be sure it was no Frenchman that did the crowning—not with such a name as that! And if the exigencies of the literary situation had compelled Coleridge to think of him in the vernacular he would never have stood in the valley of Chamouni asking him who sank his sunless pillars deep in earth. “White Mountain” is well enough in its way if one think only of its color; but there is the disquieting possibility that it was named in honor of its discoverer (Ezekiel White, of Podunk) like the eminences that “stand dressed in living green” down in New Hampshire. Call Capri “Goat Island” and you class it with an abomination of that name in the harbor of San Francisco. To the Neapolitan looking Across the charmed bay Whose blue waves keep, with Capri’s sunny fountains, Perpetual holiday it is just Goat Island, and it is nothing more. The sunny fountains and the famous sea-caverns do not interest him. They are possibly fine, but indubitably familiar. All this has perhaps something to do with contentment; it may go a short way toward making us willing to be alive. We hear much from the writer-folk about the horrors of this commercial age, the dull monotony of modern life, the depressing daily contact with the things we loathe, to wit, railways, steamships, telephones, electric street-cars and other prosaic things which, when we are not boasting of them, we are reviling. We shudder to think of the railway from Joppa to Jerusalem (if there is one) and sigh for the good old days of the camel—even as we sigh for those of the stage-coach, whereby the traveler met with many romantic adventures in lonely roads and at wayside inns. Well, as to all that, it is still possible to renounce one’s purse to a “road agent” between Squaw Gulch and Ginger Gap if one wish to, and “hold-ups” are not altogether unknown to those who in default of the stage-coach are compelled to travel by express trains. Is any spectacle really more interesting than a railway train in motion? Why, even the stolidest laborer in the field, or the most _blasé_ switchman off duty, takes a moment off to stare at it. By night, with its dazzling headlight, its engine eating fire and breathing steam and smoke, its flashes of red light upon the trees as its furnace doors are opened and closed, its long line of gleaming windows, the roar and clang of its progress—not in the world is anything more fascinating, more artistic nor, but for its familiarity, more picturesque.