walking through it, on the rough road when coming up from Plymouth to Wells river; and his few words, as the lady remarked, consorted well with the respectability (to say the least) of his appearance. As to his personality, which there did not seem the slightest occasion for his wishing to disguise, there was a big black trunk in the baggage-wagon following behind the line of coaches, and a small satchel strapped over his shoulder as he rode; and the first bore the initials "H. T." and the direction "Cincinnati." While so much attention has been paid to the occupants of that single coach, leaving the others and even the noisy passengers on the roof of this, unnoticed, the vehicles had been buzzing and clattering along over the table-land lying at the foot of the mountains, past the little hamlet of Franconia, and nearing the mountains themselves. A glorious July evening it was, with the fiery air which had been so oppressive below gradually cooled by the approach to the presence of the monarchs, and the smoke from the fires in the woods playing fantastic tricks among the peaks, and compensating for the absence of the clouds which sometimes enveloped them. Not half the passengers in those four stages had ever seen the mountains before; and not one, even of those accustomed to such scenery, but felt the blood beating a little quicker as the mountain road beyond Franconia was reached, and they began to experience those rapid ascents, and yet more rapid descents, which accompany thence all the way to the Notch, with grand old woods overhanging, steep and sheer ravines at the side of the road that made the head dizzy in looking, reverential glimpses of the awful peaks of Lafayette and the Cannon frowning ahead, and of Washington, grander still, towering far away over the White range, and with all the other accompaniments of the finest mountain scenery on the Atlantic coast of the American continent. There was quite enough, indeed, to engage the attention of any except the most blasé and ennuyée traveller, in the grandeur of the scenery and the excitement of being galloped in rocking, lumbering, four-horse coaches, down declivities of road which would have made a driver in any ordinary hill-country draw tight rein and creep down with a heavy foot on the brake. Not a few nervous passengers, first or last, dashing up and down the slopes of the White Mountain roads, have been more or less frightened, and wished that they could be once more on terra firma without incurring the penalty of a laugh at their cowardice; and in the present instance this little bit of locomotion was not to be allowed to pass without an adventure.