"The moonlight is coming: come out, all of you who care more for scenery than stuffing!" said a high, shrill voice, after a time had elapsed which would scarcely have begun the meal under ordinary circumstances. It was an elderly man with white hair and white side-whiskers, an old habitue of the house and therefore a privileged character, who spoke, pulling out his watch and at once rising from his seat. He was followed by more than half those at table, and would have been followed especially by Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, who had somewhere learned that fashion and a rage for moonlight had a mysterious connection,--but for the insatiable hunger of Mr. Brooks Cunninghame himself, who was engaged in mortal combat with a formidable piece of steak and a whole pile of biscuits, and who outraged Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame by declaring, sotto voce, that "he'd be something-or-othered if he'd lave his supper until he was done, for any moonlight or other something-or-othered thing in the wurruld!"--and the obstreperousness of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who was up to his eyes in three kinds of preserves and bade fair to stick permanently fast to the table through the agency of those glutinous compounds. Out on the piazza and the broad plateau in front of it, the visitors at the Profile gathered, to see what is not often vouchsafed to the most devoted of nature-lovers--the rising of the full moon in the mountains. Those who are familiar with the Franconia Notch well know how the mountains around the Profile always seem to draw closer after sunset, and how the frowning cliffs seem to form insurmountable barriers between them and the outer world, making it doubtful to the bewildered thought whether there is indeed any egress from that cool paradise of summer--whether or not they can ride away at will and look again upon green fields and flashing streams and the faces of those they love. And they well know that moonrise there, over those encircling cliffs, is not the moonrise of the lower country, with the orb throwing its broad beams of light at once wide over the world, but an actual peeping down from heaven of a fair and genial spirit that deigns for the time to pour welcome radiance into an abode of solitude and darkness. The spectacle, then, is one to be sought and remembered; and as storms habitually beat around those mountain tops and fog and mist quite divide the time with fair weather in the valleys, the tourist is mad or emotionless who allows the cloudless full moon to come up without catching its smile on cheek and brow.