But the saddest as well as the sweetest things in life have an end, and the halt of the company at the Flume House, that morning, supplied no exception to the rule. Just as the wagons were once more loaded, Halstead Rowan came striding up, his cigar smoked out, and his face the most unconscious imaginable, and took the seat which he had not long before vacated. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame was very busy, at that period, looking after some of the details of arrangement of Master Brooks Brooks' dress, which had become slightly disarranged; and perhaps she did not see him. Let us suppose so, for she certainly did not notice her late student in geography. She was a little red in the face, which let us also suppose to have been the effect of the weather and not of mortification. And so all once more in place, away dashed the wagons to that marvellous gap in the mountains which gives name to the house. The road seemed very rough and broken, the rises and descents grew sharper, and the forest scenery wilder. Galloping his four horses up a steep ascent to the left, each driver vigorously applied the brake as the wagons literally slid down the very sharpest bit of road descent to be found at the Franconia (except perhaps on some portions of the Bald Mountain)--a descent so sudden, and overhanging a ravine so frightful, that some of the handsome eyes looked larger than ever for the moment, all the riders involuntarily threw themselves back in the laboring and creaking wagons, and pretty little screams that had no affectation in them emancipated themselves from rosy lips and took excursions out into the summer air. Then thundering over a rickety wooden bridge, almost at the bottom of the ravine, and up another slight ascent, the wagons stopped under a clump of wide-spreading trees at a rough platform, and disembarked their passengers, leaving all to follow their will in examining that wonder of nature in one of her frolic moods. And what was the Flume like, to those who that day saw it for the first time? An irregular crack or fissure in the side of the mountain, half a mile long, and from ten to fifty feet in depth, such as the wedge of some enraged Titan might have made when he had determined to split the earth asunder, and used the thunder as a beetle. Whether he was frightened by the big oval boulder which fell into the fissure half way up, and has ever since hung suspended there, touching only at the points, and apparently ready to fall at any moment--who shall say? At all events, if he intended to disrupt the earth he desisted for the time; and let us be duly thankful!