At times the shroud of mist which had enveloped them would roll away, as they ascended the high land rising from Franconia towards Bethlehem; and then they would have the peaks of the Franconia range flecked and dotted with swales and waves and crests of transparent white that seemed alternately to be thousands of colossal sheep lying in the mountain pastures,--and again great masses of the purest and softest eider-down which had floated there and rested, from millions of birds filling the whole air above. Mount Lafayette at one moment, as some of the voyagers of that lucky morning will well remember, seemed to be capped and crowned with a wreath of untrodden snow, miles in extent and hundreds of feet in depth--such as no mountain ever wore upon its brow as a coronet, from the first morning of creation. Exclamations of pleasure filled the coach, and jest and appreciative remark blended in pleasant proximity. "I shall always remember the air of this morning," said one, "as an atmosphere of bridal veils," and more than he treasured up the comparison as one worth remembering. "See here, Cora!" said another, to the only child in the coach, who nestled half asleep on the shoulder of her mother, pointing her attention meanwhile to a little pyramidal hill separate from the mountain range and at that point relieved against it: "See here, Cora! There is a little baby mountain!" "So there is!" answered Cora, with a world of drollery in her young eyes, "I wonder how long before it will grow to be as big as the rest of them!" Whereupon Cora was voted to have the best of the argument, and manhood once more worshipped childhood. Away past Bethlehem and along the Ammonoosuc, an exaggeration, in its rocks, upon all the other mountain streams, with its few inches of water finding way among a perfect bed of boulders, and making the mere word "navigation" suggest so droll an image in that connection as to draw a loud laugh from the whole coach-load. Then past a couple of fishermen, heedless of the rain, rod in hand and creel at side, standing on the boulders in the middle of the river and practising the mysteries of the Waltonian art, report alleged with more "flies" assisting than those which they carried in their pocket-books! Then on, with the mist again closed down heavily, past the White Mountain House, that once, before the days of glory of the Glen, supplied the only so-called "carriage-road" to the top of Washington.