“Or as if to-morrow would not be as lovely,” I chime in. “I hope nobody will suggest that, on top of this mountain, days are ever other than perfect. Ah, what a view!—Eric, stop the horses, pray, and tell us what it is.” Eric stops the horses obediently, and with one accord we rise in the carriage. We have not attained the summit yet, but we feel that it can scarcely offer anything finer than this view of heights so near at hand that their massive proportions stand fully revealed, draped in the softest haze. One bare rock of immense size towers among the wooded sides, and beyond is a glimpse—only a glimpse—of a marvelous gleaming expanse, stretching away until it melts into the sky. “How like the ocean!” says Aunt Markham, alluding to the last. “There surely _must_ be ships out yonder.—Alice, we have seen nothing so beautiful as this!” I do not contradict the assertion, nor remind the speaker that she has not had the advantage of standing on the Black Mountain. I, too, am more than half inclined to think that we have seen nothing more beautiful in all our wanderings. “What is that rock, Eric?” I ask. “It is the Table Rock,” Eric answers. “Apart from the mountain on which it rests, it is five hundred feet in height.” “There seems to have been a difficulty about finding names for all these places,” says Mrs. Cardigan. “Else why should the nomenclature be so much repeated? This is not the Table Rock we saw from the Black—” “Hardly,” Eric laughs. “That was on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, in North Carolina; this is on the southern side, in South Carolina.—Yes, we are coming!” This is addressed to Charley, who has cantered back to beckon us forward. “You’ll miss the sunset from the Head if you don’t come on!” he shouts. “We are three-quarters of a mile from the top yet.” So, we go on, and before long Eric turns the horses from the road, drives up an eminence, and stops. “Here is the Head,” he says. “You must go out on the rock for the view.” It is only a few yards from the place where he has paused to the jutting rock, scattered over with gray bowlders, which is the point of lookout. We go to the verge and pause—mute. What can one say of such a prospect as this which is spread before us unto the “fine faint limit of the bounding day”? At our feet the mountain drops in a sheer descent of eighteen hundred or two thousand feet to the plain below, and, looking immediately down, the eye rests on a dark-green sea—the top of a dense forest, which clothes its base and spreads across a wild gorge to the chain of mountains which bounds the view on the right.