“There is no need of haste in getting to Patton’s,” says Eric, with a shrug. “You will have quite enough of it, for we can’t ascend the mountain until to-morrow.” This seems to us a provoking delay, but we are too well drilled to think of murmuring. “Eric knows,” says Sylvia to Mrs. Cardigan, who is bold enough to express some disapproval. “He has spent every summer since he was a boy in this country, and he is so enamored of it that I think he will end by living here altogether.” When we set forth again, the afternoon has little heat in its soft glory. After leaving Alexander’s, we turn abruptly from the stage-road straight toward the dark mountains that stand like giants before us. As we advance, these great heights, which make others seem like pigmy hills, inclose us on all sides, wearing every tint of dark purple and blue. Their majestic loneliness, their wild grandeur, strike one with a sense of absolute awe. We look at them, in the everlasting fixity of their repose, and realize— as perhaps it has never chanced to us to realize before—the brevity and insignificance of our existences. “I don’t wonder that mountaineers, as a rule, are melancholy,” says Sylvia, who is riding behind the phaeton. “If I lived always in the shadow of these mountains, I should feel their solemnity in every act of my life; I should never be able to throw it off.” “You think so because you never have lived in their shadow,” says Eric. “If you did, you would soon discover that their solemnity, which strikes you so much now, would affect you very little.” “‘They emblem that eternal rest We cannot compass in our speech,’” she says, in a low voice, looking at the splendid masses as they tower against the sky, wrapped in eternal silence and motionless calm. As we penetrate deeper into the mountains, our road leads up a narrow valley, along which a stream—clearer than crystal, if such a thing can be—takes its course, and crosses our road again and again. “Is this the Swannanoa?” some one asks. “It is Swannanoa Creek,” Eric answers; “the branch of the stream which comes down from the Black.” The sun has dropped behind the hills that hem us in, and a few broken masses of gorgeous clouds are floating above the dark-blue peaks of Craggy, when we reach the house where we are to spend the night—Patton’s, at the foot of the mountain. It is a rough place, poorly kept—hotels for tourists have not yet risen in these fastnesses—but the people, here as elsewhere, are civil, obliging, and ready to give us their best. Mrs. Cardigan grimaces a little over the room into which we are ushered; but it has at least the merit of cleanliness, which Sylvia points out. “Will you want supper?” asks a gaunt woman, coming to the door while we are shaking off the dust of travel. We reply emphatically that we will want supper, and probably manifest a little surprise at the question, for she goes on to explain it.