There was a moment’s stop at Seven Pillars for Janet, who had consented to accompany her, and then they were off, Nathalie happily waving her hand to Sam as he came through the pasture with the cows. A few moments later they were whirling past Roslinwood Farm, with its big white barn, and then past a long, low, white-gabled, red-chimneyed building, with the old-time hostelry sign, “Peckett’s on Sugar Hill,” swinging from its porte-cochère, with its flower-garden, riotous with many-colored blooms, across the road, almost under the shadow of Garnet’s sloping meadow. Now they were flying down the long sloping hill, around the tiny white schoolhouse at the cross-roads, and then they were passing Garnet’s grassy hillside, as it nodded a greeting to its taller fellows, the Franconia Range, that towered on the girls’ right. Its verdant meadows were squared with cobble-stone ledges, and awave with the glossy plumage of stately trees, as it rose upward from the road, until its slope was lost in a tangle of feathery treetops which crowned its summit like a cap of green. “The Echoes,” a homey little hotel nestling at the base of the green hill, with its square white tower, peeped picturesquely from the protecting sweep of graceful willows and silvery poplars. Here they had a magnificent view of the mountains as they rose from their mists of gray, their rugged crests, spires, and domes sharply outlined against a glorious riot of sunrise color. Lafayette, the king of the range, towered his grizzly head in blue-hazed grandeur far upward, standing like some giant up from the mists that covered the valleys below like a silver lake, while Lincoln’s rounded summit, with its twin slides, was almost hidden by trailing wreaths of pearly gray. The gaps between the Sleeping Infant, sharp-peaked Garfield, the North and South Twins, and the Sleeping Giant, were so thickly silvered with mist that the peaks of these mountains looked like islets of green on a shimmering gray sea, with their tops scarfed with pink and violet streaks, that floated mistily against the golden splendor, reflected from the crimson-hued ball in the east. Directly before them rose the undulating slope of Breakneck Hill, bowing in gentle humility to the more rugged beauty of the lofty range opposite, while between the widening gap, far in the distance, loomed the Presidential Range, their tops white-wreathed with cloud. Mount Washington, with majestic stateliness, soared far above his comrades, while the smaller mountains below and on the left, scattered here and there through the cleft between the two ranges, gleamed gray, purple, and pink, as they peered at them from their hoods of gray.