I think you can get the best view of all of Great Blue Hill from the summit of the lesser hill beyond the spurs and ponds and south of Hancock, just overhanging Houghton’s Pond. There you see the forest-clad slope sweep grandly up to form this broad upland valley, wrinkle a bit with the folds where lie the three little ponds, then rise again most majestically all along the steep side of the hill. At this time of year it is one broad, majestic mass of the warm gray of bare tree trunks in which rock ridges stand indistinct in purer color, while here and there clustering twig masses purple it. You can see the black shadows in the face of the cliff where stands the little glen in which the chestnuts disport, and down near the highest of the three ponds is a beautiful little splash of white all flushed with pink. This marks the location of a group of young birches, the only ones I find on the heights of the range. Midday had passed and with it the genial warmth that the south wind had brought us. Instead romping northern breezes had a tang in them and torn clouds sailed swiftly into view over the summit of Great Blue, rushing deep blue shadows across the warm grays of the landscape. The age-old battle of sun and wind was going on on every summit of the range. Climbing the southerly slope of Hancock it was hard to believe it winter. You got either season on the summit plateau according to the nook you chose, but standing on the rim of the precipice, which faces north you had no doubts. From your feet to the foot of the hill in this direction it was winter indeed. Yet here was the greenest spot in the whole range. Scrambling perilously down the face of the cliff I touched rich green vegetation with either hand and stood amid luxuriance at the bottom. For here you are at the meeting place of ferns. Little sunshine reaches the face of this cliff in the high noon of a midsummer day. No direct ray touches it all winter long, yet in the chill twilight the polypodys swarm all along the summit of the ridge and drip and dance down and stretch out their hands to neighbor ferns that climb cheerily to meet them out of the moist shadows below. These are the evergreen wood ferns. In the rich black frozen earth of the lower woodland they grow in profusion. On the rocky acclivity they hold each coign of vantage and splash the plaid of gray rock and brown leaves with their rich green. Where cliff meets rock jumble the two draw together and fraternize, and the polypodys come farther off the cliff than I have often seen them, and the wood ferns grow in slenderer crevices of the bare rock than anywhere else that I know.