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Ampersand waited immovable while I passed many days in such innocent and healthful pleasures as these, until the right day came for the ascent. Cool, clean, and bright, the crystal morning promised a glorious noon, and the mountain almost seemed to beckon us to come up higher. The photographic camera and a trustworthy lunch were stowed away in the pack-basket.
Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior dignity to be naturally bald. Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet of the needful height, cannot claim this distinction. But what Nature has denied, human labour has supplied.
It was fourteen miles from any house to the lake I had fixed on, that known as the Ampersand Pond; but, fortunately, there were, amongst the guides called in, some who had been assistants in the official survey, and, with their practical knowledge and memory of the lines, I was enabled, without leaving the inn, to draw a map of the section of a township which included the lake, and determine its exact position, with the fact that it had been forfeited to the State at the last tax sale, and was for sale at the land office in Albany.
Every mountain is, rightly considered, an invitation to climb. And as I was resting for a month one summer at Bartlett's, Ampersand challenged me daily. Did you know Bartlett's in its palmy time? It was the homeliest, quaintest, coziest place in the Adirondacks.
My sacrificial flames shall be kindled with birch-bark along the wooded stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, and my libations drawn from the pure current of the Ristigouche and the Ampersand, and my altar of remembrance shall rise upon the rocks beside the falls of Seboomok. I will set my affections upon rivers that are not too great for intimacy.
I really thought you knew there were only ten, and had them by heart years ago. They were among the first things I taught you. How on earth could you have forgotten them so soon? Repeat them to me." Well, I went through them all, down to "anything that is his," to ampersand without making a single stop. "Sam," said he, "don't do it again, that's a good soul, for it frightens me.
We landed on a sand beach at the mouth of a little stream, where a blazed tree marked the beginning of the Ampersand trail. This line through the forest was made years ago by that ardent sportsman and lover of the Adirondacks, Dr. W. W. Ely, of Rochester.
"There are two worlds about us," said Brooks; "the manifest, that is as plain as a horn-book from A to Ampersand; the other, that is in the mind of man, no iota less real, but we are few that venture into it further than the lintel of the door." And he had about his eyes an almost fatherly fondness for Gilian, who felt that in the words were some justification for him, the dreamer.
If you are a photographer, and have anything of the amateur's passion for your art, you will appreciate my pleasure and my anxiety. Never before, so far as I knew, had a camera been set up on Ampersand. I had but eight plates with me. The views were all very distant and all at a downward angle. The power of the light at this elevation was an unknown quantity.
The right to the name of Ampersand, like the territory of Gaul in those Commentaries which Julius Caesar wrote for the punishment of schoolboys, is divided into three parts. It belongs to a mountain, and a lake, and a little river.
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