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Across its waters rose hill upon hill, the sombre giant Vesuvius brooding like some dark monster over the ruined countryside at its base, the lovelier, more hopeful snow-crowned peaks behind rising like a fairy army beneath whose beneficent gaze the ogre was for the time vanquished and impotent. The bay was full of craft, as usual.
Out on the Edmonton trail, hundreds of miles to the north of Forks, at the crossroads where the Battule trail branches to the east, the cheerless prospect is intensified by the skeleton arms of a snow-crowned bluff.
"The statesman smiled and shook his snow-crowned head, and there he stood, long after we receded from the rocks, his tall, erect figure defined on the dark blue sky. "I never saw that noble form again. The brave old soldier died a soldier of the Cross, and fills a Christian's grave. He sleeps in death, embosomed in the quiet shades he loved best in life.
On the one side were the Vermont snow-crowned and cloud-capped mountains, rising up like eternal ramparts against all eastern hostile incursions of the elements. On the other, or the western side, were the pleasant hills of York State, which, in contrast with the mountains of Vermont, looked like so many tumuli of the deceased Indian giants of ages gone by.
The two soldiers, more valiant than the guard of Banias, rode in advance, and showed no signs of fear as we approached the suspicious places. The morning was delightfully clear, and the snow-crowned range of Taurus shone through the soft vapors hanging over the gulf.
But he tarried not here, though many kind words were spoken to him, and all besought him to stay. Right onwards he went, until he reached the waste land which borders the sounding sea. And there high mountains stood, with snow-crowned crags beetling over the waves; and a great river, all foaming with the summer floods, went rolling through the valley.
But they steadfastly refuse to be moved. Stand at the mesa edge and look out across the enchanting scene. To the far south the snow-crowned San Francisco peaks rear their lofty heights. To the north and east the sandy desert stretches away in heart-breaking desolation, relieved only by the tiny green patches of peach trees and corn fields. The blazing sun beats down appallingly.
But, though an atmosphere of tranquillity and security prevailed down here amid the villages and farm-steads of the plain, I knew that up there among those snow-crowned peaks ahead of us, musketry was crackling, cannon were belching, men were dying.
Analogous with that wonderful Gulf Stream, once a myth, still a mystery, the strange current of human existence bears each and all of us with a strong, steady sweep from the tropic lands of sunny childhood, enameled with verdure and gaudy with bloom, through the temperate regions of manhood and womanhood, fruitful or fruitless as the case may be; on to the often frigid, lonely shores of old age, snow-crowned and ice-veined; and individual destinies seem to resemble the tangled drift on those broad gulf billows, strewn on barren beaches, stranded upon icebergs, some to be scorched under equatorial heats, some to perish by polar perils; a few to take root and flourish, building imperishable landmarks; and many to stagnate in the long inglorious rest of the Sargasso Sea.
But this was not enough; and as the horses began to miss their footing, the only hope of safety consisted in remaining immovable. With the break of day, however, a gray light spread over the scene, and the travellers found themselves surrounded by a circle of lofty mountains, rising one above the other in magnificent gradation, and superbly dominated by one mighty snow-crowned mass.
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