'What fun! Did you have your rubbers on? Did you sit in a chair? I should think you would have sat in a chair--so much more comfortable! Well, I tell you what, let's do it together,--a lot of us, so we won't be afraid,--and let's climb a mountain. The sunset and dawn will be beautiful from a mountain.'
We did it; I blush to confess that some twenty-five of us did it. It was an excursion planned and discussed for a matter of two weeks (a full moon being part of the programme), and there was no accident unforeseen, no event unprovided for. The procession that wended its way, toiling and puffing, up the ascent of Haystack,--the favored mountain selected for the high pedestal of our rapture,--on the auspicious night, was about as sad, and withal as funny, an affront as the secrecy of beauty ever received. Blankets, steamer-rugs, pillows, shawls, hammocks, whiskey-flasks--how we groaned beneath the burden of all these things. We lost the way, of course, and had to beat the woods in every direction; we were tired and hot and--cross? Perhaps. But we knew what our rôle was, and when we reached the top of the mountain, we all of us stood very solemnly in a row and said, 'How beautiful!'
It was beautiful; that was just the fineness of the night's triumph over us--over me at least; I cannot speak for the other twenty-four. To this day, be it said in parentheses, whenever we mention that night on Haystack we lift our eyes in ecstasy, and no one of us has ever confessed any sense of lack. But honestly, honestly at the last (dear stalwart relief of honesty!), that experiment was a failure--so beautiful that the spirit should have been lifted out of the body, and would have been, had it stood alone, had it not already exhausted itself in plans and expectations. Beneath us, a far-spreading sea of misty, rolling hills, all vague and blended in the light of the soaring moon; above us, such a sweep of sky as only mountain-tops command; around us, silence, silence. Yet the unstrenuous orchard at home, with its tranquil acceptance of such degree of sunset light as was granted to it, and of the moon's presence when she rose above the apple trees, would have conveyed the night's message a thousand times more clearly.