The white man's discovery of this profile was made in the early nineteenth century by two road-makers, mending the highway through the Notch. Stooping to wash their hands in the lake, just at the right spot, they casually looked up and saw it, being struck instantly by the wonderful facial resemblance. "That is Jefferson," said one of them, Thomas Jefferson then being President of the United States, and the stern countenance certainly looks like some of his portraits. There he is, gazing far away, with sturdy, unchanging expression, as he has done for thousands of years. Thomas Starr King, who has so well described these mountains, regards the "Great Stone Face" as "a piece of sculpture older than the Sphinx--an imitation of the human countenance which is the crown of all beauty, that was pushed out from the coarse strata of New England, thousands of years before Adam." Yet a slight change from the proper position for view greatly alters the profile. Move a few paces northward, and the nose and face are flattened, only the projecting forehead finally being seen. Go a short distance to the southward, and the Old Man's decisive countenance quickly deteriorates into that of a toothless old woman wearing a cap, and soon the lower portion of the face is so distorted that the human profile is obliterated. The Cannon Mountain bearing the famous profile is a majestic ridge named from a spacious granite ledge on its steep slope, presenting, when observed from a certain position below, the appearance of a cannon ready for firing. Its summit rises seven hundred feet above the profile.
From the Profile Lake, the Pemigewasset River flows southward, deep down in the narrow Franconia Notch, the stream descending over five hundred feet in five miles. Here is the "Flume," and beyond it the gorge widens, giving a view which Thomas Starr King has described as "a perpetual refreshment," for it extends far away southward over the broadening intervale, one of the fairest scenes in nature, stretching many miles to and beyond Plymouth. The "Flume" is made by a brilliant little tributary brook dashing along the bottom of a fissure for several hundred feet, bordered by high walls rising sixty to seventy feet above the torrent and only a few feet apart. The water rushes towards the Pemigewasset between these smooth granite walls, and the awe-struck visitor walks through in startled admiration. The "Pool" is beyond, a deep, dark basin, into which the Pemigewasset falls, surrounded by a high rocky enclosure, making an abyss over a hundred feet across and one hundred and fifty feet deep. There is also another pellucid green basin below, into which the river tumbles by a pretty white cascade, this being a huge pothole originally ground out by the action of boulders whirled around in it by the current. A galaxy of peaks environ this pleasant glen in the Franconia and Pemigewasset ranges, the highest of them, Mount Lincoln, rising fifty-one hundred feet, and having Mount Liberty, a lower peak, to the southward.