"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. TO PLYMOUTH AND BEYOND. Emerging from the Franconia Notch, the broadened valley reaches the attractive village of North Woodstock, another cluster of hotels and summer boarding-houses in an attractive location. The Pemigewasset receives its eastern branch, passes other villages, is swollen by the brisk torrent of the Mad River, and then, amid lower mountains and broader vales, but still with the most delicious views, comes to the typical White Mountain outpost town of Plymouth, at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Baker Rivers, the latter coming in from the northwest. Captain Baker with a company of Massachusetts rangers, early in the eighteenth century, attacked an Indian village here, and his name was given the tributary stream. The Puritan colonists, however, did not actually settle Plymouth until 1764. The town is full of summer cottages and boarding-houses, is noted for its manufacture of fine buckskin gloves, and has as its chief relic the little old building, then the court-house, in which Daniel Webster made his first speech to a jury. It was here that Nathaniel Hawthorne suddenly died in May, 1864. He was travelling with his intimate friend, ex-President of the United States Franklin Pierce, and stopping overnight at a hotel, was found dead in his room next morning, having passed quietly away while sleeping. Far away beyond Plymouth the bright Pemigewasset flows, receiving the outlets of the Waukawan Lake, and of the beautiful and islanddotted Squam Lake, its enclosing hills being most superb sites for summer villas. This is the "moun |