... crowned coeval
  With Monadnock’s crest,
    And my wings extended
  Touch the East and West.

Later the same word, pursued on the same principle as that blessed one Mesopotamia, led me to and through Emerson, up to his poem on the peak itself—­the wise old giant ‘busy with his sky affairs,’ who makes us sane and sober and free from little things if we trust him.  So Monadnock came to mean everything that was helpful, healing, and full of quiet, and when I saw him half across New Hampshire he did not fail.  In that utter stillness a hemlock bough, overweighted with snow, came down a foot or two with a tired little sigh; the snow slid off and the little branch flew nodding back to its fellows.

For the honour of Monadnock there was made that afternoon an image of snow of Gautama Buddha, something too squat and not altogether equal on both sides, but with an imperial and reposeful waist.  He faced towards the mountain, and presently some men in a wood-sledge came up the road and faced him.  Now, the amazed comments of two Vermont farmers on the nature and properties of a swag-bellied god are worth hearing.  They were not troubled about his race, for he was aggressively white; but rounded waists seem to be out of fashion in Vermont.  At least, they said so, with rare and curious oaths.

Next day all the idleness and trifling were drowned in a snowstorm that filled the hollows of the hills with whirling blue mist, bowed the branches of the woods till you ducked, but were powdered all the same when you drove through, and wiped out the sleighing tracks.  Mother Nature is beautifully tidy if you leave her alone.  She rounded off every angle, broke down every scarp, and tucked the white bedclothes, till not a wrinkle remained, up to the chine of the spruces and the hemlocks that would not go to sleep.

‘Now,’ said the man of the West, as we were driving to the station, and alas! to New York, ’all my snow-tracks are gone; but when that snow melts, a week hence or a month hence, they’ll all come up again and show where I’ve been.’

Curious idea, is it not?  Imagine a murder committed in the lonely woods, a snowstorm that covers the tracks of the flying man before the avenger of blood has buried the body, and then, a week later, the withdrawal of the traitorous snow, revealing step by step the path Cain took—­the six-inch dee-trail of his snow-shoes—­each step a dark disk on the white till the very end.

There is so much, so very much to write, if it were worth while, about that queer little town by the railway station, with its life running, to all outward seeming, as smoothly as the hack-coupes on their sleigh mounting, and within disturbed by the hatreds and troubles and jealousies that vex the minds of all but the gods.  For instance—­no, it is better to remember the lesson Monadnock, and Emerson has said, ’Zeus hates busy-bodies and people who do too much.’