When the snows come, there will be avalanches by day and night, rushing into all parts of the valley.  The Hermit hears a rumbling in the clouds, as he hoes his potatoes.  He looks; a granite pilaster, hewn out by the hurricanes centuries ago, at last grown weary of clinging to that precipitous bluff, lets go its hold, and is dashed from crag to crag in a prolonged and horrible suicide.  A pioneer once laid him out a garden, and marked the plan of his cellar; he was to begin digging the next day:  that night, there leaped a boulder from under the brow of this cliff right into the heart of the plantation.  It dug his cellar for him, but he never used it.  It behooved him and others to get farther out from the mountain that found this settler too familiar, and sent a random shot as a sufficient hint to the intruder.

In the trying times when the world was baking, what agony these mountains must have endured.  You see it in their faces, they are so haggard and old-looking:  time is swallowed up in victory, but it was a desperate duel.  There is a dome here that the ambitious foot of man has never attempted.  Tissayac allows no such liberty.  Look up at that rose-colored summit!  The sun endows it with glory long after twilight has shut us in.  We are cheated of much daylight here—­it comes later and goes earlier with us; but we get hints of brighter hours, both morning and evening, from those sparkling minarets now decked with snowy arabesques.  I have seen our canopy, the clouds, so crimsoned at this hour that the valley seemed a grand oriental pavilion, whose silken roof was illuminated with a million painted lamps.  The golden woods of Autumn detract nothing from the bizarre effect of the spectacle.  To be sure, these walls are rather sombre for a festival, but the sun does what it can to enliven them, whilst the flame-colored oaks and blood-spotted azaleas projecting on all sides from the shelving rocks resemble to a startling degree galleries of blazing candelabra.  Night dispels this illusion, it is so very deep and mysterious here.  The solemn procession of the stars silently passes over us.  I see Taurus pressing forward, and anon Orion climbs on hand and knee over the mountain in hot pursuit.

Does it tire you to look so long at a gigantic monument?  I do not wonder.  The secret of self-esteem seems to lie in regarding our inferiors; therefor let us talk of this frog.  I have heard his chorus a thousand times in the dark.  His is one of the songs of the night.  Just watch him in the meadow pool.  See the contentment in his double chin; he flings out three links of hind leg and carries his elbows akimbo; his attitudes are unconstrained; he is entirely without affectation; life never bores him; he keeps his professional engagements to the letter, and sings nightly through the season, whether hoarse or not.