The quiet and repose of this spruce grove proved to be the calm that goes before the storm.  As we passed out of it, we came plump upon the almost perpendicular battlements of Slide.  The mountain rose like a huge, rock-bound fortress from this plain-like expanse.  It was ledge upon ledge, precipice upon precipice, up which and over which we made our way slowly and with great labor, now pulling ourselves up by our hands, then cautiously finding niches for our feet and zigzagging right and left from shelf to shelf.  This northern side of the mountain was thickly covered with moss and lichens, like the north side of a tree.  This made it soft to the foot, and broke many a slip and fall.  Everywhere a stunted growth of yellow birch, mountain-ash, and spruce and fir opposed our progress.  The ascent at such an angle with a roll of blankets on your back is not unlike climbing a tree:  every limb resists your progress and pushes you back; so that when we at last reached the summit, after twelve or fifteen hundred feet of this sort of work, the fight was about all out of the best of us.  It was then nearly two o’clock, so that we had been about seven hours in coming seven miles.

Here on the top of the mountain we overtook spring, which had been gone from the valley nearly a month.  Red clover was opening in the valley below, and wild strawberries just ripening; on the summit the yellow birch was just hanging out its catkins, and the claytonia, or spring-beauty, was in bloom.  The leaf-buds of the trees were just bursting, making a faint mist of green, which, as the eye swept downward, gradually deepened until it became a dense, massive cloud in the valleys.  At the foot of the mountain the clintonia, or northern green lily, and the low shadbush were showing their berries, but long before the top was reached they were found in bloom.  I had never before stood amid blooming claytonia, a flower of April, and looked down upon a field that held ripening strawberries.  Every thousand feet elevation seemed to make about ten days’ difference in the vegetation, so that the season was a month or more later on the top of the mountain than at its base.  A very pretty flower which we began to meet with well up on the mountain-side was the painted trillium, the petals white, veined with pink.

The low, stunted growth of spruce and fir which clothes the top of Slide has been cut away over a small space on the highest point, laying open the view on nearly all sides.  Here we sat down and enjoyed our triumph.  We saw the world as the hawk or the balloonist sees it when he is three thousand feet in the air.  How soft and flowing all the outlines of the hills and mountains beneath us looked!  The forests dropped down and undulated away over them, covering them like a carpet.  To the east we looked over the near-by Wittenberg range to the Hudson and beyond; to the south, Peak-o’-Moose, with its sharp crest, and Table Mountain, with its long level top,