And as we lay there courting sleep which the blinking stars refused to shower down, our philosopher discoursed to us of the principle of fire, which he holds, with the ancients, to be an independent element that comes and goes in a mysterious manner, as we see flame spring up and vanish, and is in some way vital and indestructible, and has a mysterious relation to the source of all things.  “That flame,” he says, “you have put out, but where has it gone?” We could not say, nor whether it is anything like the spirit of a man which is here for a little hour, and then vanishes away.  Our own philosophy of the correlation of forces found no sort of favor at that elevation, and we went to sleep leaving the principle of fire in the apostolic category of “any other creature.”

At daylight we were astir; and, having pressed the principle of fire into our service to make a pot of tea, we carefully extinguished it or sent it into another place, and addressed ourselves to the climb of some thing over two thousand feet.  The arduous labor of scaling an Alpine peak has a compensating glory; but the dead lift of our bodies up Nipple Top had no stimulus of this sort.  It is simply hard work, for which the strained muscles only get the approbation of the individual conscience that drives them to the task.  The pleasure of such an ascent is difficult to explain on the spot, and I suspect consists not so much in positive enjoyment as in the delight the mind experiences in tyrannizing over the body.  I do not object to the elevation of this mountain, nor to the uncommonly steep grade by which it attains it, but only to the other obstacles thrown in the way of the climber.  All the slopes of Nipple Top are hirsute and jagged to the last degree.  Granite ledges interpose; granite bowlders seem to have been dumped over the sides with no more attempt at arrangement than in a rip-rap wall; the slashes and windfalls of a century present here and there an almost impenetrable chevalier des arbres; and the steep sides bristle with a mass of thick balsams, with dead, protruding spikes, as unyielding as iron stakes.  The mountain has had its own way forever, and is as untamed as a wolf; or rather the elements, the frightful tempests, the frosts, the heavy snows, the coaxing sun, and the avalanches have had their way with it until its surface is in hopeless confusion.  We made our way very slowly; and it was ten o’clock before we reached what appeared to be the summit, a ridge deeply covered with moss, low balsams, and blueberry-bushes.

I say, appeared to be; for we stood in thick fog or in the heart of clouds which limited our dim view to a radius of twenty feet.  It was a warm and cheerful fog, stirred by little wind, but moving, shifting, and boiling as by its own volatile nature, rolling up black from below and dancing in silvery splendor overhead As a fog it could not have been improved; as a medium for viewing the landscape it was a failure and we lay down upon the Sybarite couch of moss, as in a Russian bath, to await revelations.