Flowers and Mountains
Apart from this placid and rather homely kind of country- side, extremely beautiful though it is, New England can offer a good deal more. The lakes with dreamy Indian names are a sailing paradise; there is good climbing all along the Washington Range, where the mountains too are Indian- named, and in June there will still be ro or is feet of snow in the famous Tuckermann Ravine. In June too the flowers are lovely : the huge magenta and white Indian roses, flaming stretches of Indian Paint Brush, pale blue geraniums, wild yellow-and-crimson aquilegia (A. canadensis), miles of honeysuckle, and best of all the huge pink, white and some- times yellow lady-slippers. All these are roadside flowers. There are alpines in Washington. But the best of the country is felt in its huge unspoilt expanses of natural beauty. Unlike the English countryside, very little of it is man-made. From the top of Mount Manadnock I looked down on a stretch of lake and forest that cannot have changed much in two hundred years. A lean, sardonic, tired forest-ranger, whose wife had disturbpd him a little by falling off the mountain that morning, saw me looking. His words are the best recommendation of an entrancing countryside. " Yeh, brother," he said, " it gets you."
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