THE BARE HILLS IN 

 MIDWINTER 



1 OWARD morning the south rain, 

 whose downpour was the climax of the 

 January thaw, ceased, and in the warm 

 silence that followed Great Blue Hill 

 seemed like a gigantic puffball growing 

 out of the moist twilight into the dryer 

 upper atmosphere of dawn. Standing on 

 its rounded dome you had a singular 

 sense of being swung with it upward and 

 eastward to meet the light. At such times 

 the whirling of the earth on its axis is so 

 very real that one wonders that the an- 

 cients did not discover it long before they 

 did. Surely their mountaineers must 

 have known. 



After a little the battlemented donjon 

 89 



