Winthrop Packard – författare

Excerpt: "The smooth highway over which thousands of automobiles skim in long summer processions from Massachusetts to the mountains, coquettes with Chocorua as it winds through the Ossipees. Sometimes it tosses you over a ridge whence the blue bulk and gray pinnacle stand bewitchingly revealed for a second only to be eclipsed in another second by the lesser, nearby beauties of the hill country, and leave you wistful. Sometimes it gives you tantalizing flashes of it through trees or by the gable of a farm-house on a round, hayfield hill, but it is only as you glide down the long incline to the shores of Chocorua Lake that the miracle of revelation is complete. Then indeed you must set your foot hard on the brake and gaze long over the Scudder farm-house gate down a green slope of field to the little lake, and as the eye touches approvingly Mark Robertson''s rustic bridge, set in just the right spot to give the human touch to the wild beauty of the landscape, and leaps beyond to the larger lake framed in its setting of dark growth, and on again to the noble lift of the great mountain with its bare pinnacle of gray granite, you realize the grandeur and beauty of this outpost sentinel of the white hills, It is hard to believe that Switzerland or Italy or any other country has anything finer than this to show the traveller."

Excerpt: "“I will do what I can to help make matters easy, father.” The speaker was a handsome, well-built boy of seventeen, with a frank, winsome face that ordinarily showed neither strength nor weakness of character,—the face of a boy out of whom circumstances make much that is good, or sometimes much that is ill, according to what experiences life brings him. There are boys who will grow up strong and able men, anyway. They seem to have it in them from the start. There are others who have an inborn tendency to evil and dissipation, which no amount of training and opportunity for better things can eradicate. Harry Desmond was of neither of these types; his character was rather that which responds easily to outside influences, whose weaknesses may easily grow upon it, or whose strong points may be developed and brought out by use. “Thank you, my son,” said the other simply, extending his hand; “I was very sure you would. The business will of course go on, and may be built up again with care and strict economy; but the outside investments, whose returns have made us well-to-do, and from which the money for your education was coming, are totally swept away. I’m afraid we shall have to withdraw you from the preparatory school. It is an expensive place, and just at present I do not feel able to supply you with the money necessary to keep up your standing among the boys there. In another year I had hoped to see you in the freshman class at Harvard, and that may yet be managed. There are always scholarships to be had.”"