Rev. John H. Quint, D.D., Chelsea, Mass., refers to The Troubadour as “this little publication so big with inspiration and charm to all who love New Hampshire.”
-The NH Troubadour, September 1937
THE BEST PLACES ARE FLAT
by Uncle Talbot
ONE HOT AUGUST AFTERNOON, the day before a two-week’s trip through the mountains clean from Liberty to the Nineteen-Mile Brook, making Bond and all the way stations, I sat next to a nice old lady on the big front porch of the Forest Hills Hotel in Franconia. We were looking from the hotel’s little hill eye-to-eye into the tall, beautiful bulk of Mount Lafayette, hitched like a freight locomotive to the string of Franconia Ridge’s peaks.
“My, what a lovely mountain,” said the lady. “Have you ever climbed that one?”
I had never thought of it that way, but I suppose I had. Twice I had started up Lafayette at midnight on my way up to the Presidentials, twice I had come at it from the Flume and the Ridge, but the word climb had been forgotten years ago, because people who love the White Mountains don’t climb. They travel.
-The NH Troubadour, September 1943
AUTUMN TRAIL
by Harry Elmore Hurd
In “West of East”
I know a thousand trails beneath the sun
But I shall yearn to travel only one
When autumn comes to claim the ripening seeds:
My woodland trail is hemmed by rattling weeds
And asters purpling the pasture fence,
No poet’s art or verbal eloquence
Could half transmit the beauty of my trail
To page or book…printed words would fail
To paint the glory of one flaming tree.
Come, friends, enjoy this ecstasy with me,
For autumn is an all-consuming fire,
A heady wine, a madness of desire:
Let one scared partridge rise on thundering wings
And I am happier than clowns or kings!
-The NH Troubadour, September 1947
