THE WATERVILLE VALLEY, A STORY OF A RESORT IN THE NEW HAMPSHIRE MOUNTAINS

SHIRE MOUNTAINS. By Nathaniel L. Goodrich. Lunenburg, Vermont: The North Country Press. 1952. xiii, 77 pp. $2.50.

This little volume by Dartmouth's Librarian Emeritus is one of peculiar charm. It is a very personal book, rooted in the author's lifetime familiarity with one particular, narrowly limited spot of earth, the Waterville Valley in the White Mountains, and brought into full being by his deep and abiding love for the granite peaks that surround it, the forest that clothes it, the friends that year after year have spent their summers and often parts of their winters there. Its primary appeal is naturally to those friends and to others who may chance to have become acquainted with the secluded valley, but it is also surprisingly interesting to any reader who has a native sensitivity to locale, and affection for the great outdoors. It brings the freshness of mountain air and the clean odor of upland forest, yet, enlivened by anecdote and tinged with reminiscence, it never loses the human touch.

Mr. Goodrich's theme, announced in the beginning and caught up throughout the book, is stated as "Waterville is continuance," and his emphasis is thrown on the unchanging character of this resort, set apart, as it were, from the ever-shifting world outside the Valley, its distinctiveness preserved by the devoted efforts of the families who through three generations now have made it their second home. The Inn, in which all life in the Valley has centered since 1860, and the natural setting in which it is placed mountains, river, forest, trails form the subject matter of the whole account. Mr. Good- rich has known it all since boyhood; it is so much an integral part of himself that he is able to make us see and feel it, too, with remarkable vividness.

As in the case o£ all that Mr. Goodrich writes, the style is clear-cut and polished, with sly touches of humor and a basic Yankee realism. The book has been beautifully printed by the North Country Press.