"Set me down for the first kind," said Jean, "for I don't intend to do any such fool trick as to climb a mountain nearly thirteen thousand feet high."
"If we are going to do a lot of other things, I don't see how any of us are to undertake that stunt," said Eleanor. "I vote we pick out the things we cannot reasonably pass over and then take the leavings as we can."
"Good girl," cried Jack. "That is the ticket. Tell us, Nan, oh, honorable lady of the guide-book, what is it up to us to see?"
Nan spread out her map, propped her two elbows on the table before her and began making investigations while the others chattered away about Fuji, Lake Biwa and other things that had lately interested them.
"I wish I could remember all the stories about Fuji," said Jean looking at her neat note-book. "I know that Biwa is called the Lake of the Lute on account of its shape. There is a legend that tells of its having been formed by the sun-goddess at the time of a great earthquake. The rice-fields of the poor people were all destroyed but in their stead was seen this lake full of fish."
"It was at the same time that Fujisan was formed," Mary Lee went on with the tale. "It has so many pretty poetical names; one is the Mountain of the White Lotus, because it rises, all snowy white, from out the stagnant fields at its base."
"And Japan is called the 'Islands of the Dragon-Fly,'" put in Eleanor; "I wonder why."
"There is a story of that, too," said Jean. "I have it somewhere in my note-book. It was when the god Izanami shook from his spear bits of sand and mud that stayed among the reeds of a watery place and became dry land. It was in the form of a dragon-fly that the dry part spread out and so the god called it the Land of the Dragon-Fly."
"Fuji is called the Holy White Mountain, too," put in Jack.