Nelly was looking at the picture intently, and did not reply for a moment. Then she said:—
"Papa, I think it would keep us good all the time to look at that mountain."
"Why, Nell," said her mother, "I didn't know you cared so much for mountains. You never said so."
"I never saw a real mountain before," said Nelly. "This isn't a bit like Mount Saycross."
The town of Mayfield was in one of the pleasantest counties in Massachusetts. The region was very beautifully wooded and had several small rivers in it, and one range of low hills called the Saycross Hills; the highest of these was perhaps three thousand feet high, and Nelly had spent many a day on its top: but she had never seen any thing which gave her any idea of the grandeur of a high mountain till she saw this picture of Pike's Peak. It seemed as if she could not take her eyes away from this picture: she looked at it as one looks at the picture of the face of a friend.
"Oh papa!" she exclaimed at last, "let me have this picture for my own: won't you? I'll be very, very careful of it."
"Yes, you may have it if you want it so much," replied Mr. March, "but be very sure not to lose it. I may want to show it to some one, any day."
"I won't lose it, papa," said Nelly, in a tone of so much feeling that her father looked at her in surprise.
"Why, Nell," he said, "you must be a born mountaineer I think."
And so she was. From the day she first looked on this picture of Pike's Peak till the day when she stood at the foot of the real mountain itself, it was seldom out of her mind. She kept the little card in the box with Mrs. Napoleon's best bonnet and gown, and she talked so much about it that her father called her his "little Pike's Peak girl."