Off to the right and left stretched the wonderful landscape of the Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts’ Highlands–the Berkshire mountains in May where, afar, a summit snow-cap vied with the driven snows of blossoming fruit trees, lower down; where the pink-shot pearl of a lake gleamed, opal-like, from an emerald setting, and many a silver thread winding, expanding, showed where some madcap river or brook had become with spring a wild thing.
“Oh, hurrah! I can really see off to Mount Greylock–old King Greylock–even the steel tower upon it–oh! so plainly,” murmured the madcap in the Chair, and nestled triumphantly against its rocky back.
| “Greylock, cloud-girdled, from his purple throne, A shout of gladness sends, And up soft meadow slopes, a warbling tone, Of Housatonic blends.” |
Yes! she felt as if they were two throned dignitaries, she and Greylock; for she wore the crown of derring do, and King Greylock, still wearing a thin diadem of snow, was enthroned for ever in her imagination as the favored peak from which the first experiments with her father’s immortal rocket were to be made.
Upon Greylock’s crest within a week or two, maybe–at all events before summer dog-day heat clogged and fogged the air–her transcendent dream–or the first part of it–would come to pass: her yearning thumb would press the button and start the little Thunder Bird off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its cone-shaped head, and send back that novel explorer’s log, the little recording apparatus, attached to a black silk parachute–the first, the very first record from the outer realm of space.
No wonder that old Greylock sent her back a shout of gladness now, as, squirming in the Chair, she turned her gaze away from the distant mountain to green meadow slopes, to the right, where the broadest silver ribbon, intertwined with the matchless landscape, showed where the Housatonic River, the blue Housatonic, flowed and sang.
“Oh, dear! I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” she exulted silently. “But the idea of that perfectly horrid boy actually daring me to do it! He didn’t mean to, but he did–strutting off, like that, crowing about his climbing! As if a girl were–gingerbread! Well–” indignantly–“that was just one with his passing Una and me when we only wanted to thank him, felt as if we naturally must thank him, for–for.... Bah! I won’t think of the horrid wreck now! Or of him, either! I’ll be taken up with the view! Isn’t it exquisite–sublime? Not interrupted as it is up there on the–Pinnacle’s–crest!...–Ah-h!”
The little pinched exclamation came when–all too suddenly–she changed the point of view, and looked down.
Beneath her yawned the precipice over which her feet dangled–treading air, with never a break between them and that grove of dwarf pine trees more than a hundred feet below, pointed by their glinting rocks.
The little trees bowed to her, now, like servants–green pages.