“Are you going to tell us?” asked Pat.
“If you don’t think it will tire you.” She said it very politely, like a question. And they all shook their heads—one great, vigorous shake. So the Princess began to tell it:—
“Sometimes, on her voyages, the Jane Ellen passes near a coast where there is a long line of white surf edging the blue water; then just as long a line of white sand; and back of both, the level forest extending back to the line of the coast mountains. And back of this coast range—so far away that it looks as if it were painted flat on the pale blue sky, with paint only a shade darker—rises the great triangle that, Taffy says, is the most satisfactory mountain in the world.
“And that is Xyntli’s mountain.”
“Did Taffy see it?” asked Pat.
“He did,” said the Princess, “from the sea. He sometimes thought he would like to go inland and see what it was like, near at hand. But the Jane Ellen never stopped there—there was nothing to stop for—and he never went. And that’s all he and the Jane Ellen had to do with it.
“If he had left the ship and gone ashore to climb to the top of the range of hills, he would have seen that they sloped down again; and far away, over miles of green, rolling country, the great cone of the mountain lifts its bare slope out of the forest. And on the southern side, almost at the top, his sailor eyes might have made out the hole (with the peak of the mountain, like a pointed hood, behind it) that leads down into the depths where Xyntli sleeps—long naps that keep her young and beautiful in spite of her age.
“No one can tell how beautiful she is, because she wraps herself in a veil when she looks out; but her splendid, fiery-gold hair streams out of it, and floats and sparkles in the wind when she stands on tiptoe inside, to look out and see that the mountain is just as she wants it to be,—an even slope from top to bottom; clean rocks, with no creeping green things and trees littering up its sides.
“It must be trying to her (and she is a nervous person, too) to lie down to peaceful slumber for a hundred years or more, leaving her mountain the pink of perfection; and to wake and look out—only to see that the waters that run down its sides have collected into streams, and dug irregular channels for themselves (like scratches on the mahogany table!), and to listen and hear the winds whispering in the leaves of the forest:—
Creeping, creeping,