“I haven’t the slightest idea of riding past these glaciers and leaving Gilroy to explore them alone,” remarked Mr. Vernon.
“If we agree to tie ourselves to your apron-strings, Verny, will you feel resigned to our going?” asked Julie, meekly.
“If five scouts dangle from my apron-strings, how can I scramble for myself?” laughed the Captain; but the girls knew she was weakening in her former refusal.
With wise looks exchanged between scouts and the two men, the subject was dropped for the time being. So they descended the height where they had obtained such a fine view of the peaks, and rode along the trail that was so heavily screened by forest trees as to cast a gloaming underneath them, even in the brightest sunshine.
“Gilly, how came these vast mountains here?” asked Judith.
“Yes, Gilly, why are they not scattered impartially over the land?” added one of the other scouts.
“While we are traveling along a good trail, let me tell you what I have gathered from scientific books on the subject,” returned Mr. Gilroy.
“It is evident that the Rockies were the first points of land to lift a head above the sea of water when the American Continent was born. As often happens in the families of mankind, where the youngest-born embraces all the points of beauty and abilities that are manifested in individual allotments to all other members of the same family, so it is with Nature’s mountain-children.
“The Rockies, being the youngest born of mountain ranges of the earth, inherited, as it were, the combined beauty and strength and characteristics that were the best in all the others. But there was no jealousy on the part of the older mountains of earth, and it is doubtful if any one of them even knew of this new-comer to the family group. Each had all it could do with its own affairs, in those by-gone cycles.
“Of Earth’s large family of mountains, the first-born to lift a head from sleep on the bosom of the ‘mighty waters’ were the British Isles. They were not high or mighty in geography, but they were destined to raise the highest and mightiest race of people on earth.