"It is very tiresome to look at the same things for four hundred years," said the white-barked pine. "If I could only get to the top, now. Do tell me, what is it like on the other side?" he said to the wind.
"Oh!" said the wind, "it rains and snows. There are trees and bushes and blue lakes. It is not at all different from this side."
A deer said the same thing when it slept one night under the thatch of the highest pine. "It is all meadows and hills, only sometimes the grass is not so good there, and again sometimes it is better. It is very much like this."
"I do not believe them," said the pine to himself. "They are simply trying to console me for not realizing my ambition. But I am not a sapling any longer, let me tell you that."
"At least," said a young tree that grew a little farther down, "you are higher up than any of us."
"Of what use is that if I do not get to the top?" said the unhappy pine. "There is a bunch of blue flowers there, I can see it quite plainly just where the trail dips over the ridge. Surely I am as capable of climbing as any blue weed."
"But," said the young pine, "weeds do not have to grow cones."
"Oh, as for cones," cried the tree quite crossly, "the seasons are so short I hardly ever ripen any, and if I do the squirrels get them. I do believe I have not started a seedling these two hundred years. It is no use to talk to me, I shall be happy only when I have seen the other side of the mountain."
It seems what one desires with all one's heart for a long time finally comes to pass in some fashion or other. That very season the white-barked pine went up over Kearsarge to the other side. Early in the summer, when the rosy primroses had just begun to blow beside the drifts that hugged the shade of the boulders, a party of miners went up the trail with a long string of pack mules burdened with picks and shovels, flour and potatoes, and other things that miners use. The last pull up the Kearsarge trail is the hardest, over a steep waste of loose stones that want very little encouragement to go roaring down as an avalanche into the ravine below. The miners shouted, the mules scrambled and panted on the steep, but just as they came by the last of the white-barked pines, one slipped and went rolling over and over on the jagged stones. As happens very frequently when a pack animal falls, the mule was not very much hurt, but the pack saddle was quite ruined.
"We must do the best we can," said one of the men, and he cut down the white-barked pine. He chopped off the boughs, and split the trunk in four pieces to mend the pack. It was a very small tree though it was so old.