"Because his higher interests don't give him no time for sich follies."
"How can an immortal creature be pressed for time?"
"Wal, you'll find out some day. G' lang, Jennie."
I thought I had left this excellent man in a metaphysical bog. But he had not discharged his duty, so he scrambled out and took new ground.
"Now say,—d' you think it's exackly a Christian way of spendin' time, yourself?"
"I know a worse way."
"Eh? What's that?"
"In the house of a Long-Tom settler who charges five dollars a day extra because his wife feels like a mother."
He did not continue the conversation. I myself did not close it in anger, but solely to avoid an extra charge, which in the light of experience seemed imminent, for concern about my spiritual welfare. On the maternal-tenderness scale of prices, an indulgence in this luxury would have cleaned out Bierstadt and myself before we effected junction with our drawers of exchange, and I was discourteous as a matter of economy.
We had enjoyed, from the summit of a hill twenty miles south of Salem, one of the most magnificent views in all earthly scenery. Within a single sweep of vision were seven snow-peaks, the Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helen's, with the dim suggestion of an eighth colossal mass, which might be Rainier. All these rose along an arc of not quite half the horizon, measured between ten and eighteen thousand feet in height, were nearly conical, and absolutely covered with snow from base to pinnacle. The Three Sisters, a triplet of sharp, close-set needles, and the grand masses of Hood and Jefferson, showed mountainesque and earthly; it was at least possible to imagine them of us and anchored to the ground we trod on. Not so with the others. They were beautiful, yet awful ghosts,—spirits of dead mountains buried in old-world cataclysms, returning to make on the brilliant azure of noonday blots of still more brilliant white. I cannot express their vague, yet vast and intense splendor, by any other word than incandescence. It was as if the sky had suddenly grown white-hot in patches. When we first looked, we thought St. Helen's an illusion,—an aurora, or a purer kind of cloud. Presently we detected the luminous chromatic border,—a band of refracted light with a predominant orange-tint, which outlines the higher snow-peaks seen at long range,—traced it down, and grasped the entire conception of the mighty cone. No man of enthusiasm, who reflects what this whole sight must have been, will wonder that my friend and I clasped each other's hands before it, and thanked God we had lived to this day.