“Now you are trying to spoil me! What story shall I tell, I wonder? It must be short, because I may be called away at any moment. Let me see—how would one of my younger day scrapes do?”
PET.
“Splendid! splendid!”
“Well, this wasn’t much of an adventure for youngsters like you who travel about over the country, a hundred miles a day. But to us, Fred and me, it seemed a good deal at the time. Fred always loved mountain-climbing. He went to Europe while still a young man, and only last week he sent me a paper containing an account of his ascent of one of the loftiest among the Bernese Alps.”
“Is he the stout gentleman that we saw here last summer, uncle, and who told us so much about Switzerland?”
“The same one, Kittie. ‘Frederic Cruden, Esq., F. R. S.,’ he is now. But in those days he was just a slim, fun-loving boy, and the only ‘Fellow’ he was, was a very good fellow indeed. Well, while we were both in our teens, our two families made up a party and visited the White Mountains.”
“There was no railroad through the Notch then?”
“I should say not! If one wished to see the grandest localities of the White Mountains, he must either foot it or ride over the rough roads in the big, jolting stage-coach which often carried more outside than in, and occasionally tipped its passengers out upon the moss-banks beside the road. Bears, too, were more abundant than now, and that’s saying considerable; for in many of the little New Hampshire towns of Coos County, farmers are to-day prevented from keeping sheep by the inroads of Bruin, who loves a dainty shoulder of mutton for supper only too well. I saw by the papers recently that the selectmen of one township during last year paid bounties on eleven bears and two wolves!”
Here Tom uttered a series of ferocious growls, but was covered with hay and sat upon by his cousin until he promised to behave himself.