Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

in petticoats, and good tempered, besides. The Spectator sent her out to the house to clean and make ready, and she tucked herself and all her belongings away on the ground floor contentedly, which was heroic. For there were only the kitchen and what was meant for a basement dining-room on that floor. Mrs. Spectator had gone once into that dining-room on her first visit to the house, and had declared she would never go there again. It was unspeakable; yet Katy bravely chose it as her bedroom and was cheerful over it. It swarmed with beetles, and had a base-burning heater in it, which warmed the rooms above; and in rainy weather, when the clothes would not dry out-of-doors, Katy strung them on lines around the room, set the heater at full blast, and went to bed at night amid lines of wet garments, with the stove burning so redly that one could see the glow through the basement windows. She was a jewel.

[ocr errors]

The night after moving in, it came on to rain.

All hands were tired out. The

Spectator had moved furniture all day, and Mrs. Spectator felt she had arranged everything in the wrong place, and was planning a fresh set of combinations for the morrow. The pair had climbed into their alcove, exhausted, and had fallen asleep listening to the musical patter of the rain upon the roof of their little home--their very own roof! Alas! in half an hour the rain, no longer musical but rattling, was coming through that humble roof in streams. The Spectator will never forget his weary tramp around those two rooms that night, as he set every jug, bucket, and can he owned (to the number, finally, of seventeen) under the leaks that opened above him one after another. And when he had crawled over the footboard again, into the warm shelter of the bedclothes, the last one opened just over his pillow!

When the roof came to be mended, it was found that it consisted principally of tar paper fastened down with tacks. All the others in the neighborhood were of the same unsubstantial variety, and nearly every day the "King of the

Roofers" came rattling through the street in a loudly painted wagon, with his title emblazoned on its sides, and proclaimed himself in a strident voice. After a storm, his progress was triumphal; from every door the householders came out to welcome him in. His stock in trade was simple-mostly tar paper and tacks; and after tacking strip after strip across the continually opening leaks in our roof, he finally got it into a fairly waterproof condition, from the sheer toughness and thickness of so many layers of material. But he never quite finished the job; for why should he cut off his own business connection?

During the whole six months the Spectator never got his landlords straightened out. Ford, as aforesaid, was not the owner, but the original tenant, renting the house from a large, thick-witted German woman who kept a bakery near by, and subletting to the Spectator. What their agreement had originally been was lost in the labyrinths of the Dutch mind. She came and explained it to Mrs. Spectator at length every week, only Mrs. Spectator couldn't understand her. The one intelligible point was that Ford didn't pay his rent, and she was going to turn the household out to-morrow unless she was paid at once. But it never went any further, and only added to the general opera-bouffe effect of the housekeeping.

There were small rooms and make

shift furniture in that little house; it was full of inconveniences and ridiculous happenings; there were short commons at times, and endless pulling and twisting to make both ends meet. But Mr. and Mrs. Spectator were young enough to find it great fun and to make a kind of perpetual picnic out of it as long as it lasted. And when they finally moved into a larger house, on a better street, and left their struggling days behind them, the Spectator can honestly say that he rather missed the alcove, the tar paper, the base-burner, the landlady, and the general sensation of being at the beginning of things.

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

The explorer of the Dark Continent and founder of the Congo Free State. Died on Tuesday, May 10, at the age of

sixty-three.

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]

THE

MOUNTAINS

BY

[graphic]

STEWART EDWARD

WHITE

AUTHOR OF

THE FOREST

THE BLAZED TRAIL
THE SILENT PLACES Etc.

WITH PICTURES BY FERNAND LUNGREN

[ocr errors]

I.—The Ridge Trail

IX trails lead to the main ridge. They are all good trails, so that even the casual tourist in the little Spanish-American town on the seacoast need have nothing to fear from the ascent. In some spots they contract to an arm's length of space, outside of which limit they drop sheer away; else where they stand up on end, zigzag in lacets each more hair-raising than the last, or fill to demoralization with loose boulders and shale. A fall on the part of your horse would mean a more than serious accident; but Western horses do not fall. The major premise stands: even the casual tourist has no real reason for fear, however scared he may become.

Our favorite route to the main ridge was by a way called the Cold Spring Trail. We used to enjoy taking visitors up it, mainly because you come on the top suddenly, without warning. Then we collected remarks. Everybody, even the most stolid, said something.

1 Copyright, 1904, by the Outlook Company, New York.

You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy and gradually ascending creek-bed of a cañon, a half-hour of laboring steepness in the overarching mountain lilac and laurel. There you came to a great rock gateway which seemed the top of the world. At the gateway was a Bad Place where the ponies planted warily their little hoofs, and the visitor played "eyes front," and besought that his mount should not stumble.

Beyond the gateway a lush level cañon into which you plunged as into a bath; then again the laboring trail, up and always up toward the blue California sky, out of the lilacs and laurels and redwood chaparral into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the fine angular shale of the upper regions. Beyond the apparent summit you found always other summits yet to be climbed. And all at once, like thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you looked over the top.

Then came the remarks. Some swore softly; some uttered appreciative ejac

ulation; some shouted aloud; some gasped; one man uttered three times the word "Oh"-once breathlessly, Oh! once in awakening appreciation, Oh! once in wild enthusiasm, OH! Then invariably they fell silent and looked.

For the ridge; ascending from seaward in a gradual coquetry of foot-hills, broad low ranges, cross-systems, cañons, little flats, and gentle ravines, inland dropped off almost sheer to the river below. And from under your very feet rose, range after range, tier after tier, rank after rank, in increasing crescendo of wonderful tinted mountains to the main crest of the Coast Ranges, the blue distance, the mightiness of California's western systems. The eye followed them up and up, and farther and farther, with the accumulating emotion of a wild rush on a toboggan. There came a point where the fact grew to be almost too big for the appreciation, just as beyond a certain. point speed seems to become unbearable.

It left you breathless, wonderstricken, awed. You could do nothing but look, and look, and look again, tongue-tied by the impossibility of doing justice to what you felt. And in the far distance, finally, your soul, grown big in a moment, came to rest the great precipices and pines of the greatest mountains of all, close under the sky.

on

In a little, after the change had come to you, a change definite and enduring, which left your inner processes forever different from what they had been, you turned sharp to the west and rode five miles along the knife-edge Ridge Trail to where Rattlesnake Cañon led you down and back to your accustomed environment.

To the left as you rode you saw, far on the horizon, rising to the height of your eye, the mountains of the channel islands. Then the deep sapphire of the Pacific, fringed with the soft, unchanging white of the surf and the yellow of the shore. Then the town like a little map, and the lush greens of the wide meadows, the fruit-groves, the lesser ranges-all vivid, fertile, brilliant, and pulsating with vitality. You filled your You filled your senses with it, steeped them in the beauty of it. And at once, by a mere

turn of the eyes, from the almost crude insistence of the bright primary color of life, you faced the tenuous azures of distance, the delicate mauves and amethysts, the lilacs and saffrons of the arid country.

This was the wonder we never tired of seeing for ourselves, of showing to others. And often, academically, perhaps a little wistfully, as one talks of something to be dreamed of but never enjoyed, we spoke of how fine it would be to ride down into that land of mystery and enchantment, to penetrate one after another the cañons dimly outlined in the shadows cast by the westering sun, to cross the mountains lying outspread in easy grasp of the eye, to gain the distant blue Ridge, and see with our own eyes what lay beyond.

For to its other attractions the prospect added that of impossibility, of unattainableness. These rides of ours

were day rides. We had to get home by nightfall. Our horses had to be fed, ourselves to be housed. We had not time to continue on down the other side whither the trail led. whither the trail led. At the very and literal brink of achievement we were forced to turn back.

Gradually the idea possessed us. We promised ourselves that some day we would explore. In our after-dinner smokes we spoke of it. Occasionally, from some hunter or forest-ranger, we gained little items of information, we learned the fascination of musical names -Mono Cañon, Patrera Don Victor, Lloma Paloma, Patrera Madulce, Cuyamas, became familiar to us as syllables. We desired mightily to body them forth to ourselves as facts. The extent of our mental vision expanded. We heard of other mountains far beyond these farthest mountains whose almost unexplored vastnesses contained great forests. mighty valleys, strong watercourses, beautiful hanging-meadows, deep cañons of granite, eternal snows-mountains so extended, so wonderful, that their secrets offered whole summers of solitary exploration. We came to feel their marvel, we came to respect the inferno of the Desert that hemmed them in. Shortly we graduated from the indefiniteness of railroad maps to the intrica

« AnteriorContinuar »