Papa talked pleasantly and to the point.
The little maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her birth
and that of her rearing, and mamma smiled benignly in the
background.
Balance this with a story of a young English idiot I met mooning
about inside his high collar, attended by a valet. He
condescended to tell me that "you can't be too careful who you
talk to in these parts." And stalked on, fearing, I suppose,
every minute for his social chastity.
That man was a barbarian (I took occasion to tell him so), for he
comported himself after the manner of the head-hunters and hunted
of Assam who are at perpetual feud one with another.
You will understand that these foolish stories are introduced in
order to cover the fact that this pen cannot describe the glories
of the Upper Geyser Basin. The evening I spent under the lee of
the Castle Geyser, sitting on a log with some troopers and
watching a baronial keep forty feet high spouting hot water. If
the Castle went off first, they said the Giantess would be quiet,
and vice versa, and then they told tales till the moon got up and
a party of campers in the woods gave us all something to eat.
Then came soft, turfy forest that deadened the wheels, and two
troopers on detachment duty stole noiselessly behind us. One was
the Wrap-up-his-Tail man, and they talked merrily while the
half-broken horses bucked about among the trees. And so a cavalry
escort was with us for a mile, till we got to a mighty hill
strewn with moss agates, and everybody had to jump out and pant
in that thin air. But how intoxicating it was! The old lady from
Chicago ducked like an emancipated hen as she scuttled about the
road, cramming pieces of rock into her reticule. She sent me
fifty yards down to the hill-side to pick up a piece of broken
bottle which she insisted was moss agate.
"I've some o' that at home, an' they shine. Yes, you go get it,
young man."
As we climbed the long path the road grew viler and viler till it
became, without disguise, the bed of a torrent; and just when
things were at their rockiest we nearly fell into a little
sapphire lake - but never sapphire was so blue - called Mary's
Lake; and that between eight and nine thousand feet above the
sea.
Afterward, grass downs, all on a vehement slope, so that the
buggy, following the new-made road, ran on the two off-wheels
mostly till we dipped head-first into a ford, climbed up a cliff,
raced along down, dipped again, and pulled up dishevelled at
"Larry's" for lunch and an hour's rest.
