"

"Oh, mother, I do not see how you can feel so out here! I never dreamed of
anything so beautiful!"

"Feel so out here! What do you mean? Haven't I always been good to you?
Didn't I give you a good home in Lynn after your father and mother died?
Wasn't I a mother to you? Didn't I nurse you through the fever? Didn't I
send for you to come way out here with the immigrants, and did you ever
find a better friend in the world than I have been to you?"

"Yes, mother, but--"

"And don't I let you play the violin, which the Methody elder didn't much
approve of?"

"Yes, mother, you have always been good to me, and I love you more than
anybody else on earth."

There swept into view a wild valley of giant trees, and rose clear above
it, a scene of overwhelming magnificence.

"Oh, mother, I can hardly look at it--isn't it splendid? It makes me feel
like crying."

The practical, resolute woman was about to say, "Well, look the other way
then," but she checked the rude words. The girl had told her that she
loved her more than any one else in the world, and the confession had
touched her heart.

"Well, Gretchen, that mountain used to make me feel so sometimes when I
first came out here. I always thought that the mountains would look
_peakeder_ than they do. I didn't think that they would take up so much
of the land. I suppose that they are all well enough in their way, but a
pioneer woman has no time for sentiments, except hymns. I don't feel like
you now, and I don't think that I ever did. I couldn't learn to play the
violin and the musical glasses if I were to try, and I am sure that I
should never go out into the woodshed to try to rhyme _sun_ with _fun_;
no, Gretchen, all such follies as these I should _shun_. What difference
does it make whether a word rhymes with one word or another?"

To the eye of the poetic and musical German girl the dead volcano, with
its green base and frozen rivers and dark, glimmering lines of carbon,
seemed like a fairy tale, a celestial vision, an ascent to some city of
crystal and pearl in the sky. To her foster mother the stupendous scene
was merely a worthless waste, as to Wordsworth's unspiritual wanderer:

"A primrose by the river's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

She was secretly pleased at Gretchen's wonder and surprise at the new
country, but somehow she felt it her duty to talk querulously, and to
check the flow of the girl's emoti