her brandishing an
umbrella, have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer--a person to be
disregarded.

Not so those delightful people from New Hampshire. They were good enough
to treat him--it sounds almost incredible--as a human being, possibly
respectable, probably not in immediate need of financial assistance.

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 s