her imagination as the
favored peak from which the first experiments with her father's immortal
rocket were to be made.

Upon Greylock's crest within a week or two, maybe--at all events before
summer dog-day heat clogged and fogged the air--her transcendent
dream--or the first part of it--would come to pass: her yearning thumb
would press the button and start the little Thunder Bird off, to fly up
a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its cone-shaped
head, and send back that novel explorer's log, the little recording
apparatus, attached to a black silk parachute--the first, the very first
record from the outer realm of space.

No wonder that old Greylock sent her back a shout of gladness now, as,
squirming in the Chair, she turned her gaze away from the distant
mountain to green meadow slopes, to the right, where the broadest silver
ribbon, intertwined with the matchless landscape, showed where the
Housatonic River, the blue Housatonic, flowed and sang.

"Oh, dear! I wouldn't have missed this for anything," she exulted
silently. "But the idea of that perfectly horrid boy actually daring me
to do it! He didn't mean to, but he did--strutting off, like that,
crowing about his climbing! As if a girl were--gingerbread! Well--"
indignantly--"that was just one with his passing Una and me when we only
wanted to thank him, felt as if we naturally must thank him,
for--for.... Bah! I won't think of the horrid wreck now! Or of him,
either! I'll be taken up with the view! Isn't it exquisite--sublime? Not
interrupted as it is up there on the--Pinnacle's--crest!...--Ah-h!"

The little pinched exclamation came when--all too suddenly--she changed
the point of view, and looked down.

Beneath her yawned the precipice over which her feet dangled--treading
air, with never a break between them and that grove of dwarf pine trees
more than a hundred feet below, pointed by their glinting rocks.

The little trees bowed to her, now, like servants--green pages.

But, somehow, their homage made her feel uneasy; it put too great a
distance beneath her and them.

The crown of daring which she wore did not fit quite so easily.

She began to feel like a usurper whose head might at any moment be taken
off.

And, with that, she decided to vacate!

Drawing up her feet much more gracefully than her predecessor had done,
she curled her body in the seat and raised it slowly until she was in a
standing position, grasping the stone