all of you," Charlie Sands said as we waited for the
baked apples. "Once get started with a good horse between your knees,
and--"

"I hope," Tish interrupted him, "that you do not think we are going to
ride astride!"

"I'm darned sure of it."

That was Charlie Sands's way of talking. He does not mean to be rude,
and he is really a young man of splendid character. But, as Tish says,
contact with the world, although it has not spoiled him, has roughened
his speech.

"You see," he explained, "there are places out there where the horses
have to climb like goats. It's only fair to them to distribute your
weight equally. A side saddle is likely to turn and drop you a mile or
two down a crack."

Aggie went rather white and sneezed violently.

But Tish looked thoughtful. "It sounds reasonable," she said. "I've felt
for along time that I'd be glad to discard skirts. Skirts," she said,
"are badge of servitude, survivals of the harem, reminders of a time
when nothing was expected of women but parasitic leisure."

I tried to tell her that she was wrong about the skirts. Miss
MacGillicuddy, our missionary in India, had certainly said that the
women in harems wore bloomers. But Tish left the room abruptly,
returning shortly after with a volume of the encyclopaedia, and looked up
the Rocky Mountains.

I remember it said that the highest ranges were, as compared with the
size and shape of the earth, only as the corrugations on the skin of an
orange. Either the man who wrote that had never seen an orange or he had
never seen the Rocky Mountains. Orange, indeed! If he had said the upper
end of a pineapple it would have been more like it. I wish the man who
wrote it would go to Glacier Park. I am not a vindictive woman, but I
know one or two places where I would like to place him and make him
swallow that orange. I'd like to see him on a horse, on the brink of a
canon a mile deep, and have his horse reach over the edge for a stray
plant or two, or standing in a cloud up to his waist, so that, as Aggie
so plaintively observed, "The lower half of one is in a snowstorm while
the upper part is getting sunburned."

For we went. Oh, yes, we went. It is not the encyclopaedia's fault that
we came back. But now that we are home, and nothing wrong except a touch
of lumbago that Tish got from sleeping on the ground, and, of course,
Aggie's unfortunate experience with her teeth, I look back on our
various adventures with pleasure. I even