igh. The last three thousand feet
were nearly straight up and down. We finished at a four-mile clip an
hour before sunset, and discussed what to do next to fill in the time.
When we sat down, we found we had had about enough; but we had not
discovered it before.

All of us, even the morose and cynical Dinkey, felt the benefit of the
change from the lower country. Here we were definitely in the
Mountains. Our plateau ran from six to eight thousand feet in
altitude. Beyond it occasionally we could see three more ridges,
rising and falling, each higher than the last. And then, in the blue
distance, the very crest of the broad system called the
Sierras,--another wide region of sheer granite rising in peaks,
pinnacles, and minarets, rugged, wonderful, capped with the eternal
snows.

[1] Do not fail to sound the final e.

IX

THE TRAIL

When you say "trail" to a Westerner, his eye lights up. This is
because it means something to him. To another it may mean something
entirely different, for the blessed word is of that rare and beautiful
category which is at once of the widest significance and the most
intimate privacy to him who utters it. To your mind leaps the picture
of the dim forest-aisles and the murmurings of tree-top breezes; to him
comes a vision of the wide dusty desert; to me, perhaps, a high wild
country of wonder. To all of us it is the slender, unbroken,
never-ending thread connecting experiences.

For in a mysterious way, not to be understood, our trails never do end.
They stop sometimes, and wait patiently while we dive in and out of
houses, but always when we are ready to go on, they are ready too, and
so take up the journey placidly as though nothing had intervened. They
begin, when? Sometime, away in the past, you may remember a single
episode, vivid through the mists of extreme youth. Once a very little
boy walked with his father under a green roof of leaves that seemed
farther than the sky and as unbroken. All of a sudden the man raised
his gun and fired upwards, apparently through the green roof. A pause
ensued. Then, hurtling roughly through still that same green roof, a
great bird fell, hitting the earth with a thump. The very little boy
was I. My trail must have begun there under the bright green roof of
leaves.

From that earliest moment the Trail unrolls behind you like a thread so
that never do you quite lose connection with your selves. There is
something a little fe