has glimpsed magic and who sets his face again to dull realities.

The Southerner, who had laid down his sword when its cause was lost and
the Celt who had sheathed his, when his name was tarnished, stood
together in the crystal-clear air of the heights, looking down from a
summit over crags and valleys that sparkled with the rime of frost.

Undulating like a succession of arrested waves, were the ramparts of the
ridges stretching into immeasurable distances. They were almost leafless
now, but they wrapped themselves in colour tones that touched them into
purple and blue. They wore atmospheric veils, mist-woven, and sun-dyed
into evanescent and delicate effects of colour, but the cardinal note
which lay upon them, as an expression rests upon a human face, was
their declaration of wildness; their primitive note of brooding
aloofness.

"They are unchanged," declared General Prince in a low voice. "The west
has gone under the plough. The prairies are fenced. Alaska even is
won--. These hills alone stand unamended. Here at the very heart of our
civilization is the last frontier, and the last home of the
trail-blazer." His eyes glistened as he pointed to a wisp of smoke that
rose in a cove far under them, straight and blue from its clay-daubed
chimney.

"There burns the hearth fire of our contemporary ancestors, the stranded
wagon voyagers who have changed no whit from the pioneers of two hundred
years ago."

Victor McCalloway nodded gravely, and his companion went on.

"With one exception this range was the first to which the earth, in the
travail of her youth, gave birth. Compared with the Appalachians, the
Himalayas and the Alps are young things, new to life. On either side of
where we stand a youthful civilization has grown up, but these ridges
have frowned on, unaltered. Their people still live two centuries behind
us."

McCalloway swept out his hands in a comprehensive gesture.

"When you leave this spot, sir, for your return, you travel not only
some two hundred miles, but also from the infancy of Americanism to its
present big-boyhood. Pardon me, if that term seems disrespectful," he
hastened to add. "But it is so that I always think of your nation, as
the big growing lad of the world family. Titanically strong,
astonishingly vigorous of resource, but, as yet, hardly adult."

The Kentuckian, standing spare and erect, typical of that old South
which has caught step with the present, yet which has not outgrow