“‘One gets the whole in the first minute’!  How can they keep saying that?  Look, Elinor, and see if you can tell me where we are?” was Leslie’s cry, as, early next morning, she drew up her window-shade, to look forth—­on what?

Last night had lain there, underneath them, the great basin between Starr King, behind, and the roots of that lesser range, far down, above which the blue Lafayette uprears itself:  an enormous valley, filled with evergreen forest, over whose tall pines and cedars one looked, as if they were but juniper and blueberry bushes; far up above whose heads the real average of the vast mountain-country heaped itself in swelling masses,—­miles and miles of beetling height and solid breadth.  This morning it was gone; only the great peaks showed themselves, as a far-off, cliff-bound shore, or here and there a green island in a vast, vaporous lake.  The night-chill had come down among the heights, condensing the warm exhalations of the valley-bosom that had been shone into all day yesterday by the long summer sun; till, when he lifted himself once more out of the east, sending his leaping light from crest to crest, white fallen clouds were tumbling and wreathing themselves about the knees and against the mighty bosoms of the giants, and at their feet the forest was a sea.

“We must dress, and we must look!” exclaimed Leslie, as the early summons came for them.  “Oh dear! oh dear! if we were only like the birds! or if all this would wait till we get down!”

“Please drop the shade just a minute, Les.  This glass is in such a horrid light!  I don’t seem to have but half a face, and I can’t tell which is the up-side of that!  And—­oh dear!  I’ve no time to get into a fuss!” Elinor had not disdained the beauty and wonder without; but it was, after all, necessary to be dressed, and in a given time; and a bad light for a looking-glass is such a disastrous thing!

“I’ve brushed out half my crimps,” she said, again; “and my ruffle is basted in wrong side out, and altogether I’m got up a la furieuse!” But she laughed before she had done scolding, catching sight of her own exaggerated little frown in the distorting glass, that was unable, with all its malice, to spoil the bright young face when it came to smiles and dimples.

And then Jeannie came knocking at the door.  They had spare minutes, after all, and the mists were yet tossing in the valley when they went down.  They were growing filmy, and floating away in shining fragments up over the shoulders of the hills, and the lake was lower and less, and the emerging green was like the “Thousand Islands.”

They waited a little there, in the wide, open door together, and looked out upon it; and then the Haddens went round into their sister’s room, and Leslie was left alone in the rare, sweet, early air.  The secret joy came whispering at her heart again:  that there was all this in the world, and that one need not be utterly dull and mean, and dead to it; that something in her answered to the greatness overshadowing her; that it was possible, sometimes, and that people did reach out into a larger life than that of self and every-day.  How else did the great mountains draw them to themselves so?  But then she would not always be among the mountains.