“Just suits such a mischief, doesn’t it?  Short for Asenath,—­it was always her school-name.  She’s just finished her last year at Madam Routh’s; she came there soon after we did.  It’s a party of the graduates, and some younger ones left with Madam for the long holidays, that she’s traveling with.  I wonder if she isn’t sick of her life, though, by this time!  Fancy those girls, Nell, with a whole half-wing of the hotel to themselves, and Sin Saxon in the midst!”

“Poor ‘Graywacke’ in the midst, you mean,” said Nell.

“Like a respectable old grimalkin at the mercy of a crowd of boys and a tin kettle,” added Jeannie, laughing.

“I’ve no doubt she’s a very nice person, too.  I only hope, if I come across her, I mayn’t call her Graywacke to her face,” said Mrs. Linceford.

“Just what you’ll be morally sure to do, Augusta!”

With this, they had come up the staircase and along a narrow passage leading down between a dozen or so of small bedrooms on either side,—­for the Green Cottage also had run out its addition of two stories since summer guests had become many and importunate,—­and stood now where three open doors, one at the right and two at the left, invited their entrance upon what was to be their own especial territory for the next two months.  From one side they looked up the river along the face of the great ledges, and caught the grandeur of far-off Washington, Adams, and Madison, filling up the northward end of the long valley.  The aspect of the other was toward the frowning glooms of Giant’s Cairn close by, and broadened then down over the pleasant subsidence of the southern country to where the hills grew less, and fair, small, modest peaks lifted themselves just into blue height and nothing more, smiling back with a contented deference toward the mightier majesties, as those who might say:  “We do our gentle best; it is not yours; yet we, too, are mountains, though but little ones.”  From underneath spread the foreground of green, brilliant intervale, with the river flashing down between margins of sand and pebbles in the midst.

Here they put Leslie Goldthwaite; and here, somehow, her first sensation, as she threw back her blinds to let in all the twilight for her dressing, was a feeling of half relief from the strained awe and wonder of the last few days.  Life would not seem so petty here as in the face of all that other solemn stateliness.  There was a reaction of respite and repose.  And why not?  The great emotions are not meant to come to us daily in their unqualified strength.  God knows how to dilute his elixirs for the soul.  His fine, impalpable air, spread round the earth, is not more cunningly mixed from pungent gases for our hourly breath, than life itself is thinned and toned that we may receive and bear it.

Leslie wondered if it were wrong that the high mountain fervor let itself go from her so soon and easily; that the sweet pleasantness of this new resting-place should come to her as a rest; that the laughter and frolic of the schoolgirls made her glad with such sudden sympathy and foresight of enjoyment; that she should have “come down” all the way from Jefferson in Jeannie’s sense, and that she almost felt it a comfortable thing herself not to be kept always “up in the clouds.”