chain of strange and beautiful forms, green almost to the top, and intersected with deep ravines and cliffs which the conductor informed them were “canyons.”  They seemed quite near at hand, for their bases sank into low rounded hills covered with woods, these melted into undulating table-lands, and those again into a narrow strip of park-like plain across which ran the track.  Flowers innumerable grew on this plain, mixed with grass of a tawny brown-green.  There were cactuses, red and yellow, scarlet and white gillias, tall spikes of yucca in full bloom, and masses of a superb white poppy with an orange-brown centre, whose blue-green foliage was prickly like that of the thistle.  Here and there on the higher uplands appeared strange rock shapes of red and pink and pale yellow, which looked like castles with towers and pinnacles, or like primitive fortifications.  Clover thought it all strangely beautiful, but Mrs. Watson found fault with it as “queer.”

“It looks unnatural, somehow,” she objected; “not a bit like the East.  Red never was a favorite color of mine.  Ellen had a magenta bonnet once, and it always worried—­But Henry liked it, so of course—­People can’t see things the same way.  Now the green hat she had winter before last was—­Don’t you think those mountains are dreadfully bright and distinct?  I don’t like such high-colored rocks.  Even the green looks red, somehow.  I like soft, hazy mountains like Blue Hill and Wachusett.  Ellen spent a summer up at Princeton once.  It was when little Cynthia had diphtheria—­she’s named after me, you know, and Henry he thought—­But I don’t like the staring kind like these; and somehow those buildings, which the conductor says are not buildings but rocks, make my flesh creep.”

“They’d be scrumptious places to repel attacks of Indians from,” observed Phil; “two or three scouts with breech-loaders up on that scarlet wall there could keep off a hundred Piutes.”

“I don’t feel that way a bit,” Clover was saying to Mrs. Watson.  “I like the color, it’s so rich; and I think the mountains are perfectly beautiful.  If St. Helen’s is like this I am going to like it, I know.”

St. Helen’s, when they reached it, proved to be very much “like this,” only more so, as Phil remarked.  The little settlement was built on a low plateau facing the mountains, and here the plain narrowed, and the beautiful range, seen through the clear atmosphere, seemed only a mile or two away, though in reality it was eight or ten.  To the east the plain widened again into great upland sweeps like the Kentish Downs, with here and there a belt of black woodland, and here and there a line of low bluffs.  Viewed from a height, with the cloud-shadows sweeping across it, it had the extent and splendor of the sea, and looked very much like it.

The town, seen from below, seemed a larger place than Clover had expected, and again she felt the creeping, nervous feeling come over her.  But before the train had fairly stopped, a brisk, active little man jumped on board, and walking into the car, began to look about him with keen, observant eyes.  After one sweeping glance, he came straight to where Clover was collecting her bags and parcels, held out his hand, and said in a pleasant voice, “I think this must be Miss Carr.”