“I hope,” Tish interrupted him, “that you do not think we are going to ride astride!”

“I’m darned sure of it.”

That was Charlie Sands’s way of talking.  He does not mean to be rude, and he is really a young man of splendid character.  But, as Tish says, contact with the world, although it has not spoiled him, has roughened his speech.

“You see,” he explained, “there are places out there where the horses have to climb like goats.  It’s only fair to them to distribute your weight equally.  A side saddle is likely to turn and drop you a mile or two down a crack.”

Aggie went rather white and sneezed violently.

But Tish looked thoughtful.  “It sounds reasonable,” she said.  “I’ve felt for along time that I’d be glad to discard skirts.  Skirts,” she said, “are badge of servitude, survivals of the harem, reminders of a time when nothing was expected of women but parasitic leisure.”

I tried to tell her that she was wrong about the skirts.  Miss MacGillicuddy, our missionary in India, had certainly said that the women in harems wore bloomers.  But Tish left the room abruptly, returning shortly after with a volume of the encyclopaedia, and looked up the Rocky Mountains.

I remember it said that the highest ranges were, as compared with the size and shape of the earth, only as the corrugations on the skin of an orange.  Either the man who wrote that had never seen an orange or he had never seen the Rocky Mountains.  Orange, indeed!  If he had said the upper end of a pineapple it would have been more like it.  I wish the man who wrote it would go to Glacier Park.  I am not a vindictive woman, but I know one or two places where I would like to place him and make him swallow that orange.  I’d like to see him on a horse, on the brink of a canon a mile deep, and have his horse reach over the edge for a stray plant or two, or standing in a cloud up to his waist, so that, as Aggie so plaintively observed, “The lower half of one is in a snowstorm while the upper part is getting sunburned.”

For we went.  Oh, yes, we went.  It is not the encyclopaedia’s fault that we came back.  But now that we are home, and nothing wrong except a touch of lumbago that Tish got from sleeping on the ground, and, of course, Aggie’s unfortunate experience with her teeth, I look back on our various adventures with pleasure.  I even contemplate a return next year, although Aggie says she will die first.  But even that is not to be taken as final.  The last time I went to see her, she had bought a revolver from the janitor and was taking lessons in loading it.

The Ostermaiers went also.  Not with us, however.  The congregation made up a purse for the purpose, and Tish and Aggie and I went further, and purchased a cigar-case for Mr. Ostermaier and a quantity of cigars.  Smoking is the good man’s only weakness.

I must say, however, that it is absurd to hear Mrs. Ostermaier boasting of the trip.  To hear her talk, one would think they had done the whole thing, instead of sitting in an automobile and looking up at the mountains.  I shall never forget the day they were in a car passing along a road, and we crossed unexpectedly ahead of them and went on straight up the side of a mountain.