“Well, I’m glad to come back alive, anyway,” said Jeff, with a joviality new to Westover.  “I tell you, there a’n’t many places finer than old Lion’s Head, after all.  Don’t you think so, Mr. Westover?  I want to get the daylight on it, but it does well by moonlight, even.”  He looked round at the tall girl, who had been lingering to hear the talk of planchette; at the backward tilt he gave his head, to get her in range, she frowned as if she felt his words a betrayal, and slipped out of the room; the boy had already gone, and was making himself heard in the low room overhead.

“There’s a lot of folks here this summer, mother says,” he appealed from the check he had got to Jackson.  “Every room taken for the whole month, she says.”

“We’ve been pretty full all July, too,” said Jackson, blankly.

“Well, it’s a great business; and I’ve picked up a lot of hints over there.  We’re not so smart as we think we are.  The Swiss can teach us a thing or two.  They know how to keep a hotel.”

“Go to Switzerland?” asked Whitwell.

“I slipped over into the edge of it.”

“I want to know!  Well, now them Alps, now—­they so much bigger ’n the White Hills, after all?”

“Well, I don’t know about all of ’em,” said Jeff.  “There may be some that would compare with our hills, but I should say that you could take Mount Washington up and set it in the lap of almost any one of the Alps I saw, and it would look like a baby on its mother’s knee.”

“I want to know!” said Whitwell again.  His tone expressed disappointment, but impartiality; he would do justice to foreign superiority if he must.  “And about the ocean.  What about waves runnin? mountains high?”

“Well, we didn’t have it very rough.  But I don’t believe I saw any waves much higher than Lion’s Head.”  Jeff laughed to find Whitwell taking him seriously.  “Won’t that satisfy you?”

“Oh, it satisfies me.  Truth always does.  But, now, about London.  You didn’t seem to say so much about London in your letters, now.  Is it so big as they let on?  Big—­that is, to the naked eye, as you may say?”

“There a’n’t any one place where you can get a complete bird’s-eye view of it,” said Jeff, “and two-thirds of it would be hid in smoke, anyway.  You’ve got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more than a comfortable meal.”

Whitwell laughed for joy in the bold figure.

“I’ll tell you.  When you’ve landed and crossed up from Liverpool, and struck London, you feel as if you’d gone to sea again.  It’s an ocean—­ a whole Atlantic of houses.”

“That’s right!” crowed Whitwell.  “That’s the way I thought it was.  Growin’ any?”

Jeff hesitated.  “It grows in the night.  You’ve heard about Chicago growing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, London grows a whole Chicago every night.”