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