t
is an outrage on nature and art that travelers should ever be whisked
past Overlook without a good chance to see what we're looking at. That's
why I wrote to the president of the company a month ago, telling him how
a slight deviation from the surveyed line would enable passengers to get
what's in our view now. He asked how much the line would be lengthened
by my plan. 'A hundred yards,' I answered. And I submitted a map,
showing how the tracks, after coming out from the tunnel, might make a
small detour to this very spot, instead of going behind a mass of rocks
that will completely hide this----" and a comprehensive gesture of one
arm followed his sweep of vision.

Places that get their names on impulse are apt to have appropriate ones.
Camps of railway makers in a hitherto unbroken country are not often
miscalled. An ensuing town on the same site may be unmeaningly named as
a permanency, but the inspirations that afford transient nomenclature
are usually descriptive. It was so in the case of Overlook. The railway
tunneled through the mountain, and emerged at a height of 1000 feet
above a wide valley. Mary had daily, and all day long, sat overlooking
the prospect. It had astonished and enchanted her at first, but
familiarity had blunted the keenness of her appreciation. As shown to
her anew, it was like a fresh disclosure. Gerald Heath stood holding
aside the boughs, which otherwise obscured a part of the landscape, and
seemed like an exhibitor of some wondrously big and beautiful picture.
Miles away were hills rising behind one another, until they left only a
little of sky to be framed by the eave of the shed, as seen by the
telegrapher. The diversities of a wilderness, distantly strong in rugged
forms, but indistinct in details, became gradually definite and
particular as they came nearer, and were suggestive of conscious design,
where they edged a broken, tumultuous river. Overlook was shelved so
high on a precipitous mountain that, from Mary's point of vision, the
foreground almost directly underneath passed out of her sight, and it
was as though the spectator stood on a platform before a painted canvas,
too spacious for exhibition in an ordinary manner. But in this work the
shapes and the colors, the grandeur and the beauty were inconceivably
beyond human copying.

Gerald Heath appeared to feel, however, that if he was not the painter
of this enormous landscape, he at least had the proprietary interest of
a di