The expert cragsman climbs to attain acrobatic efficiency, and may aim
at nothing higher than inspired legs. Mrs. Peck climbed to establish the
equality of the sexes. Mr. and Mrs. Bullock Workman climbed in the
Himalayas with strong determination to name a mountain Mount Bullock
Workman. They did, and the mountain, which attains 19,450 feet, is none
the worse. Climbers are exceedingly human in their love of getting to
the top before fellow-climbers. Here they follow the ordinary rules for
human conduct in commerce, politics, and literature. There have been
some loud and unseemly quarrels as to honours and fame attendant on the
first successful conquest of a desirable peak. It has been generally
held that if you cannot get a mountain to yourself you can at any rate
devise a new route. But I cannot bring myself to speak harshly of such
failings. The utmost I will say is that it were better if such
enthusiasm were tempered with a little humour.

Mark Twain saw through that deadly seriousness of the pure climber. He
saw the fatuity of mere peak-hunting. It impressed him strongly even on
the Rigi-Kulm. "We climbed and climbed," he writes in _A Tramp Abroad_,
"and we kept on climbing; we reached about forty summits: there was
always another one just ahead."

But the pure climber is always a fountain of delight, even though he
does not see himself as others see him. The pages of Conway, Mummery,
Sir Claud Schuster, and Bruce abound in gems of nature-lore, ever fresh
and ever alluring. As I search for more self-revelation in my books by
mountain-lovers, I find myself observed through the window. It is only a
cow on her way to the hollow tree into which the water courses out of
the earth. But the cow brings me back to the strenuous Alpine life, and
I find myself concluding, as I replace the books on their shelves, that
I do not care why men climb so long as they climb in spirit and body.

THE BORDERLAND

This evening the blind man came up the path from the village. I was
sitting on a stump of pine listening to the merry peal of the bells of
the little village church below. He carried a milk-can, and felt his way
with a long staff, with which he tapped the stones in front of him. He
hesitated for a moment as he passed me, as if vaguely conscious of a
disturbing presence. We have been good friends, the blind man and I, and
have had many a talk on this, our common path. But to-night I sat
silent, wondering. For a mess