tle of his loneliness. Youth hungers for a warmer, more personal
companionship than Nature, and Jack was never meant for a hermit. He
grew sullen. He would stand upon his pinnacle where he could look down
at Crystal Lake, and hate the tourists who came with lunches and their
fishing tackle, and scrambled over the rocks, and called shrilly to
one another, and laughed, and tried to invent new ways of stringing
together adjectives that seemed to express their enthusiasm. He would
make biting remarks to them which the distance prevented their
hearing, and he would wish savagely that they would fall in the lake,
or break a leg on some of the boulders.

When those with a surplus of energy started up the steep climb to the
peak, he would hurry into his little glass room, hastily part and
plaster his hair down as a precaution against possible recognition,
and lock his door and retire to a certain niche in a certain pile of
rocks, where he would be out of sight and yet be close enough to hear
the telephone, and would chew gum furiously and mutter savage things
under his breath. Much as he hungered for companionship he had a
perverse dread of meeting those exclamatory sightseers. It seemed to
Jack that they cheapened the beauty of everything they exclaimed over.

He could hear them gabble about Mount Lassen, and his lip would curl
with scorn over the weakness of their metaphors. He would grind his
teeth when they called his glass prison "cute," and wondered if
anybody really lived there. He would hear some man trying to explain
what he did not know anything at all about, and he would grin
pityingly at the ignorance of the human male, forgetting that he had
been just as ignorant, before fate picked him up and shoved him
head-foremost into a place where he had to learn.

Sometimes he was not forewarned of their visits, and would be trapped
fairly; and then he would have to answer their foolish questions and
show them what the map was for, and what the pointer was for, and
admit that it did get lonesome sometimes, and agree with them that it
was a fine view, and point out where Quincy lay, and all the rest of
it. It amazed him how every one who came said practically the same
things, asked the same questions, linked the same adjectives together.

Thus passed his second month, which might be called his pessimistic
month. But he did not take his money and go. He decided that he would
wait until he had grown a beard before he venture