m, the petals white, veined with pink.

The low, stunted growth of spruce and fir which clothes the top of
Slide has been cut away over a small space on the highest point,
laying open the view on nearly all sides. Here we sat down and
enjoyed our triumph. We saw the world as the hawk or the balloonist
sees it when he is three thousand feet in the air. How soft and
flowing all the outlines of the hills and mountains beneath us
looked! The forests dropped down and undulated away over them,
covering them like a carpet. To the east we looked over the near-by
Wittenberg range to the Hudson and beyond; to the south,
Peak-o'-Moose, with its sharp crest, and Table Mountain, with its
long level top, were the two conspicuous objects; in the west, Mt.
Graham and Double Top, about three thousand eight hundred feet each,
arrested the eye; while in our front to the north we looked over the
top of Panther Mountain to the multitudinous peaks of the northern
Catskills. All was mountain and forest on every hand. Civilization
seemed to have done little more than to have scratched this rough,
shaggy surface of the earth here and there. In any such view, the
wild, the aboriginal, the geographical greatly predominate. The
works of man dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe
come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed; the valley of the
Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth's surface. You discover with
a feeling of surprise that the great thing is the earth itself,
which stretches away on every hand so far beyond your ken.

The Arabs believe that the mountains steady the earth and hold it
together; but they have only to get on the top of a high one to see
how insignificant mountains are, and how adequate the earth looks to
get along without them. To the imaginative Oriental people,
mountains seemed to mean much more than they do to us. They were
sacred; they were the abodes of their divinities. They offered their
sacrifices upon them. In the Bible, mountains are used as a symbol
of that which is great and holy. Jerusalem is spoken of as a holy
mountain. The Syrians were beaten by the Children of Israel because,
said they, "their gods are gods of the hills; therefore were they
stronger than we." It was on Mount Horeb that God appeared to Moses
in the burning bush, and on Sinai that He delivered to him the law.
Josephus says that the Hebrew shepherds never pasture their flocks
on Sinai, believing it to be the abode of Jehov