roughout the part of the forest in
which they were riding the whole sensation was of being roofed in and
enclosed, the roof itself being of shifting and glowing green, through
which at infrequent intervals broad streams of living light poured in,
gilding with a golden bronze the carpet of pine needles, while the
purple brown shafts of the trunks of the mighty trees formed a colonnade
illimitable.

"I reckon every kind of palace," replied the Ranger, "had some sort of a
forest for a pattern. I took an artist through the Rockies one time, an'
he showed me that every kind of buildin' that had ever been built, and
every kind of trimmin's that had been devised had started as mere copies
of trees an' leaves."

"Well," said Wilbur, his mind going back to a former exclamation of the
old woodsman, "you said this was your house."

"My house it is," said Rifle-Eye, "an' if you wait a few minutes I'll
show you the view from one of my windows."

For two hours the hunter and the boy had been riding up a sharp slope,
in places getting off their horses so as to give them the benefit of as
little unnecessary carrying as possible, constantly ascending on a great
granite spur twenty miles wide, between the Kaweah and King's River
canyons. Now, suddenly they emerged from the shadowy roof of the forest
to the bare surface of a ridge of granite.

"There's the real world," said Rifle-Eye; "it ain't goin' to hurt your
eyes to look at it, same as a city does, and your own little worryin's
soon drop off in a place like this."

He turned his horse slightly to the left, where a small group of
mountain balsam, growing in a cleft of the granite, made a spot of
shadow upon the very precipice's brink. The boy looked around for a
minute or two without speaking, then said softly: "How fine!"

Three thousand feet below, descending in bold faces of naked rugged
rock, broken here and there by ledges whereon mighty pines found
lodgment, lay the valley of King's River, a thin, winding gleam of green
with the water a silver thread so fine as only to be seen at intervals.
Here and there in the depths the bottom widened to a quarter of a mile,
and there the sunlight, falling on the young grass, gave a brilliancy of
green that was almost startling in contrast with the dark foliage of the
pines.

"What do you call that rock?" asked the boy, pointing to a tall,
pyramidal mass of granite, buttressed with rock masses but little less
noble than the central