ng beside me, then cast a glance
around at the very unusual landscape.

We were standing on the summit of a mountain some two thousand feet high,
looking into a cup-shaped depression or crater, on the edges of which we
stood.

This low, flat-topped mountain, as I say, was grassy and quite treeless,
although it rose like a truncated sugar-cone out of a wilderness of trees
which stretched for miles below us, north, south, east, and west,
bordered on the horizon by towering blue mountains, their distant ranges
enclosing the forests as in a vast amphitheatre.

From the centre of this enormous green floor of foliage rose our grassy
hill, and it appeared to be the only irregularity which broke the level
wilderness as far as the base of the dim blue ranges encircling the
horizon.

Except for the log bungalow of Mr. Blythe on the eastern edge of this
grassy plateau, there was not a human habitation in sight, nor a trace of
man's devastating presence in the wilderness around us.

Again I looked questioningly at the girl beside me and she looked back at
me rather seriously.

"Shall we seat ourselves here in the sun?" she asked.

I nodded.

Very gravely we settled down side by side on the thick green grass.

"Now," she said, "I shall tell you why I wrote you to come out here.
Shall I?"

"By all means, Miss Blythe."

Sitting cross-legged, she gathered her ankles into her hands, settling
herself as snugly on the grass as a bird settles on its nest.

"The phenomena of nature," she said, "have always interested me
intensely, not only from the artistic angle but from the scientific point
of view.

"It is different with father. He is a painter; he cares only for the
artistic aspects of nature. Phenomena of a scientific nature bore him.
Also, you may have noticed that he is of a--a slightly impatient
disposition."

I had noticed it. He had been anything but civil to me when I arrived the
night before, after a five-hundred mile trip on a mule, from the nearest
railroad--a journey performed entirely alone and by compass, there being
no trail after the first fifty miles.

To characterize Blythe as slightly impatient was letting him down easy.
He was a selfish, bad-tempered old pig.

"Yes," I said, answering her, "I did notice a negligible trace of
impatience about your father."

She flushed.

"You see I did not inform my father that I had written to you. He doesn't
like strangers; he doesn't like scientists. I did n