s--this solid mountain of stone reared by the patient hands of
men--this mighty tomb of a forgotten monarch--dwarfs my cherished
mountain. For it is four hundred and eighty feet high. In still earlier
years than those I have been recalling, Holliday's Hill, in our town, was
to me the noblest work of God. It appeared to pierce the skies. It was
nearly three hundred feet high. In those days I pondered the subject
much, but I never could understand why it did not swathe its summit with
never-failing clouds, and crown its majestic brow with everlasting snows.
I had heard that such was the custom of great mountains in other parts of
the world. I remembered how I worked with another boy, at odd afternoons
stolen from study and paid for with stripes, to undermine and start from
its bed an immense boulder that rested upon the edge of that hilltop; I
remembered how, one Saturday afternoon, we gave three hours of honest
effort to the task, and saw at last that our reward was at hand; I
remembered how we sat down, then, and wiped the perspiration away, and
waited to let a picnic party get out of the way in the road below--and
then we started the boulder. It was splendid. It went crashing down the
hillside, tearing up saplings, mowing bushes down like grass, ripping and
crushing and smashing every thing in its path--eternally splintered and
scattered a wood pile at the foot of the hill, and then sprang from the
high bank clear over a dray in the road--the negro glanced up once and
dodged--and the next second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame
cooper-shop, and the coopers swarmed out like bees. Then we said it was
perfectly magnificent, and left. Because the coopers were starting up
the hill to inquire.

Still, that mountain, prodigious as it was, was nothing to the Pyramid of
Cheops. I could conjure up no comparison that would convey to my mind a
satisfactory comprehension of the magnitude of a pile of monstrous stones
that covered thirteen acres of ground and stretched upward four hundred
and eighty tiresome feet, and so I gave it up and walked down to the
Sphynx.

After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great face was so
sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of
earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any
thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image
of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verg