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And Damaris, in fact, did nothing of the sort, being very fully occupied with her own concerns at present. Half a mile ahead, pastel-tinted, green-shuttered houses a village of a single straggling street detached themselves in broken perspective from the purple of pine-crowned cliff and headland beyond. Behind them the western sky began to grow golden with the approach of sunset.

At any rate, it was a most delightful musical entertainment of which I fancy myself the discoverer, and I hope it was the dryad. He who reads may believe as he will. Beyond the pines I found the wind in the woods. Among the bare limbs of the deciduous growth the storm wailed and clattered its way on about my head as I felt out the path with my feet for a half mile to a pine-crowned hilltop.

The shock and jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent, the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.

The lad Seth was late for dinner that day, and when he entered the house Bess turned from her dish-washing to give him a sharp, troubled look, "Art tha' ill again?" she asked. "Nay," he answered, "nobbut a bit tired an heavy-loike." He sat down upon the door-step with wearily-clasped hands, and eyes wandering toward the mountain, whose pine-crowned summit towered above him.

What I could see appeared to be nothing but the continuation of the glacier's path, scored out by the cloud-burst, and swept as smooth as a floor. Sitting there, my heart beating heavily with excitement, I looked through the evening glow at the endless, pine-crowned mountain-wall with its giant's gateway pierced for me!

But it had another meaning to us now, and the first night as we sat at dinner in front of the tent and watched the afterglow fade from the sky behind the pine-crowned ridge of the Bogdo-ol, we thanked God that for five long months we could leave the twentieth century with its roar and rush, and live as the Mongols live; we knew that the days of discouragement had ended and that we could learn the secrets of the desert life which are yielded up to but a chosen few.

Its forested shores go curving in and out around many an emerald bay and pine-crowned promontory, and its waters are everywhere as keenly pure as any to be found among the highest mountains. Donner Lake, rendered memorable by the terrible fate of the Donner party, is about three miles long, and lies about ten miles to the north of Tahoe, at the head of one of the tributaries of the Truckee.

Here and there little secluded coves push in from the sea, around which lie soft tracts of green meadow-land, hemmed in and guarded by rocky pine-crowned ridges. In such sheltered spots may be seen neat white houses, nestling like sheltered doves in the beautiful solitude.

It was nearly evening when, after having penetrated a thick pine forest, we at length stood on its borders. Few lake-scenes could be more beautiful than that now spread out before us. The southern shore was indented with long narrow inlets, while pine-crowned promontories stretched from the base of the hills on every side.

Who that has stood by the blue waters of Middle Bay, engirdled as it is by soft slopes of green farming land, interchanged here and there with heavy billows of forest-trees, or rocky, pine-crowned promontories, has not felt that sense of seclusion and solitude which is so delightful? And then what a wonder!