After I had hunted for years and years to find an explorer-poet who would take a long walk with me, and had scared every one off by the elaborateness of the proposal, the first troubadour that took me up on it almost broke my neck. It was a grand and awful time. The sensible reviews of Graham’s book have been by Walter Prichard Eaton. He does not discuss Graham’s opinions or mine. But he is very plain about the fact that we almost slid into eternity. He has tried those mountains himself, and he knows. He should write several more reviews. Stephen Graham is a lifetime friend, and I have assembled these drawings as a sign thereof. But because I have been studying Hieroglyphics in the Metropolitan Museum all this summer, and because United States Hieroglyphics of my own invention are haunting me day and night, this book is drawn, and not written. I serve notice on the critics--the verses are most incidental, merely to explain the pictures. And so, directly considered, it is much more a reply to Vernon Hill, the artist, than to Stephen. The artist of the Arcadian Calendar discerned rightly. Graham and I were in Arcady, even if it was a bit rough. Going-To-The-Sun Mountain is the very jewel of the mountains of Glacier Park. All the tourists love it, and they are right. Its name fits it. Going-To-The-Sun Mountain is our American Fujiyama, as all testify who have seen it. Obviously, an ingredient of good tea is talk on Egyptian Hieroglyphics. I had an invisible copy of an Egyptian Grammar with me and I put a leaf from it into every pot of tea. Graham did not take to the taste of it as much as he did to the pages of Bryce, but he was nobly patient, as one may say, with Egypt. The Hieroglyphics in this work are based on two more British-Egyptian grammars he sent me after he reached London. Still, they may be described as United States Hieroglyphics, and almost any Egyptologist will be willing to describe them that way, having about as much to do with Egypt as Egyptian cigarettes. The Egyptians were, briefly, a nation of Vernon Hills, who drew their “Arcadian Calendar” for four thousand years in red and black ink, or cut it in granite. _I keep thinking about them!_ A free translation of the hieroglyphic inscription at the bottom of the first picture following is: +-----------------------------------------------+ | _The beating heart of the waterfall of the | | double truth, as it appears to a scribe, | | a servant of Thoth--Thoth, who is god of | | picture-writing, photoplays and hieroglyphics,| | and an intense admirer of waterfalls._ | +-----------------------------------------------+ With this start, the reader can go straight through the book without a mistake. Now, a last word as to the seal, _The Elements of Good Tea_.