"Not exactly a fairy story," I replied. "For Kipling rather prefers soldiers to fairies and machines to caps of invisibility. Of course, though, he wrote the Mowgli stories." "But those are not fairy stories," interrupted Mary. "Those were about a real boy and real animals only a long way off and different from ours." "Ah-um, real? Well, perhaps; anyway, the Mowgli animals seem more real than most real animals. But this story of the sand-pit and the man sliding down into it and not being able to get out isn't impossible at all. Only the other people down in the bottom seem a little unusual." "No, there can't be any such place," said Mary positively, "and as there can't be any such place, nobody could have slid into it or been in the bottom, and so it is a fairy story. Any story that isn't so is a fairy story." "Well, that makes it easy to tell a fairy story from the other kinds, and I never knew exactly how before. But I once saw a place much like the sand-pit that Morrowbie Jukes slid into, or that Kipling says he slid into. It is on the side of a great mountain in Oregon; Mt. Hood its name is. I had climbed far above timber line, that is, above where all the trees and bushes stop because it is too cold for them to live, and there is only bare rocks and snow and ice, and had sat down to rest near a great snowbank a mile long. As I looked back down the mountain I saw a curious yellowish smoke rising in little puffs and curls. I decided to find out about this smoke on my way down; perhaps it was the beginning of a forest fire, and ought to be put out. "Well, when I got to it there was no fire; the puffs and curls were not smoke. It was a real Morrowbie Jukes pit; a great crater-like hole in the mountain, with its side so steep that the loose volcanic sand and rocks (for the whole mountain is an old volcano) kept slipping down in little avalanches from which puffs and curls of fine yellow dust kept rising and drifting lazily away. If I had made the mistake of going too close to the edge, I should certainly have started one of these avalanches and gone slipping and sliding, faster and faster, to the very bottom, a thousand feet below." "My!" said Mary; "and were there horrible people in the bottom, and crows?" "Well, really, Mary, I couldn't see on account of the dust-smoke." "Of course there weren't, probably," said Mary thoughtfully and a little wistfully. "Probably not," I had to reply regretfully. But a bright thought came to me. I remembered something. Several days before I had tramped along this hillside road near which Mary and I were lying and I had seen--well, just wait. So I said to Mary: "But I know where there is a Morrowbie Jukes pit, several of them, indeed, near here. Sha'n't we go and see them?" "Why, of course," said Mary rather severely.