The first thing that happened was a view--a view so unexpected and so superb that I gaped at it with my mouth open. So far away, so far below, that it was as if we looked down from a balloon sailing among the clouds, two lakes were set like sapphires in a double ring of mountains, whose greens and blues and purples were dimmed by a falling veil of twilight. But through the veil, white villas gleamed on the dark hillsides, like pearls that had fallen down the mountain-side, scattering as they fell; and above, in the great pale dome of the sky, a faint silver light pulsed and quivered, like the water-lights that one sees on the wall of a room near the river. It was a search-light sent out by the moon, which was _en panne_ somewhere on its way up the horizon, Maida said; and it was she who put some of those other thoughts into my mind; but my head didn't hold any of them long at that time, because of the next thing that happened. It was not a view; it was a plunge that we took down into the view. We had come up one side of a house to get to this place on the roof, and now we began to slither down the other side, which was worse, a hundred times worse. Who was it who said, "A horse, my kingdom for a horse?" I think it must have been Richard the Third in Shakspere's play, which I went to see once in Denver, at a matinee, and Mr. Kidder scolded me afterwards for wasting my time and his money. Well, I never sympathized with any one so much in life as I sympathized with that poor man (I mean Richard, not Mr. Kidder) at this moment. I knew just how he must have felt, though of course the circumstances were somewhat different, automobiles not having been invented in those days, and he being on the stage, with a battle going on behind the scenes, where it was cheaper to produce, I suppose. But I would have given my money, and even my title, for a kind, gentle horse (the older the better) instead of a motor-car. A horse, at his worst, doesn't want to kill himself, while an automobile doesn't care what happens to it; and in these dreadful moments the only possible comfort would have been in sitting behind a thing with an instinct of self-preservation. As it was, I sat with every muscle tense and a feeling as if my hair was standing up so straight on my head that every hairpin must fall out. But what was a hairpin more or less, or even a "transformation" a little awry, to a woman about to become a corpse? I held my breath, as if to let it go meant to lose it forever, while that automobile walked down the mountain exactly as a fly walks down a long expanse of wall-paper, making a short turn for every flower in the pattern.