"No, a wood thrush," said I. "He's not so Mozartian." She finished the basket and held it out proudly. "There!" she cried. "It isn't pretty, and it isn't art, but it will hold trilliums." She dusted off her skirt, and I helped her to her feet. We continued up the road, looking for trilliums, and when the first large clump appeared pushing up their dark red blooms from the leafy mould, we were both on our knees beside it, prying it up, earth and all. We soon had the basket filled, and then pressed on straight up the hillside, leaving the wood road. It was a steep scramble, over rocks where the thin, mossy soil slipped from under foot, and through tangles of mountain laurel bushes. I had frequently to help her, for she was not used to climbing, and she was breathing hard. "Let's stop," said I. "This is too hard work for you." She grasped a dead stick, like a banner staff, struck an attitude, and cried, "Excelsior!" "No, sir," she added, "I'm going to reach the top of this hill and look down the other side if I die on the summit. I know now for the first time why Annie Peck and Hudson Stuck risked their lives on Mount Something-or-other in the Andes and Mount McKinley in Alaska. It's a grand sensation. I feel the primal urge!" "Didn't you ever climb a mountain?" I queried, incredulous. "Never," she answered. "Never even a baby mountain like this. My altitude record is the top step of the Columbia University library." "You poor child!" I cried. "Why, I'll _carry_ you to the top! I never realized that you were such a hopeless urbanite." We went on more slowly, for the way was very steep now, and between helping her and holding the trilliums level I had my hands full. Laughing when we had the breath, we scrambled through the last of the shrubbery, and suddenly stood on a flat rock at the summit, with the world spread out below us like a map. I set down the basket, wiped my face, and ruefully felt of my wilted collar. The girl sank, panting, on the rock, fanned herself with her wisp of a handkerchief, and gazed out over the green Bentford valley below to the far hills in the south. The sky above us was very blue and lazy afternoon clouds were floating in it. Far up here only a few birds peeped in the scrub. We seemed strangely alone in that privacy of the peak. "'Silent upon a peak in Darien!'" I heard her say, as if to herself. Then she turned her eager face to mine. "Isn't it wonderful!" she cried. "Look, all the world like a map below you, and all this sky to see at once, and the cooling breeze and the feeling that you are above everybody! Oh, I love it! Quick, now let me see the other side!"