Mr. Gordon was an enthusiastic member of an Alpine Club, and he would sometimes take the elder and more reliable members of his family on to the fells for mountaineering practice. Many of the rocks afforded excellent training for Switzerland, without involving any special danger. These climbs were something quite new for Gipsy, and an immense delight. She was very fearless, and had a steady head, so she proved an apt pupil. Mr. Gordon would show her exactly how she must place her feet and hold herself so as to take advantage of the tiniest and narrowest ledges of rock, and she much enjoyed the excitement of accomplishing, under his guidance, what would have appeared to her impossible performances without his skilled advice. Meg and Donald had already received some training, and when Gipsy was sufficiently advanced to be able to keep up with them, Mr. Gordon allowed them all three to venture with him on a more difficult ascent, linked together with one of his Alpine ropes. Gipsy was proud indeed as she stood at the top of a jagged crag and waved her hand to Billy, who was taking a snapshot of the party from below. Poor Billy was liable to fits of dizziness since his attack of measles, and was not allowed any real climbing, so he consoled himself by following the others about with a Brownie camera, and photographing them in the most dangerous-looking positions that he could catch. "Billy must do some extra prints, and you could put them in the Magazine," suggested Meg to Gipsy. "You could write an article on 'Mountaineering in Cumberland'. It would be grand, and would make Maude Helm gnash her teeth with envy." "Perhaps she's been doing something even more exciting to astonish us with," laughed Gipsy. "I wish we could have climbed a real mountain, like Skiddaw." "Yes, there'd be some credit in that," commented Donald thoughtfully. He said no more at the moment, but a few days afterwards, when the three young people had set out on another cycling expedition, he had an enterprising plan to unfold. "I vote we ride as far as Ribblethwaite, leave our machines there, and then climb Hawes Fell," he announced. "We've started so early we'd have heaps and loads of time. It would be a thing worth doing! I didn't broach the idea at home because I knew the Mater'd be in such a state of mind, and think we were going to break our necks. It will be time enough to tell about it when we come back. Are you two game to go?" "Rather!" exclaimed both the girls rapturously. Gipsy, with her Colonial bringing up and independent American ideas, did not realize any necessity to ask permission for such an expedition. She had been in far wilder places, and considered the Cumberland fells civilized ground compared with portions of the Rockies and certain mountainous tracts of New Zealand with which she was familiar.