A few centuries ago it was a common belief that high mountains were peopled with monsters and demons. Those demons are gone from the popular imagination; but there still exists a most unfortunate superstition, commonly believed, that altitude is harmful! Yet it has a thousand benefits for the visitor. In the heights dwell a bigness, a strangeness, a friendliness not felt in the earth's lower scenes. Altitude is ever refreshing. The dust-filled, noise-crowded air is far below. From these scenic mountain heights one commands a new world of mountainous cloud-scenery in the sky. Grand, deep, blue gorges lie open in the cloud plateaus and mountains. To the enraptured eye the shifting clouds sometimes become continents and islands, real lands where people live, landscapes upon whose sunny hills and forested mountains shadows of other clouds fall, and across whose expanding plains many winding rivers run. Often the largeness of view enables one to see vast cloud-pieces moved into place, shifted elsewhere, and others arranged. Often a number of these movements are seen at once. Here, too, the sunrise comes grandly before one, and from these mountain-rims the painted sky of evening is most intense and vivid. Cloud and color often mingle in paintings of undreamed vastness and glory. Up here one appreciates the solemnity and the splendor of the moonlight. The lonely silver moon appears a wandering planet, almost within hailing distance. You call, and a hundred cliffs call with you. You listen, but there is only the murmur of a far-off waterfall, or the receding, echoing crash of some falling cliff. Everything is in half-tone. The chasm is concealed; peaks along the sky-line are suggested; the valleys lie in subdued and mellow light; strangely, from the silken shadow folds, the pinnacles peer at the moon. Through the clean, clear air, the infinite sky becomes a near, inverted field, crowded thick with stars. This is a region worthy of multitudes of visitors, yet it has only a few. Most people do not dream of its existence. Some time throngs will come to these strange island shores in the sky as freely as now they crowd to the beach and the breakers of the sea. 3. THE WORK OF THE ICE KING With his glaciers the Ice King ground most of the soil in which now stand the forests, the grasses, and the flowers. In producing this soil he sculptured from the solid rock of the earth much of the scenery, shaped many of the flowing landscapes, and formed the excavations in which ten thousand lakes now rest in beauty. Long ice periods have had their sway, then vanished. Most of the earth appears to have been ice-covered a number of times. Then, after ages, the ice has returned. These periods appear to have alternated with others whose climatic conditions were similar to those now holding sway. The remaining glaciers, the world over, are growing smaller and smaller.