So soft and safe amid the spheres--
Could we but see and hear so far--
Is made of thunder, too, and tears._




CHAPTER XVII

CONTAINING VALUABLE STATISTICS


And the morning was like unto the evening. Summer was still to be our
companion, and, as the evening of our coming to Cohocton had been the
most dreamlike of all the ends of our walking days--had, so to say, been
most evening-spiritual, so the morning of our Cohocton seemed most
morning-spiritual of all our mornings, most filled with strange hope and
thrill and glitter. We were afoot earlier than usual. The sun had hardly
risen, and the shining mists still wreathed the great hill which
overhangs the village. We were for calling it a mountain, but we were
told that it lacked fifty feet of being a mountain. You are not a
mountain till you grow to a thousand feet. Our mountain was only some
nine hundred and fifty feet. Therefore, it was only entitled to be called
a hill. I love information--don't you, dear reader?--though, to us
humble walking delegates of the ideal, it was all one. But I know for
certain that it was a lane of young maples which made our avenue of
light-hearted departure out of the village, though I cannot be sure of
the names of all the trees of the thick woods which clothed the hillside
beneath which our road lay, a huge endless hillside all dripping and
sparkling, and alive with little rills, facing a broad plain, a sea of