SYCE'S ADVENTURE 299 



could fancy no place so fitting for the great Teacher as the 

 bright hill-top : 



" For with the lapse of years old fervours fail, 

 And old beliefs and hopes and longings fade away. 

 Oh! for an hour on the bright hill-tops with that glorious voice . . ." 



If we could only believe and live out our belief, that we 

 men, in spite of all separating differences, are in our deepest, 

 truest things alike; that all of us lock in our hearts the 

 same hopes and doubts that cheer us and cast us down, we 

 would then be more frank one with the other, and would 

 surely oftener succeed in what we really want to do; that is, 

 lend a helping hand, say a cheering word to our fellow 

 travellers marching, sometimes stumbling, along the high 

 hard roadway of life. How many of us in our heart of hearts 

 have thanked William Wordsworth no less for the honesty 

 than the beauty of his verse. So if I have lingered too long, 

 before the mountain I have learned to love, it must at least 

 be admitted I have some precedent for my loitering and 

 that I wait in good company. 



For several weeks I have looked on Kenia; seen her 

 looming near and high as the gray dawn came on. Watched 

 for the first flush of morning to strike her ice and snow; and 

 all unexpectedly in the late evening, have watched as, 

 suddenly unwinding the cloudy wrappings that all day long 

 had completely hidden her, she shone forth, baring her 

 mighty brows, rosy, glorious in the last light of the sun, 

 for us already set. 



I have in mind the manifold beauties of our own moun- 

 tain chains; Yosemite, before the winter snows have melted 

 from the peaks and tablelands. The Shoshone crags, wild 

 exceedingly: you can at one place I know count two hundred 

 separate summits, all snow crowned. The lonely solitudes 

 of the Granite range, that few have penetrated, where 

 in midsummer great ice islands still float in but partially 

 thawed lakes, and where snow fields of many miles' extent 



