biscuits, light as Aurora’s cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her table, and decided to postpone our departure one more day. And then we wandered out to take our morning glance at what we called “our view”; and it seemed to us as if Tabb and Hoogencamp, and Halkit and the Biggles could not drive us away in a year.

I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited the Bredes to walk with us to “our view.” The Hoogencamp-Biggle Tabb-Halkit contingent never stirred off Jacobus’s verandah; but we both felt that the Bredes would not profane that sacred scene. We strolled slowly across the fields, passed through the little belt of wood, and as I heard Mrs. Brede’s little cry of startled rapture, I motioned to Brede to look up.

“By Jove!” he cried; “heavenly!”

We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue, lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great silent sea of sunlit green. For silent it was to us, standing in the silence of a high place—silent with a Sunday stillness that made us listen, without taking thought, for the sound of bells coming up from the spires that rose above the tree-tops—the tree-tops that lay as far beneath us as the light clouds were above us that dropped great shadows upon our heads and faint specks of shade upon the broad sweep of land at the mountain’s foot.

“And so that is your view?” asked Mrs. Brede, after a moment; “You are very generous to make it ours too.”

Then we lay down on the grass; and Brede began to talk in a gentle voice, as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a canoe, in his earlier days, he said, and he knew every river and creek in that vast stretch of landscape. He found his landmarks, and pointed out to us where the Passaic and the Hackensack flowed, invisible to us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were but combings of the green waves upon which we looked down, and yet on the further side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages—a little world of country life, lying unseen under our eyes.

“A good deal like looking at humanity,” he said; “there is such a thing as getting so far above our fellow- men that we see only one side of them.”

Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chatter and gossip of the Tabb and the Hoogencamp—than the Major’s dissertations upon his everlasting circulars! My wife and I exchanged glances.

“Now, when I went up the Matterhorn—” Mr. Brede began.

“Why, dear,” interrupted his wife; “I didn’t know you ever went up the Matterhorn.”

“It—it was five years ago,” said Mr. Brede hurriedly; “I—I didn’t tell you—when I was on the other side, you know—it was rather dangerous—well, as I was saying—it looked—oh, it didn’t look at all like this.”

A cloud floated overhead, throwing its great shadow over the field where we lay. The shadow passed over the mountain’s brow, and reappeared far below, a rapidly decreasing blot; flying east-ward over the golden green. My wife and I exchanged glances once more. Somehow the shadow lingered over us all. As we went home, the Bredes went side by side along the narrow path, and my wife and I walked together.

“Should you think,” she asked me, “that a man would climb the Matterhorn the very first year he was married?”