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 feathery grass almost unbearably beautiful with soft glittering dew and opal mists, out of which rose spectral elms, like the shadows of gigantic Shanghai roosters.