stretched ahead of us, and perhaps one hundred feet above us, another small ridge with a pair of haycock summits. This is the real top of Denali. From below it merges indistinguishably even on a clear day, with the crest of the horseshoe ridge, with which it is parallel, but it is not a part of it, but a culminating ridge beyond it. With keen excitement we pushed on. Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the summit of Alaska's great mountain, and he had well earned the lifelong distinction. Karstens and Tatum were close behind him; but the last man on the rope, in his enthusiasm and excitement somewhat overpassing his narrow wind margin, had almost to be hauled up the few final feet, and lost consciousness for a moment as he fell upon the floor of the little basin that occupies the summit.

The top of this mountain is a small crater-like snow-basin, about sixty or sixty-five feet long, and twenty or twenty-five feet wide, much corniced on the southwest side, and looking as if every violent storm might somewhat change its form. Of its two little snow turrets the southern one is slightly the higher.

aneroid was read at once at 13.2 inches, with its mendacious altitude-scale pointing confidently at 23,300 feet. A thousand feet of this excess is, of course, the

The reading of the instruments.

When breath was recovered and the panting was done, all the party gathered in a group and a brief prayer of thanksgiving to Almighty God was said for granting us our heart's desire, and permitting us to reach in safety the top of his great mountain. This prime duty done, we fell at once to our scientific duties. The instrument tent was set up; the mercurial barometer, taken from its leather case, and then from its wooden case, was swung upon its tripod; a rough zero was established; and it was left awhile to adjust itself to conditions before attempting a reading. It was a very great gratification to find it uninjured. The boiling-point apparatus was put together and its candle lighted. The three-inch

fault of the makers of aneroids, who persist in putting their zero at 31 inches instead of at 30; but the remainder represents the loss of the instrument since leaving the base camp. While we stayed upon the summit it dropped to 13.15, and shot us up another hundred feet into the air. Soon the water was boiling in the little tubes of the hypsometer, and the mercury column rose to 174.9° and stayed there. There is something positive and uncompromising about the boiling-point thermometer: it reaches its mark unmistakably and does not budge. The reading of the

mercurial barometer is a slower and more delicate business, but with care will give a very much closer result. It takes a good light and a good sight to be sure the ivory zero-point is exactly touching the surface of the mercury in the cistern; it takes care and precision to get the vernier arm exactly level with the top of the column. And then there are all sorts of corrections to be applied before the figures can be used, and calculations to be made from the simultaneous or nearly simultaneous reading picked out from those kindly taken for us during our whole absence by Captain Michel, the officer in command of the signal corps at Fort Gibbon, on the Yukon. The reading on the mountain top was approximately 13.6 inches.

Meanwhile Tatum had been taking a round of angles of the prominent peaks with the prismatic compass. He could not handle it with sufficient exactness with his mitts on, and he froze his fingers doing it barehanded. We had talked about a small theodolite and a plane table, but were very glad we had not burdened ourselves with them; we could not have used them-it was too bitterly cold.

-

Not until this scientific work was all done did we indulge ourselves in the wonderful prospect that stretched all around us. We were above the whole visible world. Immediately before us, in the direction in which we had climbed, lay nothing: an awful void, a sheer gulf many thousands of feet deep; and one drew instinctively back from the little parapet of the snow-basin when one had glanced below. Beyond, perhaps fifteen or twenty miles away, and three thousand feet below, with nothing but space between, was the great mass of Denali's Wife, or "Mount Foraker," as some white men misname her, majestically filling all the middle distance. It was our first glimpse of her during the whole ascent. Denali's Wife does not appear upon the horizon save from the actual summit of Denali, for she is completely hidden by his South Peak until the moment when his South Peak is surmounted. On that spot one understood why the view of the mountains from Lake Minchúmina is the grand view. There are no slopes and ridges, no buttresses, no lesser peaksnothing but that awful void from the top to nigh the bottom of the mountain. Be

yond Denali's Wife, stretched blue and vague to the southwest the wide valley of the Kuskokwim, with an end of all mountains. To the north we looked right over the North Peak to the foot-hills below, dotted with lakes and lingering snow, gleaming with water-courses. We had hoped to see the junction of the Yukon and Tanana Rivers, one hundred and fifty miles away to the northwest, as we had often, in the winter, seen the summit of Denali from that point, but the haze that almost always qualifies a clear summer day inhibited that stretch of vision. Perhaps the forest fires we found raging on the Tanana were already beginning to foul the northern sky.

It was, however, to the south and the east that the most marvellous prospect spread before us. What infinite complexity of mountains, range upon range, until gray sea merged with gray sky in the ultimate south! The near-by peaks and ridges stood out, startlingly stereoscopic-the glaciation, the river drainage, the relation of each part to the others, all revealed. There the Chulitna and Sushitna, with networks of shining tributaries, received the southern waters for Cook's Inlet; here the Kantishna and the Nenana, their forks and their affluents, gathered the northern waters for the Yukon and Bering Sea. In the distance, the snow-covered tops of a thousand peaks dwindled and dwindled away, floating in the thin air when their bases were no longer distinguishable, stretching perhaps one hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred, miles; the whole beautiful crescent curve of the Alaskan range uncovered from Denali to the coast.

Overhead the sky took a blue so deep that none of us had ever gazed upon a midday sky like it before, yet by no stretch of speech could it be called black, as has been said by some about the sky at great altitudes; it was a deep, rich, lustrous, transparent blue, as dark as a Prussian blue, but intensely blue, a hue so strange, so increasingly impressive, that to one at least it 'seemed like special news of God." "Surely 'tis half-way to eternity

To go where only size and color live," as a new poet sings. We first noticed the dark tint of the upper sky in the Grand Basin, and it deepened as we rose.

It is difficult to describe at all the scene which the top of the mountain displayed, and impossible to describe it adequately; one was not occupied with the thought of description, but wholly possessed with the breadth and glory of it-with the amazing immensity of it. Only once, perhaps, in any lifetime is such a vision granted; certainly never before had been vouchsafed to any of us. Not often in the summer-time does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the clouds from all the earth beneath. Yet we could not linger, unique though the occasion, dearly bought our privilege; the miserable limitations of the flesh gave us constant warning to depart; we grew colder and still more wretchedly cold. The thermometer stood at 7 in the full sunshine, and the north wind was keener than ever. The writer's fingers were so cold that he would not venture to withdraw them from his mitts again to change the film in the camera, and the other men were in like case; indeed our hands were by this time so numb as to render it almost impossible to operate a camera. A number of photographs had been taken, though not half we should have liked to take and there yet remained the ceremonies we had determined upon.

When the mercurial barometer had been read, the instrument tent was thrown down and abandoned, and its tent-pole used for a moment as a flagstaff, while Mr. Tatum hoisted a little United States flag he had patiently and skilfully constructed in our camps below out of two silk handkerchiefs and the cover of a sewing-bag. Then the tent-pole was put to its permanent use. It had already been carved with a suitable inscription, and now a transverse piece was securely lashed to it, and it was planted on one of the little snow turrets of the summit: the sign of Our Redemption, raised high above North America. was of light, dry birch-had been one of the rails of a basket-sled-and, though six feet high, so slender that we think it may weather many a gale; and Walter planted it so deeply and so firmly that it could not be withdrawn again. Then we gathered around it and said the Te Deum.

It

There is much else to tell, but the space is gone. The descent was full of interest; the return journey in the first flush of summer as different as possible from the journey of approach.

But even this narrative, hydraulically compressed into prescribed limits, must

not close without an earnest plea for the restoration of the native names of this mountain and its companion peak. If there be any authority or standing whatever in such a matter from the accomplishment of a first complete ascent, the writer values it only as it may give weight to this plea. To have the incomparable view of these mountains from Lake Minchúmina, as he did in 1911, is to recognize at once the simple appropriateness of the native names. There, side by side, they rise: Denali, "the Great One,' the master peak; Denali's Wife, the lesser but still enormous mass; while far below, the little peaks that stretch between like ruined arches of some Gothic cloister, are the children. Why should a man who saw them a hundred miles away, fifteen years ago, be permitted to abolish names immemorially bestowed by the original inhabitants of the land and substitute for them the names of modern politicians? The geographical societies of the world have long since set their faces against this clapping of modern names upon great mountains that lift their ancient heads amongst ancient peoples. The English geographers prefer K2, the surveyor's designation of the second highest peak of the Himalayas, which the Duke of the Abruzzi climbed in 1909, the highest point ever reached by man, to "Mount GodwinAustin," so long as there is question about the native name, despite Colonel Godwin-Austin's long connection with the Trigonometrical Survey of India; and the Continental geographers will not yet call the world's highest known peak after Sir George Everest, who first fixed its position and altitude, despite the accidental appropriateness of the name, and the assurance of the British Government that it bears no distinctive native name, until they are better satisfied of this last. Some call it Gaurisankar, and some Lupti Chang. There seems, indeed, to men of feeling, a certain ruthless arrogance in the temper that comes to an unexplored land and contemptuously ignores the native names of conspicuous natural objects, almost always significant and appropriate, and overlays them with new names that are neither the one nor the other: this, in general, without specific application to the renaming of Denali. Even great men

have not been free from this folly. The world lost one of its most stately placenames when David Livingstone, in an excess of loyalty, substituted "Victoria Falls" for "the Thundering Smoke."

If it be permitted to propose a compromise, the writer would venture the following suggestion: since the name of the martyred President is closely associated in the popular mind with this mountain, and no one would wish to detract from honor done his memory, let that name be retained for the highest peak, perhaps twenty thousand five hundred feet high, or even a little more, which the present expedition is the first to climb; let it be called the "McKinley Peak of Denali"; let the North Peak, some twenty thousand feet high, be called after the men who climbed it and set the flagstaff upon it in 1910, the "Pioneer Peak of Denali," members as they were of the Order of Alaskan Pioneers; but let the name "Denali" be retained for the whole mountain mass. As regards the companion peak, not associated with any martyred or heroic character, the plea is entered for the simple restoration of the native name, "Denali's Wife."

There yet remains of obligation a tribute to the three members of the expedition who displayed a kindly consideration for one, much their senior, who could not always measure up to their physical strength and endurance; to Karstens, indomitable, indefatigable, resourceful, the real leader of the party; to Tatum, gentle and willing, bearing his full share of every burden; to Walter, strong and agile, eager and loyal, who took to mountaineering as a duck takes to water. Nor must Johnny be forgotten, who stayed a month all by himself at the base camp, and killed caribou and fed the dogs-and would not use the sugar. To Bishop Rowe, who gave his "cordial assent" to the undertaking and the necessary leave of absence, and so rendered it possible, there is lasting obligation-one more added to a long list. To the men in the Kantishna, generous of help and hospitality, we all owe our thanks; and to those at the various mission stations who took a personal interest in the enterprise and furthered it by every means in their power there is a debt of deep gratitude.

R

IGID in immaculate linens, whiter than white samite, the admiral sat at the veranda rail. There was not a glint of expression in his hard, handsome, elderly face. His heavy jaw was set. His narrow ice-blue eyes, always so oddly light in his bronzed face, stared unblinking, past columned marble and velvet-green terrace, past the rainbow sunken gardens, past the gray cliff-rim, down to the silver bar that was the sea.

Across the veranda, sheathed like an ancient empress in her dull-hued sumptuous wrappings, his aunt sat watching him. She had laid down the knitting which her restless old hands craved. Against the rich blurred silken rug that covered her knees, that gray-yarn sock, with its homely needles, fairly stuck out of the picture, as comically astray as a dandelion in the flaunting exotic borders below. Above their naïve pastime the aunt's brown, withered hands lay locked and tense. Half-hidden in swathing lace, her brown face peered out, masked inscrutably beneath its hundred wrinkles. Her deep eyes, hooded in dark, shrivelled lids, like the eyes of a tired old hawk in the sunshine, held a dim yet steady flame. And on her face lay a faint amusement, a queer sardonic gleam.

She was eighty-seven years old. For twenty of those interminable years she had sat in her chair, bound prisoner. On her face glimmered always that calm, pitying humor of one who, aloof, waiting, has long watched the hurrying world rush by on its futile road. Although, as a flippant grandson once put it, there was precious little that had ever got by Aunt Celestia.

At length she spoke.

"So you've made up your mind. Christiny shall not marry Lawrence Gardiner. That's settled and solid. H'm.

Then why are you actin' so pouty, 'Siah?”

The admiral squirmed. When you have toiled for half a century to live down a droll old rustic name, it is a little trying to have that buried chagrin dug up once more. Worse, he felt darkly that Aunt Celestia often dragged it out, much as she dragged out her own quaint old ways of speech, purposely to heckle him a bit.

"Yes. I have made my decision. It is final."

"That's no great job for an Ipswich Stafford." His aunt fumbled with her needles. Her voice was amazingly young. It flowed with a round sweetness and depth from her lean old throat. "The Staffords were all as set as the Champney Elm. Queer, that the Stafford blood in Christiny doesn't bob up, right now, and have its say. But that child gives up to you at every turn. And she's your own granddaughter. I don't understand it."

The admiral frowned.

"Christine is a dutiful child. As to disposition, she is very like—” he halted. Then his harsh face lighted with a curious inward shining. "She is very like Marianna used to be. Marianna was always so-so gentle." That white glow vanished from his face. He sagged a little in his chair.

"Anybody'd need to be gentle to live in the same house with you, 'Siah. Or with me, either. Now, why aren't you satisfied with Lawrence?"

"It is no use to discuss my reasons, Aunt Celestia."

"I aim to discuss 'em, just the same." Aunt Celestia's needles snapped. "Lawrence is good blood. None better in New England. He's well educated; stood up head at Harvard Medical, they say. He's poor, of course. But he has eight hundred a year. So they needn't starve out