"I'll wait till we're among the Big Trees," he said to himself. "They're
great, as great as the mountains in their way, but they're friendly and
kind, as if they might help. That's where I'll risk it all: in the
Mariposa Forest, the place I like better than any other in the world. So
whatever happens, we shall have seen the best there is together, and all
that will be mine to remember, if I lose everything else."
The next day was a day of forest and flowers.
They were not travelling this time in an ordinary stage, for Nick had
secured a buckboard for themselves alone, with a driver who knew the
country, with its beauties and legends, as well as he knew his big
muscular gray horses.
Those never-ending, cathedral-forests of America's. National Park were
wilder than any that Angela had imagined. She hardly believed that the
great redwoods which she was to see to-morrow could be grander than these
immense fluted columns of cedar and pine. In the arms of the biggest and
most virile trees, many slender sapling shapes, storm-broken, or tired of
facing life alone, lay helplessly. But the driver's heart was proof
against a romantic view of this situation, as sketched by Angela. "It
oughtn't to be allowed," he said, sternly.
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