[Transcriber's Note: Bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and italic text is surrounded by _underscores_.] Between the Larch-woods and the Weir By FLORA KLICKMANN Editor of “The Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine” Author of “The Flower-Patch among the Hills” [Illustration] NEW YORK Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers Dedicated to the Memory of Arthur, Bertie, and Wilfrid—my Brothers Move along these shades In gentleness of heart; . . . . . . for there is a spirit in the woods. I Preamble ON one of the high hills that border the river Wye, there stands an old cottage, perched on an outstanding bluff, with apparently no way of approach save by airship. Looking up at it from the river bank by the weir (the self-same weir beside which Wordsworth sat when he wrote his famous “Lines”), you can only glimpse the chimneys and angles of the roof, so buried is the house in the trees that clothe the hill-slopes to a height of nearly nine hundred feet. The cottage is not quite at the top of the hill; behind it rise still more woods, making the steeps in early spring a mist of purple and brown and soft grey bursting buds, followed by pale shimmering green, with frequent splashes of white when the hundreds of wild cherries break into bloom. A darker green sweeps over all with the oncoming of summer, which in turn becomes crimson, lemon, rust-gold, bronze-green, copper and orange in the autumn, where coppices of birch and oak, ash and beech, wild cherry, crab apple, yew and hazel intermingle with the stately ranks of the larch-woods that revel in the heights, and give the hills a jagged edge against the sky. The casual tourist who merely “does” the Wye Valley—which invariably means scorching along the one good road the district possesses, skirting the foot of the hills—has a clever knack of entirely missing, as a rule, the larch-woods and the weir. Obviously, when any self-respecting motorist finds himself on a fine road where he can trundle along at thirty miles an hour (at the least), with seldom any official let or hindrance, he naturally shows his friends what his car can do! And in such circumstances it is necessary to keep the eyes glued to the half-mile straight ahead. Even though the natives are too virtuous to need the upkeep of many policemen, stray cattle and slow-dragging timber-wains can be quite as upsetting as a constable; while a landslide down the hills may precipitate huge trees across the road any day of the year, and prove an equal hindrance.