Leaving the sandy road that skirted the lower end of the valley, her course took her upwards on a trail rough as a stream-bed. It ran like a tunnel through the dark of crowding trees. Laurel and rhododendron and sourwood in a snarling tangle beneath beech and oak pressed close, as though bent upon obliterating this rough gash hacked through their fastness. Overhead the dark branches came together and shut out the sun. It was damp and shaded here and the pungent smell of the earth met her as though she were burrowing. She hurried a little up the steep path with an uncanny feeling that if she delayed too long she might be enveloped. The growing things might seize her, might twine their snaky limbs about her and force her down into this same earth from which they sprang. And the earth was cold and damp. She wanted none of it. She began to feel stifled, and broke into a panic-stricken run that took the breath out of her. Halfway up she had to stop. But she refused to sit down. She did not dare sit down. She stood in the center of the road, her head upturned, her eyes trying to pierce the green canopy above. With her hands hanging limply by her side, she breathed through her mouth because her nostrils did not furnish enough air. Had any one come upon her so, he would have thought her some wild thing fleeing from the hunters. Up she climbed and up where the dawn did not reach before high noon; up and up and up. Until she saw the end of the tunnel. Then, breaking into a run again, she never stopped until she plunged out upon the top where man had fought the trees to the death and left a summit of upland pasture open to the sky, and made rich farmland covered with blue grass dotted with grazing cattle. She felt like a diver coming up from deep, brackish water. She threw herself prone on her back for a moment, her eyes fixed on the wide expanse of clean blue sky, shot with gold up here. Below her lay the crescent-shaped valley--a picture so serenely peaceful in contrast to what she had just come through that only the psalmist could adequately express it. The lines though unspoken came to her lips: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me.” All her life she had uttered these words without any appreciation save of their rhythmic beauty. Now they were like a voice from the sky itself. They quenched, like cold water, the fever in her veins. They lent a significance to that beautiful valley below which she was never to forget. They made of it, for all time, a resting-place.