These morning expeditions in the mountains are indescribably exhilarating. At every step you breathe a fresher atmosphere and feel a new access of life, vigour and enjoyment. Sweet little gushes of pure cold air meet you at the turnings of the road and bid you welcome. The vegetation around is rich, profuse and--long-forgotten charm--sparkling everywhere with dew. There has been a thunderstorm in the night, and the mountain-sides are streaming still: little cataracts come tumbling clamorously beside your path; below you a muddy stream is foaming and brawling and collecting the tribute of a hundred torrents to swell the great flood that spreads away miles wide in the plain, and glitters in the far horizon. As the path rises you get a wider view, and presently the great champaign lies below, flashing and blinking in the morning's rays. Miles away overhead a tiny white thread shows the road along which in an hour or two you will be travelling, and a little speck at the summit, the cottage where your mid-day rest will be. Behind you lie heat, monotony, fatigue, hot hours in sweltering courts, weary strugglings through the prose of officialdom, the tiresome warfare against sun and dust; around you and above, it is all enchanted ground; the air is full of pleasant sounds and sweet invisible influences; the genius of the woods breathes poetry about the scene, the mountain nymphs are dancing on yonder crest, and Puck and Oberon and Titania haunting in each delicious nook. Well may the first Englishman, who toiled panting hitherwards from the reeking realms below, have fancied himself half-way to Paradise and have christened the crowning heights Elysium. Maud, at any rate, leaving the rest of the party behind, rode forward in an ecstasy of enjoyment. * * * * * They spent the hot hours of the day in a sweet resting-place. Years afterwards the calmness of that pleasant day used to live in Maud's recollection; and though many scenes of bustle and trouble and fevered excitement had come between herself and it, yet the very thought of it used to soothe her. 'I have you, dear,' she would say to Felicia, 'in my mind's picture-gallery, set in a dozen different frames--scenes in which you played a part--and this is my favourite. I love you best of all in this; it cools and gladdens me to look at it.'