Laughing heartily at a device that spoke so little in favour of the attractive qualities of the village beaux, the Captain's daughter leaped lightly from her palfrey, as Miss Falconer had done before her; and both flourishing their whips at the same time, the liberated animals fled towards the buildings, whilst their riders lost not a moment in burying themselves from sight, by plunging into a grove, from which they continued to ramble, until they had reached a little brook, as wild and merry as themselves, that gushed over a remote corner of the park, and then hid its gleaming waters in a hollow, overgrown with forest-trees. Into this dell they made their way, following the brook, until it fell into a larger streamlet, which was indeed no other than Hawk-Hollow Run, so often mentioned before. Its banks were strown with huge masses of rock, gray and mossy, through which the waters, swollen by late rains, rushed with impetuous speed, and sometimes with great noise and fury, while its murmurs were rendered yet more impressively sonorous by the hollow reverberations of the forest. Proceeding farther, the woods, which now invested the hills on either bank, and the rocks, assumed a sterner character of wildness and grandeur. Hemlocks, and other gloomy trees, with here a rugged maple, or ghostly beech, and there a gibbous oak, springing from interstices of the rocks, seemed, with their knotted and contorted roots, to bind the fragments together; while their thick and arched boughs flung over these ruins of nature a chilly and everlasting gloom. Aloft, on the hill, the grape-vine swung its massy locks from the oak, and, in the lower depths of the ravine, for such it was, the swamp-honeysuckle shook its fragrant clusters, and green dodders rose on the stump of the decaying birch. When their path had conducted the fair wanderers beyond the immediate vicinity of the falls and rapids, these exchanged their murmurs for other sounds not less agreeable. The chattering of jays, the lonely-sounding whistle of the wood-robin, the cry of a startled dove, and now and then the sudden whir of a pheasant, starting from his lair under a fallen trunk, and bustling noisily out of sight,--the small uproar of young rabbits, bouncing out of a brier or a bush of ferns, and galloping away up the hill,--the dropping of half-eaten nuts from the paw of the retreating squirrel, and a dozen other such noises as invade the solitude of the forest, here added a double loneliness and charm to a scene long since a favourite with the maidens.