"Now are we safe," cried Miss Falconer, with exultation; "for no one having seen us take this course, our admirers, were they even spirited enough to pursue, would think of twenty more reasonable places to seek us in than this. But let us make assurance doubly sure. Don't tell me you are tired--what business has a country-wench to be tired? We will go down to the sycamore, and then rest us awhile, till the sun peeps red in the hollow. I will bring you to your confession; for, having failed in my precious designs upon the old witch there, (may Monsieur Red-jacket sleep harder to-night than he ever did before, for a Marplot!) and my curiosity being so much the more inflammable, I am resolved to learn what I can, and that without ceremony. So come along, Kate,-- 'Kate of my consolation, 'Kate of Kate-hall, my super-dainty Kate,' as the bear of Verona said of your amiable namesake; all that you have now to do, is to be, like her, 'Kate conformable.'" Thus whiling away the fatigue of climbing over rocks and creeping through thickets, with a gay rattle of discourse, the black-eyed maiden dragged her companion along, until they reached a place where the stream was contracted by the projection, on the one bank, of a huge mass of slaty rock, and, on the other, by the protrusion of the roots of a gigantic plane-tree,--the sycamore, or buttonwood, of vulgar speech. Above them, and beyond the crag, the channel of the rivulet widened into a pool; and there was a plot of green turf betwixt the water and the hill, on the farther bank, whereon fairies, if such had ever made their way to the World of Twilight, might have loved to gambol under the light of the moon. A hill shut up the glen at its upper extremity; and it was hemmed in, on the left, by the rocky and wooded declivity, over which the maidens had already passed. Over this, and just behind a black rounded shoulder that it thrust into the glen, a broad ray from the evening sun shot across the stream, and fell, in a rich yellow flood, over the vacant plot. There was something almost Arcadian in this little solitude; and if, instead of two well-bred maidens perched upon the roots of the sycamore, on seats chosen with a due regard to the claims of their dresses, there had been a batch of country girls romping in the water, a passing Actæon might have dreamed of the piny Gargaphy, its running well,--_fons tenui perlucidus unda_,--and the bright creatures of the mythic day, that once animated the waters of that solitary grot. But the fairy and the wood-nymph are alike unknown in America. Poetic illusion has not yet consecrated her glens and fountains; her forests nod in uninvaded gloom, her rivers roll in unsanctified silence, and even her ridgy mountains lift up their blue tops in unphantomed solitude. Association sleeps, or it reverts only to the vague mysteries of speculation. Perhaps