She, whose spiritual needs were being so thoroughly satisfied, for once, was not in the least materially hungry, and, if she became so, would eat roots like other heroines before her. There must be plenty of things edible in this luxuriance of undergrowth in which she was wandering, where all possible forms of vegetable life seemed literally crushing one another out in their mutual excess and exuberance. There were great, flame-coloured fungi glistering from the boles of enormous beech trees whose leaves grew so closely that, although the hot July sun, she knew, was beating outside on their thick panoply, she yet was able to walk at ease in their cool penumbra. Beds of magnificent nettles, and the broad, green discs of what the children call “fairy tables” filled all the hollows of the dells. Here and there, tall-stemmed, pale lilac campanulas rose and lightened the gloom through which the sunbeams pierced in vivid streaks, like golden spears probing the dimness. The low bank of red sandstone that formed the background to the grove showed at intervals like a rosy wall, but on the opposite side the character of the country had changed; there were no more meadows; she was hemmed in; the granite cliff rose sheer, clothed with trees that found but a scanty purchase in the rocky clefts to which they seemed to cling frantically with hoary roots upturned, detached almost, the relative positions of roots and boughs nearly reversed. The call of the wood-pigeons that nested in these coverts--she sentimentally called them doves--came to her across the river that flowed along beside her, red like wine, over shiny stones and deep, rocky crevices that modified the sound of its ripples into a thousand musical varieties. She was in an ecstasy. To herself she murmured, softly, Rossetti’s lines about the “Banks in Willow Wood”: “With woodspurge wan, with bloodwort burning red”-- and was in a mood to utter invocations to the “spotted snakes, with double tongue,” that must be lurking in those dark beds of hoary nettles. She was a well-read woman, and had her poets at her fingers’ ends, for use, not ornament, since she so frequently quoted them. She walked on, imagining that she heard the interesting rustle of wild animals that her footsteps affrighted, and presently, out of pure caprice, left the path and began to clamber up the bank, in the vague aspiration after blackberries in July. The dell began to widen out, and the river, which up to that time had flowed in a more or less massive and self-contained flood, began to spread and lose itself in shallows. The noise of many counter-ripples, of the suction of large masses of water pouring into crevices and over many different levels, grew very loud. She stood, as it were, at the end of a funnel, looking towards a sunlit clearing where the trees grew more thinly and more interspersedly, and the cliffs stood away on either side.