Both the little girls sprang forward and looked abroad breathlessly, like birds at the open door of a cage in which they had been imprisoned. The Judge watched them with smiling satisfaction as they cast puzzled glances from side to side, meeting nothing but shoulders and angles and ridges of the mountains heaving over each other in huge green waves that seemed to be endless, and to crowd close to each other, though many a lovely valley lay between, little dreamed of by the wondering children. "Well, then, tell me how you expect to get out, little ones?" repeated the Judge. "Sure enough, how?" repeated Isabel, drawing back, and looking from the Judge to Mrs. Farnham. But Mary was still gazing abroad. Her eyes wandered from hill to hill, and grew more and more luminous as each new beauty broke upon her. At last she drew back with a deep breath, and the loveliest of human smiles upon her face. "Indeed, sir, indeed I shouldn't care if we never did get out, the river would be company enough." "Yes, company enough," replied the Judge, smiling. "But would it feed us when we are hungry?" "It don't seem as if I ever should be hungry here," replied the child. "But I am hungry now," replied Enoch Sharp; "and so is Mrs. Farnham, I dare say!" "No," replied that lady, who prided herself on a delicate appetite, "I never am hungry; dew and flowers, my friends used to say, were intended to support sensitive nerves like mine." "Very likely," thought Enoch Sharp; "I am certain no human being could support them," but he drowned this ungallant thought in a loud call for Ralph to drive on. The horses made a leap forward, swept round a huge rock that concealed the highway where it curved suddenly with a bend of the river, and before them lay one of the most beautiful mountain villages you ever beheld. The horses knew their old home. Away they went sweeping up the broad winding sheet between double columns of young maple trees, through which the white houses gleamed tranquilly and dream-like on the eyes of those city children. CHAPTER XXVI A VALLEY IN THE MOUNTAINS. High up among the emerald breasted hills, There lay a village, cradled in their green. Surrounded by such loveliness as thrills The poetry within us--and the sheen Of a broad river kissed the mountain's foot Where stately hemlocks found primeval root. Judge Sharp's carriage stopped in front of a noble mansion near the centre of the village. I think it must have been one of the oldest houses in the place. But modern improvements had so transfigured and beautified it, that it bore the aspect of a noble suburban villa, rather than a mountain residence. The roof lifted in a pointed gable, and supported by brackets, shot several feet over the front, resting on a row of tall, slender columns which formed a noble portico along the entire front.