d the water flowing out beneath the road with an eddying
current. We were interested to discover where such a stream came from.
But the sailboat could not go under the bridge, nor even make a landing
on the shore without risk of getting aground. The next day we came back
in a rowboat to follow the clue of curiosity. The tide was high now, and
we passed with the reversed current under the bridge, almost bumping our
heads against the timbers. Emerging upon the pond, we rowed across its
shallow, weed-encumbered waters, and were introduced without ceremony to
one of the most agreeable brooks that we had ever met.

It was quite broad where it came into the pond,--a hundred feet from
side to side,--bordered with flags and rushes and feathery meadow
grasses. The real channel meandered in sweeping curves from bank to
bank, and the water, except in the swifter current, was filled with an
amazing quantity of some aquatic moss. The woods came straggling down on
either shore. There were fallen trees in the stream here and there. On
one of the points an old swamp-maple, with its decrepit branches and its
leaves already touched with the hectic colours of decay, hung far out
over the water which was undermining it, looking and leaning downward,
like an aged man who bends, half-sadly and half-willingly, towards the
grave.

But for the most part the brook lay wide open to the sky, and the tide,
rising and sinking somewhat irregularly in the pond below, made curious
alternations in its depth and in the swiftness of its current. For about
half a mile we navigated this lazy little river, and then we found
that rowing would carry us no farther, for we came to a place where the
stream issued with a livelier flood from an archway in a thicket.

This woodland portal was not more than four feet wide, and the branches
of the small trees were closely interwoven overhead. We shipped the oars
and took one of them for a paddle. Stooping down, we pushed the boat
through the archway and found ourselves in the Fairy Dell. It was a
long, narrow bower, perhaps four hundred feet from end to end, with the
brook dancing through it in a joyous, musical flow over a bed of clean
yellow sand and white pebbles. There were deep places in the curves
where you could hardly touch bottom with an oar, and shallow places
in the straight runs where the boat would barely float. Not a ray
of unbroken sunlight leaked through the green roof of this winding
corridor; and a