was not used to be so sick a thing, however
mild--but, in great part, was blown from far-off forests, for weeks on
fire, in Vermont; so that no wonder the sky was ominous as Hecate's
cauldron--and two sportsmen, crossing a red stubble buck-wheat field,
seemed guilty Macbeth and foreboding Banquo; and the hermit-sun, hutted
in an Adullum cave, well towards the south, according to his season, did
little else but, by indirect reflection of narrow rays shot down a
Simplon pass among the clouds, just steadily paint one small, round,
strawberry mole upon the wan cheek of northwestern hills. Signal as a
candle. One spot of radiance, where all else was shade.

Fairies there, thought I; some haunted ring where fairies dance.

Time passed; and the following May, after a gentle shower upon the
mountains--a little shower islanded in misty seas of sunshine; such a
distant shower--and sometimes two, and three, and four of them, all
visible together in different parts--as I love to watch from the
piazza, instead of thunder storms, as I used to, which wrap old
Greylock, like a Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing
among scathed hemlocks there; after, I say, that, gentle shower, I saw a
rainbow, resting its further end just where, in autumn, I had marked the
mole. Fairies there, thought I; remembering that rainbows bring out the
blooms, and that, if one can but get to the rainbow's end, his fortune
is made in a bag of gold. Yon rainbow's end, would I were there, thought
I. And none the less I wished it, for now first noticing what seemed
some sort of glen, or grotto, in the mountain side; at least, whatever
it was, viewed through the rainbow's medium, it glowed like the Potosi
mine. But a work-a-day neighbor said, no doubt it was but some old
barn--an abandoned one, its broadside beaten in, the acclivity its
background. But I, though I had never been there, I knew better.

A few days after, a cheery sunrise kindled a golden sparkle in the same
spot as before. The sparkle was of that vividness, it seemed as if it
could only come from glass. The building, then--if building, after all,
it was--could, at least, not be a barn, much less an abandoned one;
stale hay ten years musting in it. No; if aught built by mortal, it must
be a cottage; perhaps long vacant and dismantled, but this very spring
magically fitted up and glazed.

Again, one noon, in the same direction, I marked, over dimmed tops of
terraced foliage, a broader