he chides it because it has
caught cold by wading in the spring brooks.

***

On one of the broad, wooded mountains lay a dark tarn. It was
square, with as straight shores and as sharp corners as if it had
been cut by the hand of man. On three sides it was surrounded by
steep cliffs, on which pines clung with roots as thick as a man's
arm. Down by the pool, where the earth had been gradually washed
away, their roots stood up out of the water, bare and crooked and
wonderfully twisted about one another. It was like an infinite
number of serpents which had wanted all at the same time to crawl
up out of the pool but had got entangled in one another and been
held fast. Or it was like a mass of blackened skeletons of drowned
giants which the pool wanted to throw up on the land. Arms and legs
writhed about one another, the long fingers dug deep into the very
cliff to get a hold, the mighty ribs formed arches, which held up
primeval trees. It had happened, however, that the iron arms, the
steel-like fingers with which the pines held themselves fast, had
given way, and a pine had been borne by a mighty north wind from
the top of the cliff down into the pool. It had burrowed deep down
into the muddy bottom with its top and now stood there. The smaller
fish had a good place of refuge among its branches, but the roots
stuck up above the water like a many-armed monster and contributed
to make the pool awful and terrifying.

On the tarn's fourth side the cliff sank down. There a little
foaming stream carried away its waters. Before this stream could
find the only possible way, it had tried to get out between stones
and tufts, and had by so doing made a little world of islands, some
no bigger than a little hillock, others covered with trees.

Here where the encircling cliffs did not shut out all the sun,
leafy trees flourished. Here stood thirsty, gray-green alders and
smooth-leaved willows. The birch-tree grew there as it does
everywhere where it is trying to crowd out the pine woods, and the
wild cherry and the mountain ash, those two which edge the forest
pastures, filling them with fragrance and adorning them with
beauty. Here at the outlet there was a forest of reeds as high as a
man, which made the sunlight fall green on the water just as it
falls on the moss in the real forest. Among the reeds there were
open places; small, round pools, and water-lilies were floating
there. The tall stalks looked down with mild seri