nd myself standing under the willow-tree at the creek where Mabel
and I had been sitting in the afternoon. The locusts, with their
shrill metallic voices, kept whirring away in the grass, and I heard
their strange hissing sh-h-h-h-h, now growing stronger, then weakening
again, and at last stopping abruptly, as if to say: "Didn't I do
well?" But the blue-eyed violets shook their heads, and that means in
their language: "No, I don't think so at all." The water, which
descended in three successive falls into the wide, dome-shaped gorge,
seemed to me, as I stood gazing at it, to be going the wrong way,
crawling, with eager, foamy hands, up the ledges of the rock to where
I was standing.

"I must certainly be mad," thought I, "or I am getting to be a poet."

In order to rid myself of the painful illusion, which was every moment
getting more vivid, I turned my eyes away and hurried up along the
bank, while the beseeching murmur of the waters rang in my ears.

As I had ascended the clumsy wooden stairs which lead up to the second
fall, I suddenly saw two little blue lights hovering over the ground
directly in front of me.

"Will-o'-the-wisps," said I to myself. "The ground is probably
marshy."

I pounded with my cane on the ground, but, as I might have known, it
was solid rock. It was certainly very strange. I flung myself down
behind the trunk of a large hemlock. The two blue lights came hovering
directly toward me. I lifted my cane,--with a swift blow it cut the
air, and,--who can imagine my astonishment? Right in front of me I saw
a tiny man, not much bigger than a good-sized kitten, and at his side
lay a small red cap; the cap, of course, I immediately snatched up and
put it in a separate apartment in my pocket-book to make sure that I
should not lose it. One of the lights hastened away to the rocks and
vanished before I could overtake it.

There was something so very funny in the idea of finding a gnome in
the State of New York, that the strange fear which had possessed me
departed and I felt very much inclined to laugh. My blow had quite
stunned the poor little creature; he was still lying half on his back,
as if trying to raise himself on his elbows, and his large black eyes
had a terrified stare in them, and seemed to be ready to spring out of
their sockets.

"Give--give me back my cap," he gasped at last, in a strange metallic
voice, which sounded to me like the clinking of silver coins.

"Not so fast, my de