it as scenery, as she might have looked at a picture
in a gallery. And in the contagion of Evelyn's outspoken enthusiasm she
was no longer afraid to give timid expression to the latent poetry in
her own soul. And daring to express this, she seemed to herself for the
first time to realize vividly the nobility and grace of the landscape.
And yet there was a difference in the appreciation of the two. More
widely read and traveled, Evelyn's imagination took a wider range of
comparison and of admiration, she was appealed to by the large features
and the grandiose effects; while Alice noted more the tenderer aspects,
the wayside flowers and bushes, the exotic-looking plants, which she
longed to domesticate in what might be called the Sunday garden on the
terraces in front of her house. For it is in these little cultivated
places by the door-step, places of dreaming in the summer hours after
meeting and at sunset, that the New England maiden experiences something
of that tender religious sentiment which was not much fed in the
barrenness of the Congregational meeting-house.

The Pulpit Rock, in the rough pasture land of Zoar, was reached by a
somewhat tedious climb from the lonely farmhouse, in a sheltered nook,
through straggling woods and gray pastures. It was a vast exposed
surface rising at a slight angle out of the grass and undergrowth. Along
the upper side was a thin line of bushes, and, pushing these aside, the
observer was always startled at the unexpected scene--as it were the
raising of a curtain upon another world. He stood upon the edge of
a sheer precipice of a thousand feet, and looked down upon a green
amphitheatre through the bottom of which the brawling river, an amber
thread in the summer foliage, seemed trying to get an outlet from this
wilderness cul de sac. From the edge of this precipice the first impulse
was to start back in surprise and dread, but presently the observer
became reassured of its stability, and became fascinated by the lonesome
wildness of the scene.

"Why is it called Pulpit Rock?" asked Mrs. Mavick; "I see no pulpit."

"I suppose," said Philip, "the name was naturally suggested to a
religious community, whose poetic images are mainly Biblical, and who
thought it an advantageous place for a preacher to stand, looking down
upon a vast congregation in the amphitheatre."

"So it is," exclaimed Evelyn. "I can see John the Baptist standing here
now, and hear his voice crying in the wildern