rd cast of her pretty eyes.

"Oui, c'est un reve, un reve doux d'amour," she hummed, as the hem of
her outspread skirt just swept the ground.

"_Phew!_" came a most terrible, dreadful sound from the thicket close at
hand.

Barbara dropped her parasol, and clasped her heart with both hands, and
screamed. From the thicket two slender ears pointed inquiringly toward
her, two wide brown eyes stared frightened into hers, a delicate nose
dilated with terror. "_Phew!_" snorted the deer again, and vanished in a
series of elastic stiff-legged springs.

"Oh!" cried Barbara. "You horrid thing! How you frightened me!"

She picked up her parasol, and resumed her journey in some perturbation
of mind, reflecting on the utter rudeness of the deer. Gradually the
trail seemed to become more difficult. After a time it was obstructed
by the top of a fallen basswood. Barbara looked about her. She was not
on the trail at all.

This was distinctly annoying. Barbara felt a little resentful on account
of it. She gathered her skirts closely about her ankles, and tried to
pick her way through the undergrowth to the right. The brush was
exceedingly difficult to avoid, and a little patch of briers was worse.
Finally an ugly stub ripped a hole in the chiffon skirt. This was
unbearable. Barbara stamped her foot in vexation. She wanted to cry; and
fully made up her mind to do so as soon as she should have regained the
trail. In a little while the high beech-ridge over which she had been
travelling ended in a narrow cedar-swamp. Then Barbara did a foolish
thing; she tried to cross the swamp.

At first she proceeded circumspectly, with an eye to the chiffon. It was
torn in a dozen places. Then she thrust one dear little slipper through
the moss into black water. Three times the stiff straight rods of the
tamarack whipped her smartly across the face. When finally she emerged
on the other side of the hundred feet of that miserable cedar-swamp, she
had ceased to hold up the chiffon skirt, and was most vexed.

"I think you're just _mean_!" she cried, pettishly, to the still forest;
and then caught her breath in the silence of awe.

The forest had become suddenly unfriendly; its kindliness had somehow
vanished. In all directions it looked the same; straight towering
trunks, saplings, undergrowth. It had shut her in with a wall of green,
and hurry in whatever direction she would, Barbara was always inclosed
in apparently the same little cell of leav