huts, on which her housewifely care grieved to
expend itself in vain.

Evadne would not be restrained from wandering. She penetrated alone the
wildest thickets; the nests of timid birds were known to her; and she
traced the bee to his hidden city. Deep in the woods she discovered a
wide chasm, in which the water of the sea palpitated with the beating of
the great heart of Ocean from which it flowed. Trees were still erect,
clasped by the salt waves, but quite dead; and all around their base
were hung fringes of marine growth, touched with prismatic tints when
seen through the glittering water, but brown and hideous when gathered,
as the trophy remaining in the hand which has dared to seize old Proteus
by the locks. All around this avenue, into which the sea sometimes
rushed like an invading host of armed men, the laurels and the delicate
trees that love to bend over the sources of the forest-streams hung
half-uprooted and perilously a-tiptoe over the brink of shattered rocks,
and withered here and there by the touch of the salt foam, towards which
they seemed nevertheless fain to droop, asking tidings of the watery
world beyond.

The skeleton-arms of the destroyed ones were feeble to guard the passage
of the ravine. Evadne broke a way over fallen trees and stepping-stones
imbedded in sea-sand, and gained the opposite bank. The solitude in
which she found herself appeared deeper, more awful, than before the
chasm lay between the greater island and the less. She listened
motionless to the soft, but continual murmur of the wood, the music of
leaves and waves and unseen wings, by which all seeming silence of
Nature is made as rich to the ear as her fabrics to the eye, so that, in
comparison, the garments of a king are mean, though richly dyed,
embroidered on every border, and hung with jewels.

While the little wood-ranger stood and waited, as it were, for what the
grove might utter, her eye fell upon the traces of a pathway, concealed,
and elsewhere again disclosed, overgrown by sturdy plants, but yet
threading the shady labyrinth. She followed the often reappearing line
upon the hillside, and as she climbed higher, with her rose the
mountains and the sea. The shore, the sands, the rocky walls, showed
every hue of sunbeams fixed in stone. The leafy sides of Tenedos had
caught up the clear, green-tinted blue of the sea, and wore it in a
noonday dream under the slumberous light that rested on earth and sea
and sky. Above