hat I can do
Is to kiss your little shoe,
And to make a queen of you
(Swinging high, swinging low),
Make a fairy queen of you
(Swinging, oh!).

CHAPTER VI.

HARTLEY'S GLEN.

How many girls, among all the girls who may read this little book, have
seen with their own eyes Hartley's Glen? Not one, perhaps, save Brynhild
and the Rosicrucian, for whom the book is written. But the others must
try to see it with my eyes, for it is a fair place and a sweet as any on
earth. Behind the house, and just under the brow of the little hill that
shelters it, a narrow path dips down to the right, and goes along for a
bit, with a dimpled clover-meadow on the one hand, and a stone wall, all
warm with golden and red-brown lichens, on the other. Follow this, and
you come to a little gateway, beyond which is a thick plantation of
larches, with one grim old red cedar keeping watch over them. If he
regards you favorably, you may pass on, down the narrow path that winds
among the larches, whose feathery finger-tips brush your cheek and try
to hold you back, as if they willed not that you should go farther, to
see the wonders which they can never behold.

But you leave them behind, and come out into the sunshine, in a little
green glade which might be the ballroom of the fairy queen. On your
right, gleaming through clumps of alder and black birch, is a pond,--the
home of cardinal flowers and gleaming jewel-weed; a little farther on, a
thicket of birch and maple, from which comes a musical sound of falling
water. Follow this sound, keeping to the path, which winds away to the
left. Stop! now you may step aside for a moment, and part the heavy
hanging branches, and look, where the water falls over a high black
wall, into a sombre pool, shut in by fantastic rocks, and shaded from
all sunshine by a dense fringe of trees. This is the milldam, and the
pond above is no natural one, but the enforced repose and outspreading
of a merry brown brook, which now shows its true nature, and escaping
from the gloomy pool, runs scolding and foaming down through a
wilderness of rocks and trees. You cannot follow it there,--though I
have often done so in my barefoot days,--so come back to the path again.
There are pines overhead now, and the ground is slippery with the fallen
needles, and the air is sweet--ah! how sweet!--with their warm
fragrance. See! here is the old mill itself, now disused and falling to
decay. Here t