he path becomes a little precipice, and you must scramble
as best you can down two or three rough steps, and round the corner of
the ruined mill. This is a millstone, this great round thing like a
granite cheese, half buried in the ground; and here is another, which
makes a comfortable seat, if you are tired.

But there is a fairer resting-place beyond. Round this one more corner,
now, and down,--carefully, carefully!--down this long stairway, formed
of rough slabs of stone laid one below the other. Shut your eyes now for
a moment, and let me lead you forward by the hand. And now--now open the
eyes wide, wide, and look about you. In front, and under the windows of
the old mill, the water comes foaming and rushing down over a rocky fall
some sixty feet high, and leaps merrily into a second pool. No sombre,
black gulf this, like the one above, but a lovely open circle, half in
broad sunshine, half dappled with the fairy shadows of the boughs and
ferns that bend lovingly over it. So the little brook is no longer
angry, but mingles lovingly with the deep water of the pool, and then
runs laughing and singing along the glen on its way down to the sea. On
one side of this glen the bank rises abruptly some eighty feet, its
sides clothed with sturdy birches which cling as best they may to the
rocky steep. On the other stretches the little valley, a narrow strip of
land, but with turf as fine as the Queen's lawn, and trees that would
proudly grace Her Majesty's park,--tall Norway firs, raising their
stately forms and pointing their long dark fingers sternly at the
intruders on their solitude; graceful birches; and here and there a
whispering larch or a nodding pine. The other wall of the valley, or
glen, is less precipitous, and its sides are densely wooded, and fringed
with barberry bushes and climbing eglantine.

And between these two banks, and over this green velvet carpet, and
among these dark fir-trees,--ah! how the sun shines. Nowhere else in the
whole land does he shine so sweetly, for he knows that his time there is
short, and that the high banks will shut him out from that green,
pleasant place long before he must say good-night to the more
common-place fields and hill-sides. So here his beams rest right
lovingly, making royal show of gold on the smooth grass, and of diamonds
on the running water, and of opals and topazes and beryls where the
wave comes curling over the little fall.

And now, amid all this pomp and pl