ght me into a strange old haunted forest,
and that I had thrown myself down to rest at the gnarled mossy root of
a great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but fantastic shapes
and capricious groups of gold-green bole and bough, wondrous alleys
ending in mysterious coverts, and green lanes of exquisite turf that
seemed to have been laid down in expectation of some milk-white queen
or goddess passing that way.

And so still the forest was you could have heard an acorn drop or a
bird call from one end of it to the other. The exquisite silence was
evidently waiting for the exquisite voice, that presently not so much
broke as mingled with it, like a swan swimming through a lake.

"Whom seek you?" said, or rather sung, a planetary voice right at my
shoulder. But three short unmusical Saxon words, yet it was as though
a mystical strain of music had passed through the wood.

"Whom seek you?" and again the lovely speech flowered upon the
silence, as white water-lilies on the surface of some shaded pool.

"The Golden Girl," I answered simply, turning my head, and looking half
sideways and half upwards; and behold! the tree at whose foot I lay had
opened its rocky side, and in the cleft, like a long lily-bud sliding
from its green sheath, stood a dryad, and my speech failed and my
breath went as I looked upon her beauty, for which mortality has no
simile. Yet was there something about her of the earth-sweetness that
clings even to the loveliest, star-ambitious, earth-born thing. She
was not all immortal, as man is not all mortal. She was the sweetness
of the strength of the oak, the soul born of the sun kissing its green
leaves in the still Memnonian mornings, of moon and stars kissing its
green leaves in the still Trophonian nights.

"The maid you seek," said she, and again she broke the silence like the
moon breaking through the clouds, "what manner of maid is she? For a
maid abides in this wood, maybe it is she whom you seek. Is she but a
lovely face you seek? Is she but a lofty mind? Is she but a beautiful
soul?"

"Maybe she is all these, though no one only, and more besides," I
answered.

"It is well," she replied, "but have you in your heart no image of her
you seek? Else how should you know her should you some day come to meet
her?"

"I have no image of her," I said. "I cannot picture her; but I shall
know her, know her inerrably as these your wood children find out each
other untaught, as the but