All the skies, by day and night.'

But truly, it is mere drift-wood, not fit even to build a 'castle in the
air.'

I was startled from my musings by a rustling of the branches behind me,
and I turned, expecting--not to see a bear or a fox, but my fancies
incorporate. The leaves were still quivering, but I saw no apparent
cause for so much disturbance. I probably had startled a brace of
partridges from their roost. They brought me back to the actual world,
and I came home to an excellent dinner, which I found my father
practically commending.

_Sunday._--My father has brought us up to so scrupulous an observance of
the Puritan Sabbath, that I was rather surprised, this morning, by his
proposition to drive over to the Flume. His equanimity had been
disturbed by finding one of the horses that had brought us here,
seemingly in a dying condition. He was one of the 'team' that had taken
us on to Mount Willard, and my father had then prophesied that he would
suffer from the driver's neglect to blanket him. He was in nowise
comforted by the verification of his 'I told you so!' but walked to and
fro from the stable, watching the remedies administered, and
vituperating all youth as negligent, reckless, and hard-hearted. I think
it was half to get rid of this present annoyance that he proposed the
drive to the Flume, saying, as he did so: 'These mountains are a great
temple, my children; it matters not much where we stand to worship.'

We stopped for a half-hour at a little fall just by the roadside, called
by the mountain-folk 'The Basin,' and by fine people, 'The Emerald
Bowl,' a name suggested by the exquisite hue of the water, which truly
is of as soft and bright a green as an emerald's. The stream has
curiously cut its way through a rock, whitened, smoothed, and almost
polished by its fretting, which overhangs the deep, circular bowl like a
canopy, or rather, like a half-uplifted lid, its inner side being
mottled and colored like a beautiful shell. The stream glides over the
brim of its sylvan bowl and goes on its way rejoicing. We loitered here
for a half-hour watching the golden and crimson leaves that had dropped
in, and that lay in rich mosaics in the eddies of the stream.

The morning was misty, and the clouds were driven low athwart the
mountains, forming, as Alice well said, pedestals on which their lofty
heads were upreared. No wonder that people in mountainous and misty
regions become imaginative, even superst