be,--for the master noticed
once, when her necklace was slightly displaced, that a faint ring or
band of a little lighter shade than the rest of the surface encircled
her neck. What was the slight peculiarity of her enunciation, when
she read? Not a lisp, certainly, but the least possible imperfection
in articulating some of the lingual sounds,--just enough to be
noticed at first, and quite forgotten after being a few times heard.

Not a word about the flower on either side. It was not uncommon for
the schoolgirls to leave a rose or pink or wild flower on the
teacher's desk. Finding it in the Virgil was nothing, after all; it
was a little delicate flower, that looked as if it were made to
press, and it was probably shut in by accident at the particular
place where he found it. He took it into his head to examine it in a
botanical point of view. He found it was not common,--that it grew
only in certain localities,--and that one of these was among the
rocks of the eastern spur of The Mountain.

It happened to come into his head how the Swiss youth climb the sides
of the Alps to find the flower called the _Edelweiss_ for the maidens
whom they wish to please. It is a pretty fancy, that of scaling some
dangerous height before the dawn, so as to gather the flower in its
freshness, that the favored maiden may wear it to church on Sunday
morning, a proof at once of her lover's devotion and his courage. Mr.
Bernard determined to explore the region where this flower was said
to grow, that he might see where the wild girl sought the blossoms of
which Nature was so jealous.

It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook his
land-voyage of discovery. He had more curiosity, it may be, than he
would have owned; for he had heard of the girl's wandering habits, and
the guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was thinking what the chances
were that he should meet her in some strange place, or come upon
traces of her which would tell secrets she would not care to have
known.

The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with his mind
in an excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open. The trees are
always talking, not merely whispering with their leaves, (for every
tree talks to itself in that way, even when it stands alone in the
middle of a pasture,) but grating their boughs against each
other, as old horn-handed farmers press their dry, rustling palms
together,--dropping a nut or a leaf or a twig, clicking t