ee, laughing at him.

Her mother appeared to have enlisted in the Union army, and, her father
being detained in that characteristic manner by Mr. Sumner, there was
evidently nothing to be done but for Gypsy to go to Winnie's relief. This
she hastened to do with all possible speed. She dressed herself under a
remarkable sense of not being able to find any buttons, and of getting all
her sleeves upon the wrong arm. She put on her rubber-boots, because it
took so long to lace up her boots. Her stockings she wore upon her arms.
The reason appeared to be, that she might not get her hands wet in pulling
Winnie out. She stopped to put on her sack, her turban, and her blue veil.
She also spent considerable time in commendable efforts to pin on a lace
collar which utterly refused to be pinned, and to fasten at her throat a
velvet bow that kept turning into a little green snake, and twisting round
her fingers.

When at length she was fairly ready, she left the house softly, under the
impression that Tom (who appeared to have the remarkable capacity of being
in the house and down in the maple-trees at one and the same time) would
stop her if he heard her.

She ran down the lane and over the fields and into the woods, where the
Kleiner Berg rose darkly in front of her; so, at last, to the Basin, which
rippled and washed on its shore, and tossed up at her feet--_an empty
milk-pitcher_!

A horrible fear seized her. She had come too late. Winnie was drowned. It
was all owing to that lace collar.

She sprang into the boat; she floated away; she peered down into the dark
water. But Tom laughed in the maple-tree; and there was no sign nor sound
of Winnie.

She cried out with a loud cry, and awoke. She lifted up her head, and
saw----

CHAPTER V

WHAT SHE SAW

A great, solemn stretch of sky, alive with stars.

A sheet of silent water.

A long line of silent hills.

_She had acted out her dream!_ When the truth came to Gypsy, she sat for a
moment like one stunned. The terrible sense of awakening in a desolate
place, at midnight, and alone, instead of in a safe and quiet bed, with
bolted doors, and friends within the slightest call, might well alarm an
older and stouter heart than Gypsy's. The consciousness of having wandered
she did not know whither, she did not know how, in the helplessness of
sleep, into a place where her voice could reach no human ear, was in
itself enough to freeze her where she sat, with hands l