breathlessly, at last, as Mrs. Gartney entered,
"look there! have you seen it? Just imagine what the woods must be this
morning! How can we think of buckwheats?"

Sounds and odors betrayed that Mis' Battis and breakfast were in the
little room adjoining.

"There is a thought of something akin to them, isn't there, under all
this splendor? Men must live, and grass and grain must grow."

Mr. Gartney said this, as he came up behind wife and daughter, and laid
a hand on a shoulder of each.

"I know one thing, though," said Faith. "I'll eat the buckwheats, as a
vulgar necessity, and then I'll go over the brook and up in the woods
behind the Pasture Rocks. It'll last, won't it?"

"Not many hours, with this spring balm in the air," replied her father.
"You must make haste. By noon, it will be all a drizzle."

"Will it be quite safe for her to go alone?" asked Mrs. Gartney.

"I'll ask Aunt Faith to let me have Glory. She showed me the walk last
summer. It is fair she should see this, now."

So the morning odds and ends were done up quickly at Cross Corners and
at the Old House, and then Faith and Glory set forth together--the
latter in as sublime a rapture as could consist with mortal cohesion.

The common roadside was an enchanted path. The glittering rime
transfigured the very cart ruts into bars of silver; and every coarse
weed was a fretwork of beauty.

"Bells on their toes" they had, this morning, assuredly; each footfall
made a music on the sod.

Over the slippery bridge--out across a stretch of open meadow, and then
along a track that skirted the border of a sparse growth of trees,
projecting itself like a promontory upon the level land--round its
abrupt angle into a sweep of meadow again, on whose farther verge rose
the Pasture Rocks.

Behind these rocks swelled up gently a slope, half pasture, half
woodland--neither open ground nor forest; but, although clear enough for
comfortable walking, studded pretty closely with trees that often
interlaced their branches overhead, and made great, pillared aisles,
among whose shade, in summer, wound delicious little footpaths that all
came out together, midway up, into--what you shall be told of presently.

Here, among and beyond the rocks, were oaks, and pines, and savins--each
needle-like leaf a shimmering lance--each clustering branch a spray of
gems--and the stout, spreading limbs of the oaks delineating themselves
against the sky above in Gothic frost-work.