ently useful. After removing a few of these, he
thrust his hand to the very bottom of the remaining pile and drew out
a coiled strip of leather many yards in length, ending in a noose,--a
tough, well-seasoned lasso, looking as if it had seen service and was
none the worse for it. He uncoiled a few yards of this and fastened it
to the knob of a door. Then he threw the loose end out of the window so
that it should hang by the open casement of Elsie's room. By this he let
himself down opposite her window, and with a slight effort swung himself
inside the room. He lighted a match, found a candle, and, having lighted
that, looked curiously about him, as Clodius might have done when he
smuggled himself in among the Vestals.

Elsie's room was almost as peculiar as her dress and ornaments. It was
a kind of museum of objects, such as the woods are full of to those who
have eyes to see them, but many of them such as only few could hope to
reach, even if they knew where to look for them. Crows' nests, which
are never found but in the tall trees, commonly enough in the forks of
ancient hemlocks, eggs of rare birds, which must have taken a quick eye
and a hard climb to find and get hold of, mosses and ferns of unusual
aspect, and quaint monstrosities of vegetable growth, such as Nature
delights in, showed that Elsie had her tastes and fancies like any
naturalist or poet.

Nature, when left to her own freaks in the forest, is grotesque and
fanciful to the verge of license, and beyond it. The foliage of trees
does not always require clipping to make it look like an image of life.
From those windows at Canoe Meadow, among the mountains, we could see
all summer long a lion rampant, a Shanghai chicken, and General Jackson
on horseback, done by Nature in green leaves, each with a single tree.
But to Nature's tricks with boughs and roots and smaller vegetable
growths there is no end. Her fancy is infinite, and her humor not always
refined. There is a perpetual reminiscence of animal life in her rude
caricatures, which sometimes actually reach the point of imitating the
complete human figure, as in that extraordinary specimen which nobody
will believe to be genuine, except the men of science, and of which the
discreet reader may have a glimpse by application in the proper quarter.

Elsie had gathered so many of these sculpture-like monstrosities, that
one might have thought she had robbed old Sophy's grandfather of his
fetishes. They help