ned that this particular tree, the white ash, did
not grow upon The Mountain, and the leaflets were more welcome for their
comparative rarity. So the girls made their basket, and the floor of it
they covered with the rich olive-purple leaflets. Such late flowers as
they could lay their hands upon served to fill it, and with many kindly
messages they sent it to Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.

Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and
Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,
Helen thought, for one who was said to have some kind of fever. The
school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes
for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased
Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her. Elsie began looking at the
flowers, and taking them from the basket, that she might see the leaves.
All at once she appeared to be agitated; she looked at the basket, then
around, as if there were some fearful presence about her which she was
searching for with her eager glances. She took out the flowers, one
by one, her breathing growing hurried, her eyes staring, her hands
trembling,--till, as she came near the bottom of the basket, she flung
out all the rest with a hasty movement, looked upon the olive-purple
leaflets as if paralyzed for a moment, shrunk up, as it were, into
herself in a curdling terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back
senseless, with a faint cry which chilled the blood of the startled
listeners at her bedside.

"Take it away!--take it away!--quick!" said Old Sophy, as she hastened
to her mistress's pillow. "It 's the leaves of the tree that was always
death to her,--take it away! She can't live wi' it in the room!"

The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to
rouse her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered
up the flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment, She
came to herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering. In
her delirium she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with such
exactness of circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that she had
some such retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably fitted up
in her own fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself from all human
eyes, and of the entrance to which she alone possessed the secret.

All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than be