e
at the edge of which the green frog, stupidest of his tribe, sat waiting
to be victimized by boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy and agile
leopard-frog had taken the six-foot spring that plumped him into the
middle of the pool. And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair spread
its flat disk of embroidered fronds on the wire-like stem that glistened
polished and brown as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets,
cheated by the cold skies of their hues and perfume, sunned themselves
like white-cheeked invalids. Over these rose the old forest-trees,--the
maple, scarred with the wounds which had drained away its sweet
life-blood,--the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to look
like the body of one of those great snakes of old that used to frighten
armies, always the mark of lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora
and her swain,--the yellow birch, rough as the breast of Silenus in old
marbles,--the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying unheeded at its
foot,--and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed,
dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of whose aerial solitudes the crow
brooded on her nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived unharmed till
his incisors grew to look like ram's-horns.

Rockland would have been but half a town without its pond; Guinnepeg
Pond was the name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean
Institute were very anxious that it should be called Crystalline Lake.
It was here that the young folks used to sail in summer and skate in
winter; here, too, those queer, old, rum-scented good-for-nothing, lazy,
story-telling, half-vagabonds, who sawed a little wood or dug a few
potatoes now and then under the pretence of working for their living,
used to go and fish through the ice for pickerel every winter. And
here those three young people were drowned, a few summers ago, by the
upsetting of a sail-boat in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of
these smiling ponds which has not devoured more youths and maidens than
any of those monsters the ancients used to tell such lies about. But it
was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent--so the native "bard"
of Rockland said in his elegy--than on the morning when they found Sarah
Jane and Ellen Maria floating among the lily-pads.

The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly called,
was, in the language of its Prospectus, a "first-class Educational
Establishment." It employed a considerab