ow to it. Wait for that." So we addressed ourselves to follow
the brook that stole away from the spring in its windings and doublings
and tricky surprises.

"A brook," quoth Uncle Blair, "is the most changeful, bewitching,
lovable thing in the world. It is never in the same mind or mood two
minutes. Here it is sighing and murmuring as if its heart were broken.
But listen--yonder by the birches it is laughing as if it were enjoying
some capital joke all by itself."

It was indeed a changeful brook; here it would make a pool, dark and
brooding and still, where we bent to look at our mirrored faces; then it
grew communicative and gossiped shallowly over a broken pebble bed where
there was a diamond dance of sunbeams and no troutling or minnow could
glide through without being seen. Sometimes its banks were high and
steep, hung with slender ashes and birches; again they were mere, low
margins, green with delicate mosses, shelving out of the wood. Once
it came to a little precipice and flung itself over undauntedly in an
indignation of foam, gathering itself up rather dizzily among the mossy
stones below. It was some time before it got over its vexation; it went
boiling and muttering along, fighting with the rotten logs that lie
across it, and making far more fuss than was necessary over every root
that interfered with it. We were getting tired of its ill-humour and
talked of leaving it, when it suddenly grew sweet-tempered again,
swooped around a curve--and presto, we were in fairyland.

It was a little dell far in the heart of the woods. A row of birches
fringed the brook, and each birch seemed more exquisitely graceful
and golden than her sisters. The woods receded from it on every hand,
leaving it lying in a pool of amber sunshine. The yellow trees were
mirrored in the placid stream, with now and then a leaf falling on the
water, mayhap to drift away and be used, as Uncle Blair suggested, by
some adventurous wood sprite who had it in mind to fare forth to some
far-off, legendary region where all the brooks ran into the sea.

"Oh, what a lovely place!" I exclaimed, looking around me with delight.

"A spell of eternity is woven over it, surely," murmured Uncle Blair.
"Winter may not touch it, or spring ever revisit it. It should be like
this for ever."

"Let us never come here again," said the Story Girl softly, "never,
no matter how often we may be in Carlisle. Then we will never see it
changed or different. We can