first before the glass and then, with
feet crossed and clasped hands between her knees, before the roaring
fire of resinous pine-knots in the old fireplace.

Having finally decided that it was a good one, she went about the cabin
seeing to the fastenings of doors and windows, wholly unafraid despite
her solitude. There was but one way of approaching this, her fastness in
the rocks, and the bridge, had been drawn up for the night. Safe she was
as any Rhenish baron in his moated stronghold.

Conscious that a busy day was looming large before her, she now blew out
her candles and crept into her little curtained bed, to dream, there,
vividly, of haughty beauties from the bluegrass staring in astonishment
as they first glimpsed the beauty of a little mountain girl in such a
gorgeous outfit as they had not in all their pampered lives conceived;
of lovely aunts who smiled with pleasure when they saw their handsome
nephews step up to this splendid maiden and take her hands in theirs; of
wondrous youths--ah, these images were never absent from the scenes her
fancy painted!--who scorned the haughty bluegrass beauties in favor of
the freckled little fists of those same brilliant mountain maidens, and,
lo! by taking those same freckled fists in theirs, removed the freckles
and the callouses of work as if by magic, making them as white and
fine--aye, whiter, finer!--than the haughty bluegrass beauty's. And in
her dreams, too, was a gallant horseman, wise in equine ways, who came
to her with handsome chargers trailing from fair-leather lead straps to
present her with the thoroughbreds because her little, shaggy pony
limped.

Queer fancies of the strange life of the lowlands which he had
described to her, flashed, also, through her ignorant but active brain
in fascinating visions. She thought she saw the houses on the tops of
houses which he had described to her, in efforts to assist her to
imagine structures more elaborate than the little, single storied cabins
which were all that she had ever seen. Strange conceptions of the
railroad, with its monstrous engines puffing smoke and fire would have
been terrifying had there not been, ever at her side as dreams revealed
them, a stalwart youth in corduroys to bear her from their path through
rings of burning thickets.

Again she trembled in imagination at the thought of meeting the fine
ladies who would be dressed with such elaboration and impressive
elegance; but each time, when her