sun. It was a hot afternoon, as Mrs.
Starling had said; and the two excursionists were fain to take it
gently and to make as straight a course across the fields as keeping on
one side of the brook left possible. They could not cross it. The
stream was not large, yet quite too broad for a jump; and not deep, yet
deep enough to cover its stony bed and leave no crossing stones. So
sometimes along the border of the brook, where a fringe of long grass
had been left by the mowers' scythes, rank and tangled; sometimes
striking across from bend to bend over the meadow, where no kindly
trees stood to shade them, the two went--on a hunt, as Mr. Knowlton
said, after pretty things.

After a mile or more of this walking, the scenery changed. Mown fields,
hot and fragrant, were left behind; almost suddenly they entered the
hills, where the brook issued from them; and then they began a slower
tracking of its course back among the rocks and woods of a dell which
soon grew close and wild. The sides of the dell became higher; the bed
of the stream more steep and rough; the canopy of trees closed in
overhead, and showed the blue through only in broken patches. The
clothing of the hill-sides was elegant and exquisite; oaks, and firs,
and hemlocks, with slender birches and maples, lining the ravine; and
under them a free growth of ferns, and fresh beds of moss, and lovely
lichens covered the rocks and dressed the ground. The stream rattled
along at the bottom; foaming over the stones and leaping down the
rocks; making the still, deep pools where the fish love to lie; and in
its way executing a succession of cascades and tiny waterfalls that
wanted no picturesque element except magnitude. And a good imagination
can supply that.

And how went the afternoon? How goes it with those who have just
received a new sense, or found a sudden doubling of that which they had
before? Nay, it was a new sense, a new power of perception, able to
discern what had eluded all their previous lives. The brook in the
meadow had been to Diana's vision until now merely running water;
whence had come those delicious amber hues where it rolled over the
stones, and the deep olive shadows where the water was deeper? She had
never seen them before. Now they were pointed out and seen to be rich
and clear, a sort of dilution of sunlight, with a suggestion of
sunlight's other riches of possibility. The rank unmown grass that
fringed the stream, Diana had never seen it bu