up
Cameron's lane, crossed the orchard, and went down the winding pathway
into the ravine.

The little stream danced along at their side, touched here and there
with the gold of the sunset, the vesper sparrows had gathered for their
twilight chorus, and the valley was vibrating with music.

No matter at what hour of the day, or season of the year, it might be
viewed, the ravine where the mill-stream ran was a treasure-house to
any one who had the seeing eye. Long before, when Elmbrook was merely
a "Corners," with one or two houses, there came to the place a queer
Englishman, who wandered all day about the fields, and painted pictures
and read strange, dry books by a man named Ruskin. He first entered
the valley on an October morning, when it was all gold and crimson, and
lay shrouded in a soft violet mist. The man had sat for hours gazing
down the winding stream, and afterward he had said it was the Golden
River, and that the place should be called Treasure Valley. But Sandy
McQuarry's father, who was living then, said that onybody with a head
on him could see that it was clean ridic'l'us to give a place such a
daft name. McQuarry's Corners it had been called for years, and
McQuarry's Corners it would stay. The queer Englishman left, and was
never heard of again, and old Sandy died, and when the post-office came
old lady Cameron named the place Elmbrook; but Treasure Valley still
remained with the little Golden River flowing through it, showing new
beauties with every recurring season.

About a mile below the village the walls of the ravine disappeared, and
the brook was lost in a deep swamp, a maze of tangled foliage and deep
pools and idly wandering streams. As the water advanced the forest
became submerged, and formed a desolate stretch known as the Drowned
Lands. Its slimy, green surface was dotted with rotten stumps and
fantastic tree-trunks, pitched together in wild confusion, and above it
rose a drear, dead forest of tall pine stems, bleached and scarred, and
stripped of every limb. Around this silent, ghostly place the swamp
formed a ring through which it was dangerous to pass, for near the edge
of the Drowned Lands it was honeycombed with mud holes, into which it
was sure death to slip. Terrible tales were related of lives lost in
this swamp. Folks said that a banshee or a will-o'-the-wisp, or some
such fearsome creature, wandered to and fro at nights over the surface
of the desolate waters, wavi