boulders amidst the whirl of the transparent
crystal-brown water, with its fleck and fringe of white foam. More
than once, to evade the dizzying effect of the sinuous motion and the
continuous roar, she stood still in midstream and gazed upward or at the
opposite bank. The woods were dense on the slope. All in red and yellow
and variant russet and brown tints, the canopy of the forest foliage was
impenetrable. The great, dark boles of oak and gum and spruce contrasted
sharply with the white and greenish-gray trunks of beeches and
sycamore and poplar, and, thus breaking the monotony, gave long, almost
illimitable avenues of sylvan vistas. She noted amidst a growth of
willows on the opposite bank, at the waters-edge, a spring, a circular,
rock-bound reservoir; in the marshy margin she could see the imprints of
the cleft hoofs of deer, and thence ran the indefinite trail known as
a deer-path. The dense covert along the steep slope was a famous
"deer-stand," and there many a fine buck had been killed. All at once
she was reminded of the storied tree hard by, the tragedy of which she
had often bewept.

There it stood, dead itself, weird, phantasmal, as befitted the housing
of so drear a fate. Its branches now bore no leaves. The lightnings of
a last-year's storm had scorched out its vital force and riven the fibre
of the wood. Here and there, too, the tooth of decay had gnawed fissures
that the bark had not earlier known; and from one of these--she thought
herself in a dream--a ghastly, white face looked out suddenly, and as
suddenly vanished!

Her heart gave one wild plunge, then it seemed to cease to beat She
wondered afterward that she did not collapse, and sink into the plunging
rapids to drown, beaten and bruised against the rocks. It was a
muscular instinct that sustained her rather than a conscious impulse of
self-preservation. Motionless, horrified, amazed, she could only gaze
at the empty fissure of the tree on the slope. She could not then
discriminate the wild, spectral imaginations that assailed her untutored
mind. She could not remember these fantasies later. It was a relief
so great that the anguish of the physical reaction was scarcely less
poignant than the original shock when she realized that this face
was not the grisly skeleton lineaments that had looked out thence
heretofore, but was clothed with flesh, though gaunt, pallid, furtive.
Once more, as she gazed, it appeared in a mere glimpse at the fissure