l-stems I climbed to the top, passed through a cleft as narrow as a
doorway, and presently found myself in a little upper dell, as wild and
sweet and strange as one of the pictures that haunts us on the brink of
sleep.

There was a pond--no, rather a bowl--of water in the centre; hardly
twenty yards across, yet the sky in it was so pure and far down that
the circle of rocks and summer foliage inclosing it seemed like a little
planetary ring, floating off alone through space. I can't explain the
charm of the spot, nor the selfishness which instantly suggested that
I should keep the discovery to myself. Ten years earlier I should have
looked around for some fair spirit to be my "minister," but now--

One forenoon--I think it was the third or fourth time I had visited the
place--I was startled to find the dent of a heel in the earth, half-way
up the slope. There had been rain during the night and the earth was
still moist and soft. It was the mark of a woman's boot, only to be
distinguished from that of a walking-stick by its semicircular form. A
little higher, I found the outline of a foot, not so small as to awake
an ecstasy, but with a suggestion of lightness, elasticity, and grace.
If hands were thrust through holes in a board-fence, and nothing of the
attached bodies seen, I can easily imagine that some would attract and
others repel us: with footprints the impression is weaker, of course,
but we cannot escape it. I am not sure whether I wanted to find the
unknown wearer of the boot within my precious personal solitude: I was
afraid I should see her, while passing through the rocky crevice, and
yet was disappointed when I found no one.

But on the fiat, warm rock overhanging the tarn--my special throne--lay
some withering wild-flowers and a book! I looked up and down, right and
left: there was not the slightest sign of another human life than mine.
Then I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and listened: there were only
the noises of bird and squirrel, as before. At last, I took up the book,
the fiat breadth of which suggested only sketches. There were, indeed,
some tolerable studies of rocks and trees on the first pages; a few
not very striking caricatures, which seemed to have been commenced as
portraits, but recalled no faces I knew; then a number of fragmentary
notes, written in pencil. I found no name, from first to last; only,
under the sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious that the
initials could h