hat no glamour hung
about the word. They talked of places, people, books, flowers, all
simple things, in a simple way. They were interested in music, in
pictures, in what they saw and what they did. They sang and played
with fresh, natural grace, to the delight and applause of all, and
stopped soon enough to make us wish for more, but not soon enough to
seem capricious or disobliging or pert.

But my pen fails to picture them to you as I saw them,--the one with
her grave, sweet, artless dignity, a perfect Honoria, crowned with the
soft glory of a dawning womanhood; but the other docile and sprightly,
careless, but not thoughtless. The beauty of their characters lay in
the perfect balance. Their qualities were set off against each other,
and symmetry was the result. They combined opposites into a
fascinating harmony. They had all the ease and unconcern of refined
association, without the smallest admixture of forwardness. They were
neither bold nor bashful. They neither pampered nor neglected
themselves,--neither fawned upon nor insulted others. They were
everything that they ought to be, and nothing that they ought not to
be, and I wished I could put them in a cage, and carry them through the
country, and say: "Look, girls, this is what I mean. This is what I
wish you to be."

We wound around the mountains, and wandered back and forth through the
defiles like the Israelites in the wilderness, seeing everything that
was to be seen, and a good deal more. We alighted incessantly, and
struck into little wood-paths after cascades and falls, and got them
to, sometimes. Of course we penetrated into the dripping Flume, and
paddled on the Pool, or the Basin,--I have forgotten which they call
it,--for
a pool is but a big basin, and a basin a small pool. Of
course we sailed and shouted on Echo Lake, and did obeisance to the Old
Man of the Mountains and his numerous and nondescript progeny; for he
has played pranks up there, and infected the whole surrounding country
with a furor of personality. The Old Man himself I acknowledged. That
great stone face is clearly and calmly profiled against the sky. His
knee, too, is susceptible of proof, for I climbed it. A white horse in
the vicinity of Conway is visible to the imaginative eye, and, by a
little forcing of vision and conscience, one can make out a turtle, all
but the head and legs. But there is a limit to all things, and when
Halicarnassus held up both hands in