le, never daring to enter its sacred
precincts, but content to worship the priestess from afar.

With such unconscious intervals the monotonous procession of blue
skies, glittering sunshine, brief twilights, and starlit nights passed
over Red Gulch. Miss Mary grew fond of walking in the sedate and proper
woods. Perhaps she believed, with Mrs. Stidger, that the balsamic odors
of the firs "did her chest good," for certainly her slight cough was
less frequent and her step was firmer; perhaps she had learned the
unending lesson which the patient pines are never weary of repeating to
heedful or listless ears. And so one day she planned a picnic on
Buckeye Hill, and took the children with her. Away from the dusty road,
the straggling shanties, the yellow ditches, the clamor of restless
engines, the cheap finery of shop-windows, the deeper glitter of paint
and colored glass, and the thin veneering which barbarism takes upon
itself in such localities, what infinite relief was theirs! The last
heap of ragged rock and clay passed, the last unsightly chasm crossed--
how the waiting woods opened their long files to receive them! How the
children--perhaps because they had not yet grown quite away from the
breast of the bounteous Mother--threw themselves face downward on her
brown bosom with uncouth caresses, filling the air with their laughter;
and how Miss Mary herself--felinely fastidious and intrenched as she
was in the purity of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs--forgot all,
and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until, romping,
laughing, and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat
hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came suddenly and
violently, in the heart of the forest, upon the luckless Sandy!

The explanations, apologies, and not overwise conversation that ensued
need not be indicated here. It would seem, however, that Miss Mary had
already established some acquaintance with this ex-drunkard. Enough
that he was soon accepted as one of the party; that the children, with
that quick intelligence which Providence gives the helpless, recognized
a friend, and played with his blond beard and long silken mustache, and
took other liberties--as the helpless are apt to do. And when he had
built a fire against a tree, and had shown them other mysteries of
woodcraft, their admiration knew no bounds. At the close of two such
foolish, idle, happy hours he found himself lying at the feet of the
sc