he day.

Captain Jotham Green, host and proprietor, himself stood at the horses'
heads. The Green Cottage, you perceive, had double right to its
appellation. It was both baptismal and hereditary, surname and given
name,--given with a coat of fresh, pale, pea-green paint that had been
laid on it within the year, and had communicated a certain tender,
newly-sprouted, May-morning expression to the old centre and its
outshoots.

Mrs. Green, within, was generously busy with biscuits, cold chicken,
doughnuts fried since sunrise, and coffee richly compounded with cream
and sugar, which a great tin can stood waiting to receive and convey,
and which was at length to serve as cooking utensil in reheating upon
the fire of coals the picnickers would make up under the very tassel of
Feather-Cap.

The great wagons were drawn up also before the piazza of the hotel; and
between the two houses flitted the excursionists, full of the bright
enthusiasm of the setting off, which is the best part of a jaunt,
invariably.

Leslie Goldthwaite, in the hamadryad costume, just aware--which it was
impossible for her to help--of its exceeding prettiness, and of glances
that recognized it, pleased with a mixture of pleasures, was on the
surface of things once more, taking the delight of the moment with a
young girl's innocent abandonment. It was nice to be received so among
all these new companions; to be evidently, though tacitly, _voted_ nice,
in the way girls have of doing it; to be launched at once into the
beginning of apparently exhaustless delights,--all this was superadded
to the first and underlying joy of merely being alive and breathing,
this superb summer morning, among these forests and hills.

Sin Saxon, whatever new feeling of half sympathy and respect had been
touched in her toward Miss Craydocke the night before, in her morning
mood was all alive again to mischief. The small, spare figure of the
lady appeared at the side-door, coming out briskly toward them along
the passage, just as the second wagon filled up and was ready to move.

I did not describe Miss Craydocke herself when I gave you the glimpse
into her room. There was not much to describe; and I forgot it in
dwelling upon her surroundings and occupations. In fact, she extended
herself into these, and made you take them involuntarily and largely
into the account in your apprehension of her. Some people seem to have
given them at the outset a mere germ of personality li