bright, flashing stream and the fine old hawthorn trees of the avenue,
alternate white and rose-colored, like clouds of fragrant bloom, as one
of the sunniest pictures of those sweet summer days.

The charm and seduction of bright water has always been irresistible to
me, a snare and a temptation I have hardly ever been able to withstand;
and various are the chances of drowning it has afforded me in the wild
mountain brooks of Massachusetts. I think a very attached maid of mine
once saved my life by the tearful expostulations with which she opposed
the bewitching invitations of the topaz-colored flashing rapids of
Trenton Falls, that looked to me in some parts so shallow, as well as so
bright, that I was just on the point of stepping into them, charmed by
the exquisite confusion of musical voices with which they were
persuading me, when suddenly a large tree-trunk of considerable weight
shot down their flashing surface and was tossed over the fall below,
leaving me to the natural conclusion, "Just such a log should I have
been if I had gone in there." Indeed, my worthy Marie, overcome by my
importunity, having selected what seemed to her a safe, and to me a very
tame, bathing-place, in another and quieter part of the stream, I had
every reason, from my experience of the difficulty of withstanding its
powerful current there, to congratulate myself upon not having tried the
experiment nearer to one of the "springs" of the lovely torrent, whose
Indian name is the "Leaping Water." Certainly the pixies--whose cousin
my friends accused me of being, on account of my propensity for their
element--if they did not omit any opportunity of alluring me, allowed me
to escape scathless on more than one occasion, when I might have paid
dearly for being so much or so little related to them.

This fascination of living waters for me was so well known among my
Lenox friends of all classes, that on one occasion a Yankee Jehu of our
village, driving some of them by the side of a beautiful mountain brook,
said, "I guess we should hardly have got Mrs. Kemble on at all,
alongside of this stream," as if I had been a member of his _team_, made
restive by the proximity of water. A pool in a rocky basin, with foaming
water dashing in and out of it, was a sort of trap for me, and I have
more than once availed myself of such a shower-bath, without any further
preparation than taking my hat and shoes and stockings off. Once, on a
visit to the Catskil