However full of poetry and passion Mark’s declaration was for Mildred, to him it was tame and hesitating enough.  It seemed to him that he could not force into the cold formula of words the emotion that agitated him.  But with quickening breath he poured out his love, his hopes, and his fears,—­the old burden!  She trembled, her eyelids fell; but at length, roused by his pleading tones, she looked up.  Their eyes met; one look was enough; it was a reciprocal electric flash.  With a sudden energy he clasped her in his arms; and it was a very pretty tableau they made!  But in the quick movement his heedless foot chanced to touch a stone, which rolled down the bank and fell into the stream with a splash.  The charm was broken.

“What’s that?” cried Lizzy from a distance, forgetting her discretion.  “Did a pickerel jump?”

“No,” replied Mark, “the pickerel know me of old, and don’t come about for fear that I have a hook and line in my pocket.  It was only a stone rolling into the river.”

“You come here a moment,” continued the unthoughtful Lizzy; “here’s a beautiful sassafras sapling, and I can’t pull it up by the roots alone.”

“Send for the dentist, then.”

“Go and help her,” said Mildred, softly.

“Well,” said Mark, with a look of enforced resignation,—­“if I must.”

The sapling grew on the steep bank, perhaps fifty yards from where he had been sitting.  He did not use sufficient care to brace himself, as he pulled with all his might, and in a moment, he knew not how, he rolled down into the river.  The girls first screamed, and then, as he came out of the water, shaking himself like a Newfoundland dog, they laughed immoderately.  The affair did not seem very funny to Mark, and he joined in the laugh with no great heartiness.  The shock had effectually dispelled all the romance of the hour.

“I’m so sorry!” said Lizzy, still laughing at his grotesque and dripping figure.

“You must hurry and get dry clothes on, Mark,” said Mildred.  “Squire Clamp’s is the nearest house across the bridge.”

“Hang Squire Clamp! his clothes would poison me.  I’d as lief go to a quarantine hospital to be dressed.”

“Don’t!” said Lizzy.

But he kept on in the same mercurial strain.—­“Clamp lives on poison, like Rappaccini’s daughter, in Hawthorne’s story; only it makes him ugly instead of fair, as that pretty witch was.  His wife never had any trouble with spiders as long as she lived; he had only to blow into a nest, and the creatures would tumble out, and give up their venomous ghosts.  No vermin but himself are to be seen in his neighborhood; the rats even found they couldn’t stand it, and had to emigrate.”

“The breath that killed spiders must have been a little too powerful, at times, for Mrs. Clamp, one would think,” said Mildred.

“It was,” said Mark.  “She died one day, after Clamp had cheated a widow out of her dower.”