Elsie’s room was almost as peculiar as her dress and ornaments.  It was a kind of museum of objects, such as the woods are full of to those who have eyes to see them, but many of them such as only few could hope to reach, even if they knew where to look for them.  Crows’ nests, which are never found but in the tall trees, commonly enough in the forks of ancient hemlocks, eggs of rare birds, which must have taken a quick eye and hard climb to find and get hold of, mosses and ferns of unusual aspect, and quaint monstrosities of vegetable growth, such as Nature delights in, showed that Elsie had her tastes and fancies like any naturalist or poet.

Nature, when left to her own freaks in the forest, is grotesque and fanciful to the verge of license, and beyond it.  The foliage of trees does not always require clipping to make it look like an image of life.  From those windows at Canoe Meadow, among the mountains, we could see all summer long a lion rampant, a Shanghai chicken, and General Jackson on horse-back, done by Nature in green leaves, each with a single tree.  But to Nature’s tricks with boughs and roots and smaller vegetable growths there is no end.  Her fancy is infinite, and her humor not always refined.  There is a perpetual reminiscence of animal life in her rude caricatures, which sometimes actually reach the point of imitating the complete human figure, as in that extraordinary specimen which nobody will believe to be genuine, except the men of science, and of which the discreet reader may have a glimpse by application in the proper quarter.

Elsie had gathered so many of these sculpture-like monstrosities, that one might have thought she had robbed old Sophy’s grandfather of his fetishes.  They helped to give her room a kind of enchanted look, as if a witch had her home in it.  Over the fireplace was a long, staff-like branch, strangled in the spiral coils of one of those vines which strain the smaller trees in their clinging embraces, sinking into the bark until the parasite becomes almost identified with its support.  With these sylvan curiosities were blended objects of art, some of them not less singular, but others showing a love for the beautiful in form and color, such as a girl of fine organization and nice culture might naturally be expected to feel and to indulge, in adorning her apartment.

All these objects, pictures, bronzes, vases, and the rest, did not detain Mr. Richard Venner very long, whatever may have been his sensibilities to art.  He was more curious about books and papers.  A copy of Keats lay on the table.  He opened it and read the name of Bernard C. Langdon on the blank leaf.  An envelope was on the table with Elsie’s name written in a similar hand; but the envelope was empty, and he could not find the note it contained.  Her desk was locked, and it would not be safe to tamper with it.  He had seen enough; the girl received books and notes from this fellow up at the school,—­this usher, this Yankee quill-driver;—­he was aspiring to become the lord of the Dudley domain, then, was he?