Beyond these there lay less frequented fields, which rose gradually, at no very great distance, into a range of hills as green as the valley below.  One of them was covered all over its summit, and a little way down its sides, with some dark old woods.  The trees which grew there were very tall, and so large that their thick and heavy tops seemed to crowd together, so that you might have walked on them almost as well as upon the hill itself.  I loved sometimes, when the air was full of the bright sunshine, to look at the rich shades of green upon those tree-tops; but if ever my eye rested, for a moment only, upon the dark and mysterious avenues which led into the depths of the wood beneath them, there would creep such a chill to my heart,—­such a feeling of dread would come over me,—­that I turned quickly to the glad-looking homestead, that I might again grow warm and happy.

At first it was probably no more than the idea that those woods formed a limit to the world of light and gladness in which I lived.  My eye could not penetrate their dimness, and with a childish, human feeling I shrank from the undiscovered and unknown.  But as I grew older, and read the stories in the small books which were given to me for presents, or lent by my little friends, I had other and plainer reasons for the apprehensive feeling with which I looked at the woods.  I found that children had been so lost among their thickets as hardly to be found again; and that two poor little orphans, left there on purpose, had lain down and died of hunger and weariness; and the birds covered them over with leaves.  Strange birds I thought there were in the woods.  Then the fairies that dwelt there, and the strange elfin creatures, and the perils that travellers fell into with robbers and wild beasts; and still I referred the scene of every story I read directly to those very woods upon the hill-side, although they were so near that I could see them plainly enough from the windows of the cheerful rooms at home.

Time passed along in its usual way; but before I had acquired knowledge or strength of mind enough to correct my early impressions of the woods, I had permission, one bright afternoon in June, to go with an older sister to a strawberry meadow across the creek.  We were accompanied by some little maidens, who were older and more adventurous than me; and so it happened that when we did not find the fruit so abundant as we could wish, they persuaded us to go into another field, and then into another, I little thought where, until I became suddenly sensible of a shaded light around me, of a breeze a little cooler than that which tempered the warm air of the valley, and a low, wild music that I had never heard before; and looking up, I saw that we were actually upon the ascent of the hill which led up to the dreaded woods.