this girl which was in some way leading her to seek his presence.  She did not lift her glittering eyes upon him as at first.  It seemed strange that she did not, for they were surely her natural weapons of conquest.  Her color did not come and go like that of young girls under excitement.  She had a clear brunette complexion, a little sun-touched, it may be,—­for the master noticed once, when her necklace was slightly displaced, that a faint ring or band of a little lighter shade than the rest of the surface encircled her neck.  What was the slight peculiarity of her enunciation, when she read?  Not a lisp, certainly, but the least possible imperfection in articulating some of the lingual sounds,—­just enough to be noticed at first, and quite forgotten after being a few times heard.

Not a word about the flower on either side.  It was not uncommon for the schoolgirls to leave a rose or pink or wild flower on the teacher’s desk.  Finding it in the Virgil was nothing, after all; it was a little delicate flower, that looked as if it were made to press, and it was probably shut in by accident at the particular place where he found it.  He took it into his head to examine it in a botanical point of view.  He found it was not common,—­that it grew only in certain localities,—­and that one of these was among the rocks of the eastern spur of The Mountain.

It happened to come into his head how the Swiss youth climb the sides of the Alps to find the flower called the Edelweiss for the maidens whom they wish to please.  It is a pretty fancy, that of scaling some dangerous height before the dawn, so as to gather the flower in its freshness, that the favored maiden may wear it to church on Sunday morning, a proof at once of her lover’s devotion and his courage.  Mr. Bernard determined to explore the region where this flower was said to grow, that he might see where the wild girl sought the blossoms of which Nature was so jealous.

It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook his land-voyage of discovery.  He had more curiosity, it may be, than he would have owned; for he had heard of the girl’s wandering habits, and the guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was thinking what the chances were that he should meet her in some strange place, or come upon traces of her which would tell secrets she would not care to have known.

The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with his mind in an excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open.  The trees are always talking, not merely whispering with their leaves, (for every tree talks to itself in that way, even when it stands alone in the middle of a pasture,) but grating their boughs against each other, as old horn-handed farmers press their dry, rustling palms together,—­dropping a nut or a leaf or a twig, clicking to the tap of a woodpecker, or rustling as a squirrel flashes along a branch.  It was now the season of singing-birds, and the woods were haunted with mysterious, tender