Leaving behind him the business quarter of the town, he passed through pleasant streets bordered with trees, and almost immediately found himself amid scenes clothed with all the freshness of the country.  Handsome mansions here and there dotted the landscape, with pretty little parks, enclosing orange-trees and magnolias, surrounded with hedges of holly, in whose foliage numerous little foraging birds were busy in the sunshine.  The young man looked at these dwellings with an exile’s longing at his heart.  He imagined groups of parents and children, brothers and sisters, under those sheltering roofs, all strangers to him, an orphan, alone in the world.  The pensiveness of his mood gradually gave place to more cheerful thoughts.  Visions of prosperous business and a happy home rose before him, as he walked briskly toward the hills south of the city.  The intervals between the houses increased in length, and he soon found himself in a little forest of pines.  Emerging from this, he came suddenly in sight of an elegant white villa, with colonnaded portico and spacious verandas.  He approached it by a path through a grove, the termination of which had grown into the semblance of a Gothic arch, by the interlacing of two trees, one with glossy evergreen leaves, the other yellow with the tints of autumn.  Vines had clambered to the top, and hung in light festoons from the branches.  The foliage, fluttering in a gentle breeze, caused successive ripples of sun-flecks, which chased each other over trunks and boughs, and joined in wayward dance with the shadows on the ground.

Arrested by this unusual combination of light and shade, color and form, the young man stood still for a moment to gaze upon it.  He was thinking to himself that nothing could add to the perfection of its beauty, when suddenly there came dancing under the arch a figure that seemed like the fairy of those woods, a spirit of the mosses and the vines.  She was a child, apparently five or six years old, with large brown eyes, and a profusion of dark hair.  Her gypsy hat, ornamented with scarlet ribbons and a garland of red holly-berries, had fallen back on her shoulders, and her cheeks were flushed with exercise.  A pretty little white dog was with her, leaping up eagerly for a cluster of holly-berries which she playfully shook above his head.  She whirled swiftly round and round the frisking animal, her long red ribbons flying on the breeze, and then she paused, all aglow, swaying herself back and forth, like a flower on its stem.  A flock of doves, as if attracted toward her, came swooping down from the sky, revolving in graceful curves above her head, their white breasts glistening in the sunshine.  The aerial movements of the child were so full of life and joy, she was so in harmony with the golden day, the waving vines, and the circling doves, that the whole scene seemed like an allegro movement in music, and she a charming little melody floating through it all.