They listened accordingly.  The younger children had been put to bed in another room, but with an open door between; so that they could be heard talking busily among themselves.  One and all seemed to have caught the infection from the fireside circle, and were outvying each other in wild wishes and childish projects of what they would do when they came to be men and women.  At length a little boy, instead of addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.

“I’ll tell you what I wish, mother,” cried he:  “I want you and father and grandma’m, and all of us, and the stranger too, to start right away and go and take a drink out of the basin of the Flume.”

Nobody could help laughing at the child’s notion of leaving a warm bed and dragging them from a cheerful fire to visit the basin of the Flume—­a brook which tumbles over the precipice deep within the Notch.

The boy had hardly spoken, when a wagon rattled along the road and stopped a moment before the door.  It appeared to contain two or three men who were cheering their hearts with the rough chorus of a song which resounded in broken notes between the cliffs, while the singers hesitated whether to continue their journey or put up here for the night.

“Father,” said the girl, “they are calling you by name.”

But the good man doubted whether they had really called him, and was unwilling to show himself too solicitous of gain by inviting people to patronize his house.  He therefore did not hurry to the door, and, the lash being soon applied, the travellers plunged into the Notch, still singing and laughing, though their music and mirth came back drearily from the heart of the mountain.

“There, mother!” cried the boy, again; “they’d have given us a ride to the Flume.”

Again they laughed at the child’s pertinacious fancy for a night-ramble.  But it happened that a light cloud passed over the daughter’s spirit; she looked gravely into the fire and drew a breath that was almost a sigh.  It forced its way, in spite of a little struggle to repress it.  Then, starting and blushing, she looked quickly around the circle, as if they had caught a glimpse into her bosom.  The stranger asked what she had been thinking of.

“Nothing,” answered she, with a downcast smile; “only I felt lonesome just then.”

“Oh, I have always had a gift of feeling what is in other people’s hearts,” said he, half seriously.  “Shall I tell the secrets of yours?  For I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and complains of lonesomeness at her mother’s side.  Shall I put these feelings into words?”

“They would not be a girl’s feelings any longer if they could be put into words,” replied the mountain-nymph, laughing, but avoiding his eye.