You should wear a satin gown
       (Swinging high, swinging low),
     All with ribbons falling down
       (Swinging, oh!). 
     And your little twinkling feet,
     O my Pretty and my Sweet! 
     Should be shod with silver neat
       (Swinging high, swinging low)—­
     Shod with silver slippers neat
       (Swinging, oh!).

     But I’m not a fairy, Pet
       (Swinging high, swinging low),
     Am not even a king, as yet
       (Swinging, oh!). 
     So all that I can do
     Is to kiss your little shoe,
     And to make a queen of you
       (Swinging high, swinging low),
     Make a fairy queen of you
       (Swinging, oh!).

CHAPTER VI.

HARTLEY’S GLEN.

How many girls, among all the girls who may read this little book, have seen with their own eyes Hartley’s Glen?  Not one, perhaps, save Brynhild and the Rosicrucian, for whom the book is written.  But the others must try to see it with my eyes, for it is a fair place and a sweet as any on earth.  Behind the house, and just under the brow of the little hill that shelters it, a narrow path dips down to the right, and goes along for a bit, with a dimpled clover-meadow on the one hand, and a stone wall, all warm with golden and red-brown lichens, on the other.  Follow this, and you come to a little gateway, beyond which is a thick plantation of larches, with one grim old red cedar keeping watch over them.  If he regards you favorably, you may pass on, down the narrow path that winds among the larches, whose feathery finger-tips brush your cheek and try to hold you back, as if they willed not that you should go farther, to see the wonders which they can never behold.

But you leave them behind, and come out into the sunshine, in a little green glade which might be the ballroom of the fairy queen.  On your right, gleaming through clumps of alder and black birch, is a pond,—­the home of cardinal flowers and gleaming jewel-weed; a little farther on, a thicket of birch and maple, from which comes a musical sound of falling water.  Follow this sound, keeping to the path, which winds away to the left.  Stop! now you may step aside for a moment, and part the heavy hanging branches, and look, where the water falls over a high black wall, into a sombre pool, shut in by fantastic rocks, and shaded from all sunshine by a dense fringe of trees.  This is the milldam, and the pond above is no natural one, but the enforced repose and outspreading of a merry brown brook, which now shows its true nature, and escaping from the gloomy pool, runs scolding and foaming down through a wilderness of rocks and trees.  You cannot follow it there,—­though I have often done so in my barefoot days,—­so come back to the path again.  There are pines overhead now, and the ground is slippery with the fallen needles, and the air is sweet—­ah! how sweet!—­with their warm fragrance.  See! here is the old mill itself, now disused and falling to decay.  Here the path becomes a little precipice, and you must scramble as best you can down two or three rough steps, and round the corner of the ruined mill.  This is a millstone, this great round thing like a granite cheese, half buried in the ground; and here is another, which makes a comfortable seat, if you are tired.