and cumbered with bowlders which have tumbled from somewhere and lodged in the most extraordinary groupings, became my favorite walk of a morning.  There was a footpath in it, well-trodden at first, but gradually fading out as it became more like a ladder than a path, and I soon discovered that no other city feet than mine were likely to scale a certain rough slope which seemed the end of the ravine.  With the aid of the tough laurel-stems I climbed to the top, passed through a cleft as narrow as a doorway, and presently found myself in a little upper dell, as wild and sweet and strange as one of the pictures that haunts us on the brink of sleep.

There was a pond—­no, rather a bowl—­of water in the centre; hardly twenty yards across, yet the sky in it was so pure and far down that the circle of rocks and summer foliage inclosing it seemed like a little planetary ring, floating off alone through space.  I can’t explain the charm of the spot, nor the selfishness which instantly suggested that I should keep the discovery to myself.  Ten years earlier I should have looked around for some fair spirit to be my “minister,” but now—­

One forenoon—­I think it was the third or fourth time I had visited the place—­I was startled to find the dent of a heel in the earth, half-way up the slope.  There had been rain during the night and the earth was still moist and soft.  It was the mark of a woman’s boot, only to be distinguished from that of a walking-stick by its semicircular form.  A little higher, I found the outline of a foot, not so small as to awake an ecstasy, but with a suggestion of lightness, elasticity, and grace.  If hands were thrust through holes in a board-fence, and nothing of the attached bodies seen, I can easily imagine that some would attract and others repel us:  with footprints the impression is weaker, of course, but we can not escape it.  I am not sure whether I wanted to find the unknown wearer of the boot within my precious personal solitude:  I was afraid I should see her, while passing through the rocky crevice, and yet was disappointed when I found no one.

But on the flat, warm rock overhanging the tarn—­my special throne—­lay some withering wild-flowers and a book!  I looked up and down, right and left:  there was not the slightest sign of another human life than mine.  Then I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and listened:  there were only the noises of bird and squirrel, as before.  At last, I took up the book, the flat breadth of which suggested only sketches.  There were, indeed, some tolerable studies of rocks and trees on the first pages; a few not very striking caricatures, which seemed to have been commenced as portraits, but recalled no faces I knew; then a number of fragmentary notes, written in pencil.  I found no name, from first to last; only, under the sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious that the initials could hardly be discovered unless one already knew them.