wound along the mimic ravines or gently climbed the hilly ridges.  Among these stones and sharing the soil with them, uprose the cedars, pines, hemlocks, and a pretty intermingling of deciduous trees; not of very tall or vigorous growth, for the land favoured them not, but elegant and picturesque in varied and sweet degree.  That it pleased those eyes to which it had been long familiar, and long strange, was in no measure.

Leaving the beaten paths, the brother and sister turned to the right of the first little ravine they had entered, just where a large boulder crowned with a tuft of ferns marked the spot, and toiled up a very rough and steep rising.  Winthrop’s help was needed here to enable Winnie to keep footing at all, much more to make her way to the top.  There were steep descents of ground, spread with dead pine leaves, a pretty red-brown carpeting most dainty to the eyes but very unsure to the foot; —­ there were sharp turns in the rocky way, with huge granitic obstacles before and around them; —­ Winnie could not keep on her feet without Winthrop’s strong arm; although in many a rough pitch and steep rise of the way, young hickories and oaks lent their aid to her hand that was free.  Mosses and lichens, brown and black with the summer’s heat, clothed the rocks and dressed out their barrenness; green tufts of fern nodded in many a nook, and kept their greenness still; and huckleberry bushes were on every hand, in every spare place, and standing full of the unreaped black and blue harvest.  And in the very path, under their feet, sprang many an unassuming little green plant, that in the Spring had lifted its head in glorious beauty with some delicate crown of a flower.  A stranger would have made nothing of them; but Winnie and Winthrop knew them all, crowned or uncrowned.

“It’s pretty hard getting up here, Governor —­ I guess I haven’t grown strong since I was here last; and these old yellow pines are so rotten I am afraid to take hold of anything —­ but your hand.  It’s good you are sure-footed.  O look at the Solomon’s Seal —­ don’t you wish it was in flower!”

“If it was, we shouldn’t have any huckleberries,” said her brother.

“There’s a fine parcel of them, isn’t there, Winthrop?  O let’s stop and pick these —­ there are nice ones —­ and let me rest.”

Winnie sat down to breathe, with her arm round the trunk of a pine tree, drinking in everything with her eyes, while that cluster of bushes was stripped of its most promising berries; and then a few steps more brought Winthrop and Winnie to the top of the height.