For some little distance there was a rude wagon-track, very rough, probably made for the convenience of getting wood.  It stood thick with pretty large stones or heads of rock; but it was softly grass-grown between the stones and gave at least a clear way through the woods, upon which the morning light if not the morning sun beamed fairly.  A light touch of white frost lay upon the grass and covered the rocks with bloom, the promise of a mild day.  After a little, the roadway descended into a bit of smooth meadow, well walled in with trees, and lost itself there.  In the tree-tops the morning sun was glittering; it could not get to the bottom yet; but up there among the leaves it gave a bright shimmering prophecy of what it would do; it was a sparkle of heavenly light touching the earth.  Elizabeth had never seen it before; she had never in her life been in the woods at so early an hour.  She stood still to look.  It was impossible to help feeling the light of that glittering promise; its play upon the leaves was too joyous, too pure, too fresh.  She felt her heart grow stronger and her breath come freer.  What was the speech of those light-touched leaves, she might not have told; something her spirit took knowledge of while her reason did not.  Or had not leisure to do; for if she did not get to Mountain Spring in good season she would not be home for breakfast.  Yet she had plenty of time, but she did not wish to run short.  So she went on her way.

From the valley meadow for half a mile, it was not much more or much better than a cow-path, beaten a little by the feet of the herdsman seeking his cattle or of an occasional foot-traveller to Mountain Spring.  It was very rough indeed.  Often Elizabeth must make quite a circuit among cat-briars and huckleberry bushes and young underwood, or keep the path at the expense of stepping up and stepping down again over a great stone or rock blocking up the whole way.  Sometimes the track was only marked over the grey lichens of an immense head of granite that refused moss and vegetation of every other kind; sometimes it wound among thick alder bushes by the edge of wet ground; and at all times its course was among a wilderness of uncared-for woodland, overgrown with creepers and vines tangled with underbrush, and thickly strewn with larger and smaller fragments and boulders of granite rock.  But how beautiful it was!  The alders, reddish and soft-tinted, looked when the sun struck through them as if they were exotics out of witch-land; the Cornus family, from beautiful dogwood a dozen feet high stretching over Elizabeth’s head, to little humble nameless plants at her feet, had edged and parted their green leaves with most dainty clear hues of madder lake; white birches and hickories glimmered in the sunlight like trees of gold, the first with stems of silver; sear leaves strewed the way; and fresh pines and hemlocks stretched out their arms amidst the changing foliage, with their evergreen promise and performance.  The morning air and the morning walk no doubt had something to do with the effect of the whole; but Elizabeth thought, with all the beauty her eyes had ever seen they had never been more bewitched than they were that day.