first time she looked at it as scenery, as she might have looked at a picture in a gallery.  And in the contagion of Evelyn’s outspoken enthusiasm she was no longer afraid to give timid expression to the latent poetry in her own soul.  And daring to express this, she seemed to herself for the first time to realize vividly the nobility and grace of the landscape.  And yet there was a difference in the appreciation of the two.  More widely read and traveled, Evelyn’s imagination took a wider range of comparison and of admiration, she was appealed to by the large features and the grandiose effects; while Alice noted more the tenderer aspects, the wayside flowers and bushes, the exotic-looking plants, which she longed to domesticate in what might be called the Sunday garden on the terraces in front of her house.  For it is in these little cultivated places by the door-step, places of dreaming in the summer hours after meeting and at sunset, that the New England maiden experiences something of that tender religious sentiment which was not much fed in the barrenness of the Congregational meeting-house.

The Pulpit Rock, in the rough pasture land of Zoar, was reached by a somewhat tedious climb from the lonely farmhouse, in a sheltered nook, through straggling woods and gray pastures.  It was a vast exposed surface rising at a slight angle out of the grass and undergrowth.  Along the upper side was a thin line of bushes, and, pushing these aside, the observer was always startled at the unexpected scene—­as it were the raising of a curtain upon another world.  He stood upon the edge of a sheer precipice of a thousand feet, and looked down upon a green amphitheatre through the bottom of which the brawling river, an amber thread in the summer foliage, seemed trying to get an outlet from this wilderness cul de sac.  From the edge of this precipice the first impulse was to start back in surprise and dread, but presently the observer became reassured of its stability, and became fascinated by the lonesome wildness of the scene.

“Why is it called Pulpit Rock?” asked Mrs. Mavick; “I see no pulpit.”

“I suppose,” said Philip, “the name was naturally suggested to a religious community, whose poetic images are mainly Biblical, and who thought it an advantageous place for a preacher to stand, looking down upon a vast congregation in the amphitheatre.”

“So it is,” exclaimed Evelyn.  “I can see John the Baptist standing here now, and hear his voice crying in the wilderness.”

“Very likely,” said Mrs. Mavick, persisting in her doubt, “of course in Zoar.  Anywhere else in the world it would be called the Lover’s Leap.”

“That is odd,” said Alice; “there was a party of college girls came here two years ago and made up a story about it which was printed, how an Indian maiden pursued by a white man ran up this hill as if she had been a deer, disappeared from his sight through these bushes, and took the fatal leap.  They called it the Indian Maiden’s Rock.  But it didn’t take.  It will always be Pulpit Rock.”