The young lady had taken the natural precaution to leave it fastened, carrying the key with her, no doubt,—­unless; indeed, she had got out by the window, which was not far from the ground.  Dick could get in at this window easily enough, but he did not like the idea of leaving his footprints in the flower-bed just under it.  He returned to his own chamber, and held a council of war with himself.

He put his head out of his own window and looked at that beneath.  It was open.  He then went to one of his trunks, which he unlocked, and began carefully removing its contents.  What these were we need not stop to mention,—­only remarking that there were dresses of various patterns, which might afford an agreeable series of changes, and in certain contingencies prove eminently useful.  After removing a few of these, he thrust his hand to the very bottom of the remaining pile and drew out a coiled strip of leather many yards in length, ending in a noose,—­a tough, well-seasoned lasso, looking as if it had seen service and was none the worse for it.  He uncoiled a few yards of this and fastened it to the knob of a door.  Then he threw the loose end out of the window so that it should hang by the open casement of Elsie’s room.  By this he let himself down opposite her window, and with a slight effort swung himself inside the room.  He lighted a match, found a candle, and, having lighted that, looked curiously about him, as Clodius might have done when he smuggled himself in among the Vestals.

Elsie’s room was almost as peculiar as her dress and ornaments.  It was a kind of museum of objects, such as the woods are full of to those who have eyes to see them, but many of them such as only few could hope to reach, even if they knew where to look for them.  Crows’ nests, which are never found but in the tall trees, commonly enough in the forks of ancient hemlocks, eggs of rare birds, which must have taken a quick eye and a hard climb to find and get hold of, mosses and ferns of unusual aspect, and quaint monstrosities of vegetable growth, such as Nature delights in, showed that Elsie had her tastes and fancies like any naturalist or poet.

Nature, when left to her own freaks in the forest, is grotesque and fanciful to the verge of license, and beyond it.  The foliage of trees does not always require clipping to make it look like an image of life.  From those windows at Canoe Meadow, among the mountains, we could see all summer long a lion rampant, a Shanghai chicken, and General Jackson on horseback, done by Nature in green leaves, each with a single tree.  But to Nature’s tricks with boughs and roots and smaller vegetable growths there is no end.  Her fancy is infinite, and her humor not always refined.  There is a perpetual reminiscence of animal life in her rude caricatures, which sometimes actually reach the point of imitating the complete human figure, as in that extraordinary specimen which nobody will believe to be genuine, except the men of science, and of which the discreet reader may have a glimpse by application in the proper quarter.