“Dear Miss Amhurst, I am looking every day for a letter from you, but none has yet been received by the Admiralty, who, when they get one, will forward it to whatever part of the world I happen to be in.”

CHAPTER VIII

 “When Johnny comes marching home”

A summer hotel that boasts a thousand acres of forest, more or less, which serve the purposes of a back-yard, affords its guests, even if all its multitude of rooms are occupied, at least one spot for each visitor to regard as his or her favorite nook.  So large an extent of woodland successfully defies landscape gardening.  It insists on being left alone, and its very immensity raises a financial barrier against trimly-kept gravel walks.  There were plenty of landscape garden walks in the immediate vicinity of the hotel, and some of them ambitiously penetrated into the woods, relapsing from the civilization of beaten gravel into a primitive thicket trail, which, however, always led to some celebrated bit of picturesqueness:  a waterfall, or a pulpit rock upstanding like a tower, or the fancied resemblance of a human face carved by Nature from the cliff, or a view-point jutting out over the deep chasm of the valley, which usually supported a rustic summer house or pavilion where unknown names were carved on the woodwork—­ the last resort of the undistinguished to achieve immortality by means of a jack-knife.

Dorothy discovered a little Eden of her own, to which no discernible covert-way led, for it was not conspicuous enough to obtain mention in the little gratis guide which the hotel furnished—­ a pamphlet on coated paper filled with half-tone engravings, and half-extravagant eulogies of what it proclaimed to be, an earthly paradise, with the rates by the day or week given on the cover page to show on what terms this paradise might be enjoyed.

Dorothy’s bower was green, and cool, and crystal, the ruggedness of the rocks softened by the wealth of foliage.  A very limpid spring, high up and out of sight among the leaves, sent its waters tinkling down the face of the cliff, ever filling a crystal-clear lakelet at the foot, which yet was never full.  Velvety and beautiful as was the moss surrounding this pond, it was nevertheless too damp to form an acceptable couch for a human being, unless that human being were brave enough to risk the rheumatic inconveniences which followed Rip Van Winkle’s long sleep in these very regions, so Dorothy always carried with her from the hotel a feather-weight, spider’s-web hammock, which she deftly slung between two saplings, their light suppleness giving an almost pneumatic effect to this fairy net spread in a fairy glen; and here the young woman swayed luxuriously in the relaxing delights of an indolence still too new to have become commonplace or wearisome.