----'the leanings Of the close trees o'er the brim, Had a sound beneath their leaves.'
And--I will borrow two lines more to help out my confession--
'Driftings of my dream do light All the skies, by day and night.'
But truly, it is mere drift-wood, not fit even to build a 'castle in the air.'
I was startled from my musings by a rustling of the branches behind me, and I turned, expecting--not to see a bear or a fox, but my fancies incorporate. The leaves were still quivering, but I saw no apparent cause for so much disturbance. I probably had startled a brace of partridges from their roost. They brought me back to the actual world, and I came home to an excellent dinner, which I found my father practically commending.
_Sunday._--My father has brought us up to so scrupulous an observance of the Puritan Sabbath, that I was rather surprised, this morning, by his proposition to drive over to the Flume. His equanimity had been disturbed by finding one of the horses that had brought us here, seemingly in a dying condition. He was one of the 'team' that had taken us on to Mount Willard, and my father had then prophesied that he would suffer from the driver's neglect to blanket him. He was in nowise comforted by the verification of his 'I told you so!' but walked to and fro from the stable, watching the remedies administered, and vituperating all youth as negligent, reckless, and hard-hearted. I think it was half to get rid of this present annoyance that he proposed the drive to the Flume, saying, as he did so: 'These mountains are a great temple, my children; it matters not much where we stand to worship.'
We stopped for a half-hour at a little fall just by the roadside, called by the mountain-folk 'The Basin,' and by fine people, 'The Emerald Bowl,' a name suggested by the exquisite hue of the water, which truly is of as soft and bright a green as an emerald's. The stream has curiously cut its way through a rock, whitened, smoothed, and almost polished by its fretting, which overhangs the deep, circular bowl like a canopy, or rather, like a half-uplifted lid, its inner side being mottled and colored like a beautiful shell. The stream glides over the brim of its sylvan bowl and goes on its way rejoicing. We loitered here for a half-hour watching the golden and crimson leaves that had dropped in, and that lay in rich mosaics in the eddies of the stream.
