The boys tramped over all their favourite bits of country, and the girls visited all their best beloved haunts, every one of them dear from a thousand charming associations. They looked for the last time in Mirror Pool, and saw the reflection of their faces—rather grave faces just then, over the leave-taking.
The water-mirror might have been glad to keep the picture for ever on its surface—Margery with her sleek braids and serene forehead; Polly, with saucy nose and mischievous eyes, laughing at you like a merry water-sprite; Bell, with her brilliant cheeks glowing like two roses just fallen in the brook; and Gold Elsie, who, if you had put a frame of green leaves about her delicate face and yellow locks, would have looked up at you like a water-lily.
They wafted a farewell to Pico Negro, and having got rid of the boys, privately embraced a certain Whispering Tree under whose singing branches they had been wont to lie and listen to all the murmuring that went on in the forest.
Then they clambered into the great thorough-brace wagon, where they all sat in gloomy silence for ten minutes, while Dicky’s tan terrier was found for the fourth time that morning; and the long train, with its baggage-carts, its saddle-horses and its dogged little pack-mules, moved down the rocky steeps that led to civilisation. The gate that shut them in from the county road and the outer world was opened for the last time, and shut with a clang, and it was all over—their summer in a cañon!
FOOTNOTES.
[100a] Foot-notes by a rival of the Countess.
[100b] Is that spelled right?
[100c] Fifty miles an hour, Jack says.
[100d] Poetic licence.