“And see there where those branches touch the water,” she soon continued; “might not that have been the very place where poor Ophelia lost her life? Listen!
‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;’
Isn’t that a perfect description of this very spot? And then:
‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows,—’
Just see the violets all about us here! There are the ‘pale cowslips,’ too! Do you see? Oh, it’s wonderful,—wonderful to find so many of the very flowers which Shakespeare loved and talked of so much!—the daisy, the musk-rose and woodbine! There’s some right by your foot, Betty. But come, come, we really must go now! We’ll go back by the field above, where it is not so steep and dark. Come, John!”
So they hurriedly retraced their steps toward the town. In skirting the fields on the hill-top, they once had to pick their way with some difficulty through holes in bristling hedges, and Mrs. Pitt and the girls were forced to run away from a buck, but these were little incidents to which they were all quite equal, and they arrived at the Red Horse Hotel, nothing daunted, just as the dinner-gong sounded loudly.