Meanwhile, the fair jockeys, after being repulsed from the highway, had betaken themselves to the park, where they galloped about for awhile, expecting the Captain. As they looked back ever and anon upon the road, they caught sight of the three young men, whom Hunter had seen pass the Traveller's Rest but a short time after the ladies themselves.
"Was ever any thing more provoking!" cried Miss Falconer. "Those three rural coxcombs, the doctor and the two lawyers! Will no one have the humanity to break a leg, or his neighbour's bones, so as to afford them some employment, and us a little peace and quiet? Must we be ever afflicted with their admiration and homage? It is more than a misfortune to be a fine woman in the country, where merit, as the old villanous poet says of female attraction in general,
'In its narrow circle gathers,
Nothing but chaff, and straw, and feathers.'
But we will escape them, if it be only for an hour. Down, Kate! down, ere they have seen you! Whip your filly, and I warrant me, she will find her way to the stable. We will hide in the woods, as I think we have done before from the same fellows."
Laughing heartily at a device that spoke so little in favour of the attractive qualities of the village beaux, the Captain's daughter leaped lightly from her palfrey, as Miss Falconer had done before her; and both flourishing their whips at the same time, the liberated animals fled towards the buildings, whilst their riders lost not a moment in burying themselves from sight, by plunging into a grove, from which they continued to ramble, until they had reached a little brook, as wild and merry as themselves, that gushed over a remote corner of the park, and then hid its gleaming waters in a hollow, overgrown with forest-trees.
Into this dell they made their way, following the brook, until it fell into a larger streamlet, which was indeed no other than Hawk-Hollow Run, so often mentioned before. Its banks were strown with huge masses of rock, gray and mossy, through which the waters, swollen by late rains, rushed with impetuous speed, and sometimes with great noise and fury, while its murmurs were rendered yet more impressively sonorous by the hollow reverberations of the forest. Proceeding farther, the woods, which now invested the hills on either bank, and the rocks, assumed a sterner character of wildness and grandeur. Hemlocks, and other gloomy trees, with here a rugged maple, or ghostly beech, and there a gibbous oak, springing from interstices of the rocks, seemed, with their knotted and contorted roots, to bind the fragments together; while their thick and arched boughs flung over these ruins of nature a chilly and everlasting gloom. Aloft, on the hill, the grape-vine swung its massy locks from the oak, and, in the lower depths of the ravine, for such it was, the swamp-honeysuckle shook its fragrant clusters, and green dodders rose on the stump of the decaying birch. When their path had conducted the fair wanderers beyond the immediate vicinity of the falls and rapids, these exchanged their murmurs for other sounds not less agreeable. The chattering of jays, the lonely-sounding whistle of the wood-robin, the cry of a startled dove, and now and then the sudden whir of a pheasant, starting from his lair under a fallen trunk, and bustling noisily out of sight,—the small uproar of young rabbits, bouncing out of a brier or a bush of ferns, and galloping away up the hill,—the dropping of half-eaten nuts from the paw of the retreating squirrel, and a dozen other such noises as invade the solitude of the forest, here added a double loneliness and charm to a scene long since a favourite with the maidens.
"Now are we safe," cried Miss Falconer, with exultation; "for no one having seen us take this course, our admirers, were they even spirited enough to pursue, would think of twenty more reasonable places to seek us in than this. But let us make assurance doubly sure. Don't tell me you are tired—what business has a country-wench to be tired? We will go down to the sycamore, and then rest us awhile, till the sun peeps red in the hollow. I will bring you to your confession; for, having failed in my precious designs upon the old witch there, (may Monsieur Red-jacket sleep harder to-night than he ever did before, for a Marplot!) and my curiosity being so much the more inflammable, I am resolved to learn what I can, and that without ceremony. So come along, Kate,—
'Kate of my consolation,
'Kate of Kate-hall, my super-dainty Kate,'
as the bear of Verona said of your amiable namesake; all that you have now to do, is to be, like her, 'Kate conformable.'"
Thus whiling away the fatigue of climbing over rocks and creeping through thickets, with a gay rattle of discourse, the black-eyed maiden dragged her companion along, until they reached a place where the stream was contracted by the projection, on the one bank, of a huge mass of slaty rock, and, on the other, by the protrusion of the roots of a gigantic plane-tree,—the sycamore, or buttonwood, of vulgar speech. Above them, and beyond the crag, the channel of the rivulet widened into a pool; and there was a plot of green turf betwixt the water and the hill, on the farther bank, whereon fairies, if such had ever made their way to the World of Twilight, might have loved to gambol under the light of the moon. A hill shut up the glen at its upper extremity; and it was hemmed in, on the left, by the rocky and wooded declivity, over which the maidens had already passed. Over this, and just behind a black rounded shoulder that it thrust into the glen, a broad ray from the evening sun shot across the stream, and fell, in a rich yellow flood, over the vacant plot. There was something almost Arcadian in this little solitude; and if, instead of two well-bred maidens perched upon the roots of the sycamore, on seats chosen with a due regard to the claims of their dresses, there had been a batch of country girls romping in the water, a passing Actæon might have dreamed of the piny Gargaphy, its running well,—fons tenui perlucidus unda,—and the bright creatures of the mythic day, that once animated the waters of that solitary grot. But the fairy and the wood-nymph are alike unknown in America. Poetic illusion has not yet consecrated her glens and fountains; her forests nod in uninvaded gloom, her rivers roll in unsanctified silence, and even her ridgy mountains lift up their blue tops in unphantomed solitude. Association sleeps, or it reverts only to the vague mysteries of speculation. Perhaps