FOR several days I saw nothing of Preston. He was hardly missed.
I found that such a parade as that which pleased me the first morning came off twice daily; and other military displays, more extended and more interesting, were to be looked for every day at irregular times. I failed not of one. So surely as the roll of the drum or a strain of music announced that something of the sort was on hand, I caught up my hat and was ready. And so was Dr. Sandford. Mrs. Sandford would often not go; but the doctor's hat was as easily put on as mine, and as readily; and he attended me, I used to think, as patiently as a great Newfoundland dog. As patient, and as supreme. The evolutions of soldiers and clangour of martial music were nothing to him, but he must wait upon his little mistress. I mean of course the Newfoundland dog; not Dr. Sandford.
"Will you go for a walk, Daisy?" he said, the morning of the third or fourth day. "There is nothing doing on the plain, I find."
"A walk? Oh, yes!" I said. "Where shall we go?"
"To look for wonderful things," he said.
"Only don't take the child among the rattlesnakes," said Mrs. Sandford. "They are wonderful, I suppose, but not pleasant. You will get her all tanned, Grant!"
But I took these hints of danger as coolly as the doctor himself did; and another of my West Point delights began.
We went beyond the limits of the post, passed out at one of the gates which shut it in from the common world, and forgot for the moment drums and fifes. Up the mountain side, under the shadow of the trees most of the time, though along a good road; with the wild hill at one hand rising sharp above us. Turning round that, we finally plunged down into a grand dell of the hills, leaving all roads behind and all civilization, and having a whole mountain between us and the West Point plain. I suppose it might have been a region for rattlesnakes, but I never thought of them. I had never seen such a place in my life. From the bottom of the gorge where we were, the opposite mountain side sloped up to a great height; wild, lonely, green with a wealth of wood, stupendous, as it seemed to me, in its towering expanse. At our backs, a rocky and green precipice rose up more steeply yet, though to a lesser elevation, topped with the grey walls of the old fort, the other face of which I had seen from our hotel. A wilderness of nature it was; wild and stern. I feasted on it. Dr. Sandford was moving about, looking for something; he helped me over rocks, and jumped me across morasses, and kept watchful guard of me; but else he let me alone; he did not talk, and I had quite enough without. The strong delight of the novelty, the freedom, the delicious wild things around, the bracing air, the wonderful lofty beauty,
made me as happy as I thought I could be. I feasted on the rocks and wild verdure, the mosses and ferns and lichen, the scrub forest and tangled undergrowth, among which we plunged and scrambled: above all, on those vast leafy walls which shut in the glen, and almost took away my breath with their towering lonely grandeur. All this time Dr. Sandford was as busy as a bee, in quest of something. He was a great geologist and mineralogist; a lover of all natural science, but particularly of chemistry and geology. When I stopped to look at him, I thought he must have put his own tastes in his pocket for several days past that he might gratify mine. I was standing on a rock, high and dry and grey with lichen; he was poking about in some swampy ground.