White star-flowers and purple hepaticas nodded on their slender stems, while the crimson and white wood-sorrel fairly ran wild, creeping in and out through bush and brier, like a host of fairies in striped petticoats.
"A nice place enough," said the child, tossing her head, "for those who know of nothing better; but I can't stop to admire such simple things. Gems and jewels are the only flowers I care for."
The shadows were growing longer and deeper all around her, for the sun was almost down, and as she looked up through the trees she could see the pale face of the young moon peeping down at her through the branches.
"Oh, if the wise old woman had only come with me!" said the child, in a whisper. The shadows took on strange, ghostly shapes, and the tall pine-trees, so high that their topmost branches seemed to rest against the sky, sang softly and slowly and all together,
"Take care—take care—oh—oh—ough."
She had never realized before how full of sounds the stillness of the deep woods may be, and it seemed to her as if the rustling of the leaves and the singing of the wind were strange unearthly voices calling out to her and warning her to go back. But in spite of the rustling leaves and the mournful sighing of the pines the little girl hurried on. Perhaps, just because of them, she hurried all the faster, for she felt quite sure that she was nearing the place to which she had been directed. And in a few moments she saw just before her the gray moss-grown rocks piled one above another which the wise old woman of Hollowbush had described, and heard far below the rushing and tumbling of a brook.
Surely I must have been deceived! she thought.
Here was no strange country sown with jewels, but simply a rocky ravine, where ferns waved in the wind, clinging to the rocks, and catching the spray from the water as it bubbled and hissed and fell in a snowy pool below.
"This can't be the place," said the child, as she looked around; "but while I am here I may as well see what it is."
So she clambered over the loose stones and decaying logs till she reached the level of the stream, and there, strangely enough, scattered among broken bits of granite, were small bright stones of a deep wine-color. "These are not diamonds," she said to herself, "but they are too pretty to lie neglected here, whatever they may be."