those who were old enough to be careful in crossing the rustic bridges,
I sometimes played on summer afternoons;--gathered the prettiest flowers
in the sweetest little woods, and dipped my feet into the clear running
water.

Beyond these there lay less frequented fields, which rose gradually, at
no very great distance, into a range of hills as green as the valley
below. One of them was covered all over its summit, and a little way
down its sides, with some dark old woods. The trees which grew there
were very tall, and so large that their thick and heavy tops seemed to
crowd together, so that you might have walked on them almost as well as
upon the hill itself. I loved sometimes, when the air was full of the
bright sunshine, to look at the rich shades of green upon those
tree-tops; but if ever my eye rested, for a moment only, upon the dark
and mysterious avenues which led into the depths of the wood beneath
them, there would creep such a chill to my heart,--such a feeling of
dread would come over me,--that I turned quickly to the glad-looking
homestead, that I might again grow warm and happy.

At first it was probably no more than the idea that those woods formed a
limit to the world of light and gladness in which I lived. My eye could
not penetrate their dimness, and with a childish, human feeling I shrank
from the undiscovered and unknown. But as I grew older, and read the
stories in the small books which were given to me for presents, or lent
by my little friends, I had other and plainer reasons for the
apprehensive feeling with which I looked at the woods. I found that
children had been so lost among their thickets as hardly to be found
again; and that two poor little orphans, left there on purpose, had lain
down and died of hunger and weariness; and the birds covered them over
with leaves. Strange birds I thought there were in the woods. Then the