rock and clay passed, the last unsightly chasm crossed--how the waiting
woods opened their long files to receive them! How the children--perhaps
because they had not yet grown quite away from the breast of the
bounteous Mother--threw themselves face downward on her brown bosom with
uncouth caresses, filling the air with their laughter; and how Miss Mary
herself--felinely fastidious and intrenched as she was in the purity of
spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs--forgot all, and ran like a crested
quail at the head of her brood until, romping, laughing, and panting,
with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon
from her throat, she came suddenly and violently, in the heart of the
forest, upon--the luckless Sandy!

The explanations, apologies, and not overwise conversation that ensued
need not be indicated here. It would seem, however, that Miss Mary had
already established some acquaintance with this ex-drunkard. Enough that
he was soon accepted as one of the party; that the children, with that
quick intelligence which Providence gives the helpless, recognized a
friend, and played with his blond beard and long silken mustache, and
took other liberties--as the helpless are apt to do. And when he had
built a fire against a tree, and had shown them other mysteries of
woodcraft, their admiration knew no bounds. At the close of two such
foolish, idle, happy hours he found himself lying at the feet of the
schoolmistress, gazing dreamily in her face, as she sat upon the sloping
hillside weaving wreaths of laurel and syringa, in very much the same
attitude as he had lain when first they met. Nor was the similitude
greatly forced. The weakness of an easy, sensuous nature that had found
a dreamy exaltation in liquor, it is to be feared was now finding an
equal intoxication in love.

I think that Sandy was dimly conscious of this himself. I know that he