was with a sudden toss of her head which only for a moment cleared her
forehead and eyes from the thick veil. Her gesture, like that of an
animal, had a remarkable mechanical precision, the quickness of which
seemed wonderful in a woman. The huntsmen were amazed to see her
suddenly leap up on the branch of an apple-tree, and sit there with
the ease of a bird. She gathered an apple and ate it; then she dropped
to the ground with the graceful ease we admire in a squirrel. Her
limbs possessed an elasticity which took from every movement the
slightest appearance of effort or constraint. She played upon the
turf, rolling herself about like a child; then, suddenly, she flung
her feet and hands forward, and lay at full length on the grass, with
the grace and natural ease of a young cat asleep in the sun. Thunder
sounded in the distance, and she turned suddenly, rising on her hands
and knees with the rapidity of a dog which hears a coming footstep.

The effects of this singular attitude was to separate into two heavy
masses the volume of her black hair, which now fell on either side of
her head, and allowed the two spectators to admire the white shoulders
glistening like daisies in a field, and the throat, the perfection of
which allowed them to judge of the other beauties of her figure.

Suddenly she uttered a distressful cry and rose to her feet. Her
movements succeeded each other with such airiness and grace that she
seemed not a creature of this world but a daughter of the atmosphere,
as sung in the poems of Ossian. She ran toward a piece of water, shook
one of her legs lightly to cast off her shoe, and began to dabble her
foot, white as alabaster, in the current, admiring, perhaps, the
undulations she thus produced upon the surface of the water. Then she
knelt down at the edge of the stream and amused herself, like a child,
in casting in her long tresses and pulling them abruptly out, to watch