Time passed; and the following May, after a gentle shower upon the
mountains--a little shower islanded in misty seas of sunshine; such a
distant shower--and sometimes two, and three, and four of them, all
visible together in different parts--as I love to watch from the
piazza, instead of thunder storms, as I used to, which wrap old
Greylock, like a Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing
among scathed hemlocks there; after, I say, that, gentle shower, I saw a
rainbow, resting its further end just where, in autumn, I had marked the
mole. Fairies there, thought I; remembering that rainbows bring out the
blooms, and that, if one can but get to the rainbow's end, his fortune
is made in a bag of gold. Yon rainbow's end, would I were there, thought
I. And none the less I wished it, for now first noticing what seemed
some sort of glen, or grotto, in the mountain side; at least, whatever
it was, viewed through the rainbow's medium, it glowed like the Potosi
mine. But a work-a-day neighbor said, no doubt it was but some old
barn--an abandoned one, its broadside beaten in, the acclivity its
background. But I, though I had never been there, I knew better.

A few days after, a cheery sunrise kindled a golden sparkle in the same
spot as before. The sparkle was of that vividness, it seemed as if it
could only come from glass. The building, then--if building, after all,
it was--could, at least, not be a barn, much less an abandoned one;
stale hay ten years musting in it. No; if aught built by mortal, it must
be a cottage; perhaps long vacant and dismantled, but this very spring
magically fitted up and glazed.

Again, one noon, in the same direction, I marked, over dimmed tops of
terraced foliage, a broader gleam, as of a silver buckler, held sunwards
over some croucher's head; which gleam, experience in like cases taught,
must come from a roof newly shingled. This, to me, made pretty sure the