the Cambrian fashion, an honour which, to their great surprise, she
always declined. Among these, Harry Ap-Heather, whose father
rented an extensive sheepwalk, and had a thousand she-lambs
wandering in the mountains, was the most strenuous in his suit, and
the most pathetic in his lamentations for her cruelty.

Miss Susannah often wandered among the mountains alone, even to
some distance from the farmhouse. Sometimes she descended into the
bottom of the dingles, to the black rocky beds of the torrents, and
dreamed away hours at the feet of the cataracts. One spot in
particular, from which she had at first shrunk with terror, became
by degrees her favourite haunt. A path turning and returning at
acute angles, led down a steep wood-covered slope to the edge of a
chasm, where a pool, or resting-place of a torrent, lay far below.
A cataract fell in a single sheet into the pool; the pool boiled
and bubbled at the base of the fall, but through the greater part
of its extent, lay calm, deep, and black, as if the cataract had
plunged through it to an unimaginable depth, without disturbing its
eternal repose. At the opposite extremity of the pool, the rocks
almost met at their summits, the trees of the opposite banks
intermingled their leaves, and another cataract plunged from the
pool into a chasm, on which the sunbeams never gleamed. High
above, on both sides, the steep woody slopes of the dingle soared
into the sky; and from a fissure in the rock, on which the little
path terminated, a single gnarled and twisted oak stretched itself
over the pool, forming a fork with its boughs at a short distance
from the rock. Miss Susannah often sat on the rock, with her feet
resting on this tree; in time, she made her seat on the tree
itself, with her feet hanging over the abyss; and at length, she
accustomed herself to lie along upon its trunk, with her side on