it struck his fancy to take advantage of the solitude to try its effect.
Humming to himself, at first softly, he at last grew bolder, and let his
voice drift away through the stark pillars of the sylvan colonnade till
it seemed to suffuse and fill it with no more effort than the light
which strayed in on either side. Sitting thus, his hat thrown a little
back from his clustering curls, the white neck and shoulders of his
horse uplifting him above the crested mass of fern, his red sash the one
fleck of color in their olive depths, I am afraid he looked much
more like the real minstrel of the grove than the unknown poetess who
transfigured it. But this, as has been already indicated, was Jack
Hamlin's peculiar gift. Even as he had previously outshone the vaquero
in his borrowed dress, he now silenced and supplanted a few fluttering
blue-jays--rightful tenants of the wood--with a more graceful and airy
presence and a far sweeter voice.

The open horizon towards the west had taken a warmer color from the
already slanting sun when Mr. Hamlin, having rested his horse, turned
to that direction. He had noticed that the wood was thinner there,
and, pushing forward, he was presently rewarded by the sound of far-off
wheels, and knew he must be near the high-road that the boy had spoken
of. Having given up his previous intention of crossing the stream, there
seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's advice
and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the
wood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmed
recesses. Once or twice--perhaps because he recalled the words of the
poem--that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life,
and he had even fancied, here and there, a swaying of its plumed crests.
Howbeit, he still lingered long enough for the open sunlight into which
he had obtruded to point out the bravery of his handsome figure. Then
he wheeled his horse, the light glanced from polished double bit and