in a similar poetic temperament, very shy on the part of Alice and very
frank on the part of Evelyn. The whole wild scene along the river was
quite as novel to Alice as to the city girl, because, although she was
familiar with every mile of it and had driven through it a hundred times,
she had never in all her life before, of purpose, gone to see it. No
doubt she had felt its wildness and beauty, but now for the first time
she looked at it as scenery, as she might have looked at a picture in a
gallery. And in the contagion of Evelyn's outspoken enthusiasm she was
no longer afraid to give timid expression to the latent poetry in her own
soul. And daring to express this, she seemed to herself for the first
time to realize vividly the nobility and grace of the landscape. And yet
there was a difference in the appreciation of the two. More widely read
and traveled, Evelyn's imagination took a wider range of comparison and
of admiration, she was appealed to by the large features and the
grandiose effects; while Alice noted more the tenderer aspects, the
wayside flowers and bushes, the exotic-looking plants, which she longed
to domesticate in what might be called the Sunday garden on the terraces
in front of her house. For it is in these little cultivated places by
the door-step, places of dreaming in the summer hours after meeting and
at sunset, that the New England maiden experiences something of that
tender religious sentiment which was not much fed in the barrenness of
the Congregational meeting-house.

The Pulpit Rock, in the rough pasture land of Zoar, was reached by a
somewhat tedious climb from the lonely farmhouse, in a sheltered nook,
through straggling woods and gray pastures. It was a vast exposed
surface rising at a slight angle out of the grass and undergrowth. Along
the upper side was a thin line of bushes, and, pushing these aside, the
observer was always startled at the unexpected scene--as it were the
raising of a curtain upon another world. He stood upon the edge of a