I was very sleepy, and while trying to make up my mind I fell
asleep; and lo! the sandwiches and sherry brought me a dream that
I could not but consider of good omen. And this was the dream.

I thought my quest had brought me into a strange old haunted
forest, and that I had thrown myself down to rest at the gnarled
mossy root of a great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but
fantastic shapes and capricious groups of gold-green bole and
bough, wondrous alleys ending in mysterious coverts, and green
lanes of exquisite turf that seemed to have been laid down in
expectation of some milk-white queen or goddess passing that way.

And so still the forest was you could have heard an acorn drop or
a bird call from one end of it to the other. The exquisite
silence was evidently waiting for the exquisite voice, that
presently not so much broke as mingled with it, like a swan
swimming through a lake.

"Whom seek you?" said, or rather sung, a planetary voice right
at my shoulder. But three short unmusical Saxon words, yet it
was as though a mystical strain of music had passed through the
wood.

"Whom seek you?" and again the lovely speech flowered upon the
silence, as white water-lilies on the surface of some shaded
pool.

"The Golden Girl," I answered simply, turning my head, and
looking half sideways and half upwards; and behold! the tree at
whose foot I lay had opened its rocky side, and in the cleft,