where it re-forms and becomes a furious little torrent that dashes
across the road under a bridge and empties itself into the Arve.

The carriage-road skirts the base of the mountain and offers numberless
fine views of the cascade as you approach or leave it. It was directly
in front of the fall, half a mile distant, though it did not look so
far, that the driver, in obedience to previous instruction from Lynde,
drew up the horses and halted. At that instant the sunshine slanted
across the fall and dashed it with prismatic colors.

"It is almost too exquisite to look at," said Mrs. Denham. "It makes one
doubt one's own eyes."

"I saw it once," Lynde said, "when I thought the effect even finer. I
was induced by some pleasant English tourists to stop over night at
Magland, and we walked up here in the moonrise. You can't imagine
anything so lovely as that long strip of gossamer unfolding itself to
the moonlight. There was an English artist with us, who made a sketch of
the fall; but he said a prettier thing about it than his picture."

"What was that?" inquired Miss Ruth.

"He called it Penelope's web, because it is always being unravelled and
reknitted."

"That artist mistook his profession."

"Folks often do," said Lynde. "I know painters who ought to be poets,
and poets who ought to be bricklayers."