"I suppose many of them have. Of course I let out all those that had
been with me twelve months: they don't turn to fairies in the cage,
you know. Now I have only those I caught this year, or last autumn;
the prettiest don't appear till the autumn."

The girl here bent her uncovered head over the straw hat, her tresses
shadowing it, and uttered loving words to the prisoner. Then again
she looked up and around her, and abruptly stopped, and exclaimed,--

"How can people live in towns? How can people say they are ever dull
in the country? Look," she continued, gravely and earnestly, "look at
that tall pine-tree, with its long branch sweeping over the water; see
how, as the breeze catches it, it changes its shadow, and how the
shadow changes the play of the sunlight on the brook:--


"'Wave your tops, ye pines;
With every plant, in sign of worship wave.'


"What an interchange of music there must be between Nature and a poet!"

Kenelm was startled. This "an innocent"!--this a girl who had no mind
to be formed! In that presence he could not be cynical; could not
speak of Nature as a mechanism, a lying humbug, as he had done to the
man poet. He replied gravely,--

"The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are
the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to whom it is no