above the stream, with a gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its
apex. Loftily on both sides climbed the mountains cloaked in laurel and
timber.

Suddenly the leafage was thrust aside from above by a cautious hand,
and a shy, half-wild girl appeared in the opening. For an instant she
halted, with her brown fingers holding back the brushwood, and raised
her face as though listening. Across the slope drifted the call of the
partridge, and with perfect imitation she whistled back an answer. It
would have seemed appropriate to anyone who had seen her that she
should talk bird language to the birds. She was herself as much a wood
creature as they, and very young. That she was beautiful was not
strange. The women of the mountains have a morning-glory bloom--until
hardship and drudgery have taken toll of their youth--and she could not
have been more than sixteen.

It was June, and the hills, which would be bleakly forbidding barriers
in winter, were now as blithely young as though they had never known
the scourging of sleet or the blight of wind. The world was abloom, and
the girl, too, was in her early June, and sentiently alive with the
strength of its full pulse-tide. She was slim and lithely resilient of
step. Her listening attitude was as eloquent of pausing elasticity as
that of the gray squirrel. Her breathing was soft, though she had come
down a steep mountainside, and as fragrant as the breath of the elder
bushes that dashed the banks with white sprays of blossom. She brought
with her to the greens and grays and browns of the woodland's heart a
new note of color, for her calico dress was like the red cornucopias of
the trumpet-flower, and her eyes were blue like little scraps of sky.
Her heavy, brown-red hair fell down over her shoulders in loose
profusion. The coarse dress was freshly briar-torn, and in many places