You should wear a satin
gown
(Swinging
high, swinging low),
All with ribbons falling
down
(Swinging,
oh!).
And your little twinkling
feet,
O my Pretty and my Sweet!
Should be shod with
silver neat
(Swinging
high, swinging low)—
Shod with silver slippers
neat
(Swinging,
oh!).
But I’m not a
fairy, Pet
(Swinging
high, swinging low),
Am not even a king,
as yet
(Swinging,
oh!).
So all that I can do
Is to kiss your little
shoe,
And to make a queen
of you
(Swinging
high, swinging low),
Make a fairy queen of
you
(Swinging,
oh!).
HARTLEY’S GLEN.
How many girls, among all the girls who may read this
little book, have seen with their own eyes Hartley’s
Glen? Not one, perhaps, save Brynhild and the
Rosicrucian, for whom the book is written. But
the others must try to see it with my eyes, for it
is a fair place and a sweet as any on earth.
Behind the house, and just under the brow of the little
hill that shelters it, a narrow path dips down to
the right, and goes along for a bit, with a dimpled
clover-meadow on the one hand, and a stone wall, all
warm with golden and red-brown lichens, on the other.
Follow this, and you come to a little gateway, beyond
which is a thick plantation of larches, with one grim
old red cedar keeping watch over them. If he
regards you favorably, you may pass on, down the narrow
path that winds among the larches, whose feathery
finger-tips brush your cheek and try to hold you back,
as if they willed not that you should go farther, to
see the wonders which they can never behold.
But you leave them behind, and come out into the sunshine,
in a little green glade which might be the ballroom
of the fairy queen. On your right, gleaming through
clumps of alder and black birch, is a pond,—the
home of cardinal flowers and gleaming jewel-weed; a
little farther on, a thicket of birch and maple, from
which comes a musical sound of falling water.
Follow this sound, keeping to the path, which winds
away to the left. Stop! now you may step aside
for a moment, and part the heavy hanging branches,
and look, where the water falls over a high black
wall, into a sombre pool, shut in by fantastic rocks,
and shaded from all sunshine by a dense fringe of
trees. This is the milldam, and the pond above
is no natural one, but the enforced repose and outspreading
of a merry brown brook, which now shows its true nature,
and escaping from the gloomy pool, runs scolding and
foaming down through a wilderness of rocks and trees.
You cannot follow it there,—though I have
often done so in my barefoot days,—so come
back to the path again. There are pines overhead
now, and the ground is slippery with the fallen needles,
and the air is sweet—ah! how sweet!—with
their warm fragrance. See! here is the old mill
itself, now disused and falling to decay. Here
the path becomes a little precipice, and you must scramble
as best you can down two or three rough steps, and
round the corner of the ruined mill. This is
a millstone, this great round thing like a granite
cheese, half buried in the ground; and here is another,
which makes a comfortable seat, if you are tired.
