Ruffling and widening to the edges of the pools went the circles, as the pale, yellow walnuts plashed into their midst; for here, too, grew the parent trees, their black bark cut and jagged and broken into rough diamond work.

That beautiful season was come when

“Rustic girls in hoods
Go gleaning through the woods.”

Two days after this, we said, my dear mate and I, we shall have a holiday, and from sunrise till sunset, with our laps full of ripe nuts and orchard fruits, we shall make pleasant pastime.

Rosalie, for so I may call her, was older than I, with a face of beauty and a spirit that never flagged.  But to-day there was heaviness in her eyes, and a flushing in her cheek that was deeper than had been there before.

Still she spoke gayly, and smiled the old smile, for the gaunt form of sickness had never been among us children, and we knew not how his touch made the head sick and the heart faint.

The day looked forward to so anxiously dawned at last; but in the dim chamber of Rosalie the light fell sad.  I must go alone.

We had always been together before, at work and in play, asleep and awake, and I lingered long ere I would be persuaded to leave her; but when she smiled and said the fresh-gathered nuts and shining apples would make her glad, I wiped her forehead, and turning quickly away that she might not see my tears, was speedily wading through winrows of dead leaves.

The sensations of that day I shall never forget; a vague and trembling fear of some coming evil, I knew not what, made me often start as the shadows drifted past me, or a bough crackled beneath my feet.

From the low, shrubby hawthorns, I gathered the small red apples, and from beneath the maples, picked by their slim golden stems the notched and gorgeous leaves.  The wind fingered playfully my hair, and clouds of birds went whirring through the tree-tops; but no sight nor sound could divide my thoughts from her whose voice had so often filled with music these solitary places.

I remember when first the fear distinctly defined itself.  I was seated on a mossy log, counting the treasures which I had been gathering, when the clatter of hoof-strokes on the clayey and hard-beaten road arrested my attention, and, looking up—­for the wood thinned off in the direction of the highway, and left it distinctly in view—­I saw Doctor H——­, the physician, in attendance upon my sick companion.  The visit was an unseasonable one.  She, whom I loved so, might never come with me to the woods any more.

Where the hill sloped to the roadside, and the trees, as I said, were but few, was the village graveyard.  No friend of mine, no one whom I had ever known or loved, was buried there—­yet with a child’s instinctive dread of death, I had ever passed its shaggy solitude (for shrubs and trees grew there wild and unattended) with a hurried step and averted face.