Sometimes its banks were high and steep, hung with slender ashes
and birches; again they were mere, low margins, green with
delicate mosses, shelving out of the wood. Once it came to a
little precipice and flung itself over undauntedly in an
indignation of foam, gathering itself up rather dizzily among the
mossy stones below. It was some time before it got over its
vexation; it went boiling and muttering along, fighting with the
rotten logs that lie across it, and making far more fuss than was
necessary over every root that interfered with it. We were
getting tired of its ill-humour and talked of leaving it, when it
suddenly grew sweet-tempered again, swooped around a curve--and
presto, we were in fairyland.
It was a little dell far in the heart of the woods. A row of
birches fringed the brook, and each birch seemed more exquisitely
graceful and golden than her sisters. The woods receded from it
on every hand, leaving it lying in a pool of amber sunshine. The
yellow trees were mirrored in the placid stream, with now and then
a leaf falling on the water, mayhap to drift away and be used, as
Uncle Blair suggested, by some adventurous wood sprite who had it
in mind to fare forth to some far-off, legendary region where all
the brooks ran into the sea.
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