OUR FOUR-FOOTED NEIGHBORS. 341 



All around was sweet and beautiful and abundant, such 

 as the poetical imagination of the painter can rarely com- 

 pose, and neve?' unless, like Salvator, ho has lived in the 

 wilderness with its free denizens. Upon the summit above 

 the crag there was a broad and verdant terrace surrounded 

 by ivied pines and feathering birches, and upon a little 

 green glade in the midst grew two of the most beautiful 

 objects ever produced by art or nature. Those were a pair 

 of twin thorns exactly similar in size, age, and form, and 

 standing about three yards from each other, their stems as 

 straight as shafts, and their round and even heads like vast 

 bushes of wild thyme, but each so overgrown with ivy and 

 woodbine that their slender trunks appeared like fretted 

 columns, over which the thorny foliage served as a trellis 

 to suspend the heavy plumes of the ivy and the golden tas- 

 sels of the woodbine. Many a " ladye's bower " we have 

 seen, and many a rich and costly plant reared by the care 

 of man, but none so beautiful as those lonely sisters of the 

 forest, planted by His hand in His great garden, where 

 none beheld but those for whom He made it lovely — the 

 ravens of the rock, the deer who couched under its shade 

 by night, and the birds who sang their matins and their 

 even-song out of its sweet boughs. 



(>. In these lonely thickets the doe secretes her young, 

 and covers them so carefully that they are very rarely 

 found. There was a solitary doe that I had frequently 

 seen on the hillside, but I was careful not to disturb her 

 haunt. Accordingly, when at evening and morning she 

 came out to pick the sweet herbs at the foot of the brae, 

 or by the little green well in its face, I trod softly out of 

 her sight, and, if I passed at noon, made a circuit from 

 the black willows and thick junipers where she reposed 

 during the heat of the day. 



7. One fine sunny morning I saw her come tripping 

 out from her bower of young birches as light as a fairy, 



