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From the higher branches of the alders that shut out the sky with their dainty, silvery-green leaves, hung with many a graceful loop and knot ropes of wild grape-vine and curtains of virgin's-bower.
He simply stood for a few minutes under the gray-trunked alders that were so marked by the loving hands of long ago men and maidens beside the mint bordered spring with the scattered stones of that old foundation where, through the screen of boughs and vines and virgin's-bower the sunlight fell as through the traceries of a cathedral window, and the low, deep tones of the mountain waters came like the music of a great organ.
Sibyl, dressed in her brown, mountain costume, was sitting on the boulder, when the artist said softly, "Look!" Lifting her eyes, as he pointed, she saw two butterflies it might almost have been the same two with zigzag flight, through the opening in the draperies of virgin's-bower. With parted lips and flushed cheeks, the girl watched.
Up and down the canyon, along the boulder-strewn bed of the roaring Clear Creek, from the Ranger Station to the falls; in the quiet glades under the alders hung with virgin's-bower and wild grape; beneath the live-oaks on the mountains' flanks or shoulders; in dimly lighted, cedar-sheltered gulches, among tall brakes and lilies; or high up on the canyon walls under the dark and fragrant pines over all the paths and trails familiar to her girlhood she led him showing him every nook and glade and glen teaching him to know, as he had asked, the mountains that she herself so loved.
Above the arroyo willows, on the farther side of the glade, Oak Knoll, with bits of the pine-clad Galenas, could be glimpsed; but on the orchard side, the vine-dressed bank with the old gate under the mistletoe oak shut out the view. Through the screen of alder and grape and willow and virgin's-bower the sunlight fell, as through the delicate traceries of a cathedral window.
Then as though following the path of a sunbeam two gorgeously brown and yellow winged butterflies came flitting through the draperies of virgin's-bower, and floated in zigzag flight about the glade now high among the alder boughs; now low over the tops of the roses and berry-bushes; down to the fragrant mint at the water's edge; and up again to the tops of the willows, as if to leave the glade; but only to return again to the vines that covered the bank, and to the flowers that, here and there, starred the grassy sward.
A little later they stood in the old spring glade, where the alders bore, still, in the smooth, gray bark of their trunks, the memories of long-ago lovers; where the light fell, slanting softly through the screen of leaf and branch and vine and virgin's-bower, upon the granite boulder and the cress-mottled waters of the spring, as through the window traceries of a vast and quiet cathedral; and where the distant roar of the mountain stream trembled in the air like the deep tones of some great organ.
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