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Lincoya, who, freed from the restraint of his moss-lined bed, now rolled on the turf with Rodolph, and played with the gentle and intelligent animal. How happy was Oriana that day!

Aunt Corinne clasped a leather-covered upright which hurt her hand before, and leaned toward the trees on her side. Every new piece of woodland is an unexplored country containing moss-lined stumps, dimples of hollows full of mint, queer-shaped trees, and hickory saplings just the right saddle-curve for bending down as "teeters," such as are never reproduced in any other piece of woodland.

After the bustle of departure had subsided, the steward came forward bringing a moss-lined basket, filled with choice hothouse flowers, saying: "A gentleman left this in my care, to be delivered to Miss Dexie Sherwood. I believe it belongs to one of you ladies." "Oh, Dexie, they can't all be for you," said Gussie, eagerly, as she reached out her hand and took the basket from the steward's hands.

The elegant residences of the owners were romantically situated on some half-isolated promonotory around which the stream sweeps, embowered with maples and begirt with willows at its base; or nestled away in some nook, moss-lined and hemlock-shaded, which marks where some spring brook bubbles down its brief career to the larger stream; or in some plateau upon the other side, backed by a scraggly old orchard, and hidden among great groves of rock-maples which the careful husbandman spared a hundred years ago for a "sugar-bush," little dreaming that the nabobs of the rushing streams would build homesteads beneath their shade.

Two moss-lined caves near the ground open back into the trunk, one on the north side, the other on the west, forming picturesque, romantic seats. The largest of the main branches is eighteen feet and nine inches in circumference, and some of the long pendulous branchlets droop over the stream at the foot of the fall where it is gray with spray.

Many of these moss-lined chambers contain thousands of these delightful ferns, clinging to mossy walls by the slightest hold, reaching out their delicate finger-fronds on dark, shining stalks, sensitive and tremulous, throbbing in unison with every movement and tone of the falling water, moving each division of the frond separately at times, as if fingering the music.

There was a sense of movement and life which was in accord with their own spirits and rapid motion. Snow-birds fluttered and twittered in weedy thickets by the way-side, breakfasting on the seeds that fell like black specks upon the snow. The bright sunlight had lured the red squirrels from their moss-lined nests in hollow trees, and their barking was sometimes heard above the chime of the bells.