Accordingly I turned my steps up the channel to the left, and was
rewarded, after another twenty minutes' scramble, by emerging
upon a break in the forest. On one side of the stream rose a
reddish-coloured cliff, almost smooth of face and about seventy or
eighty feet high, across the edge of which the last trees on the
summit clutched with their naked roots, as though protesting
against being thrust over the precipice by the crowd behind them.
The other bank swelled up, from a little above the water's edge, to a
fair green lawn, rounded, grassy, and smooth as a glade in an English
park. At its widest I dare say that, from the stream's edge back to
the steep slope where the forest started again and climbed to a tall
ridge that shut in the glen on the south side, it measured something
over two hundred yards.
"Here," thought I, glancing up the glade towards the westering sun,
"is the very spot for our clump of, trees;" and so it was--only no
clump of trees happened to be in sight. The glade, however,
stretched away and around a bend of the stream, and I was moving to
the bank to explore it to its end when my eyes were arrested by
something white not ten paces away. It was a piece of paper caught
against one of the large boulders between which, as through a broken
dam, the water poured into the ravine.
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