Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/227

IF you have ever threaded your way, in dreams, along the water-path of a deep, narrow, winding gorge, where the river seems to drive a wedge into the very heart and secret of the mountains—a gorge so deep and narrow that the summer sunshine can hardly slip in through the crevices of sky above, but hangs midway down the ravine, caught in the impenetrable sheet of virgin bush; where the voice of the ever-mourning river, breaking its heart on the rapids, is the only sound in that immense silent wilderness, and has been the only audible voice for century on century; where no flower sparkles in the forest, and hardly a bird floats across the precipice; where the narrow reach of shining water is so closely folded in by the hills, that you seem to be shut up in a land-locked estuary, rather than on a rushing river—if you have seen this one beautiful monotonous effect repeated over and over again, league after league