Page:By Sanction of Law.pdf/316

 Birds were singing in the shadows. As they passed deeper and deeper into the forests, with their blazed pines oozing turpentine pitch into a box hole cut into the tree the woods became more and more quiet. On they walked till Bennet began to wonder where they were, when suddenly he heard a waterfall and through the trees he could see the glistening spray some one hundred feet at his right. At the base of the falls where the copse opened into a narrow bit of green meadow through which the rivulet from the falls ran trailing off to the Edisto River, the girl halted. The water was falling over a sheer cliff in three steps from the higher land above, draining a pond some miles away. The cliff seemingly having been formed ages ago when some cataclysm of nature caused a fault in the rocky bed by which the land below dropped.

At the base of the falls, stood a tall poplar tree whose roots seemed to have dipped into the little stream for sustenance. This poplar tree grew close to the cliff and some thirty-five feet up its limbs reached over and touched the cliff just where the water passed. By a process of erosion with the swaying winds these limbs and water had dug into the cliff behind the white sheet of water and hollowed out a cave. Moisture had softened the rock and clay till it crumbled and fell into the little pool at the base of the falls. Lida, in one of her play days of girlhood, in exploring the woods had climbed this tree and discovered the cave. Since then it was her cave and she spent many a day behind the water shed, making the cave wider and deeper as she dreamed of primitive days when Indians inhabited this section.