Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/43



N very early times indeed, when no maidens had looking-glasses, except the mermaidens, there lived in a deep valley two beautiful hamadryads. Now, the hamadryads are a race of nymphs that inhabit the forests. Whenever a little acorn, or a beech nut, or any other seed of a forest tree begins to sprout, a little hamadryad is born, and grows up and lives and dies with the tree. So you see the hamadryads, the daughters of trees, live far longer than the daughters of men—some of them even a thousand years; still they do at last get old, and faded, and shrivelled.

Now, the two hamadryads of whom I spoke lived in a forest by the side of a clear lake, and they loved better than anything to go down to the brink of the lake and look into the mirror of waters; but not for the same reason. Idione loved to look into the lake because she saw herself there; she would sit on the bank, weaving leaves and flowers in her silken hair, and smiling at her own image all the day long, and if the pretty water-lilies or any other plants began to spread themselves 37