Page:The House Without Windows.djvu/140

 mystic flowers on tall spikes with two smooth leaves. Yellow lady-slippers made her think of butterflies with folded wings, or of the sun peeping out from dark clouds. But the loveliest of all were pink orchidshosts of them with more deeply tinted lips fringed like fairies' fingers: hosts of them on slender stems, each stem a dawn-sprite's wand.

"Like the dawn I saw once," she thought, "when snow-pink fringey flowers wreathed the sky. The sun was pleased and smiled. I danced for him, and the bobolinks and skylarks greeted him with song." There were tall flowers, too, pink silk beneath white tissue, with very dark and curious leaves up the stalks among the blossoms. Butterflies were playing like sun rays, winging softly from flower to flower. And as she went on she passed through forests of thick bushes and poisonous thorns, open pine-groves, and great pastures smelling of hay-scented ferns and budding steeple-bush. All the time the path, or rather the easiest way through the thick bushes, had been fairly level, but now it began to shoot up steeply, and it was all Eepersip could do to keep herself from sliding back in an avalanche of pebbles and stones. A bit of tough scrambling followed, and at last she broke out on a comparatively level piece of ground.