At sunset she was again at the peak of her mountain. The sky was flushed with magic; a great cloud in the west became brilliantly fringed with gold and red-gold, the east was all submerged in a lilac sea, and a delicate laciness of pink trailed across the zenith. Sunset fairies alighted on the snow-peaks: they were fiery for a moment, and all the great snowfields were flaming. Then the colour faded to pink on the summits. But in the sky Nature still flung about her colours wildly—fire was in the zenith, the long bank of clouds was vividly fringed with red-gold, and there to the south it changed to caverns of shadowed pink and strange violet. Seas and bays and cloud islands formed out of it—seas of a strange greenish rose. Then one thrill and flame of gold spread about the whole earth; the snow at her feet was shadowy gold, and a pathway of it danced upon the air ’way to the horizon. It played upon each frost-feather; the eastern mountains were flushed with this soft gold.
And then, dizzy with the colour and the beauty, Eepersip fell asleep, her fingers clutching the rosy snow.
The next morning the frost-feathers had almost disappeared underneath a new snowfall. The air was full of its fresh scent, as it came down gently in tremendous flakes. Here and there Eepersip saw one of the lovely blossoms of the talatuna, with those same ruby-red leaves. How beautiful they were, growing in great clusters, just peeping through the snow! Once in a while a pale cream-coloured mountain moth would flit before her. Occasional gusts brought swarms of tiny bottle-green, white-winged snow-beetles, and the air was abuzz with them. Sometimes a blue or white insect like a firefly would hover past, a strange red light gleaming about its transparent body.
On and on Eepersip explored, seeing nothing but the wonderland about her—the fairy palaces of snow, the fluttering, hovering insects, and the beautiful mountain flowers. Following the icy river down, she came sometimes to a great cascade of the green water—a cascade coming over one of those great cliffs, washing down the snow, throwing up fountains and clouds of spray in its furious descent. Sometimes it cut under the banks, making a green cave hung with icicles gleaming strangely. One of these had been made when the river was in flood; now it was large enough for Eepersip to stand in, and, wading in water about up to her knees, she went back into its innermost recesses, where the roar of the stream was muffled. There were fish there—trout playing in the whirlpools and riding swiftly with the current. She found some odd bright stones and gleaming pebbles in this mysterious place, silent save for the deadened rush of water.
Sometimes, again, the rushing brook took such steep course that Eepersip was forced to make a detour into the woods for a little way, through clumps of the firs, now growing less stunted, but hung with icicles which clicked together in the wind, sounding to Eepersip like fairy castanets. Even at this high altitude, she saw occasionally a white pine, each cluster of pale green needles laden with snow—tufts of snow which seemed to make little faces peering out from the tree. Bursts of happiness would overwhelm her now and then, and she would leap high and dart like some frightened deer or mountain nymph.
Once she found beautiful little violet-shaped pink flowers with bowed heads and feathery leaves—snow-pinks blooming there, thrusting their buds from the snow itself. She tucked a spray of them into her dress of fluttering ferns.
And then she would return to the river and follow it again. When the moon came, dappling the foamy water with silver, she watched it as it dipped down its forehead in the stream and touched the treetops with magic. Then she would go on again through the moonlit night. Once she came to a place where the brook separated, and she had a difficulty choosing which branch to follow.
And when the russet dawn reappeared, tipping the mountains with apple-blossom and fire, she had followed it to its goal in the very meadow from where she had started—a pool hitherto unseen by her. About a hundred feet across it was, beached with clean white pebbles. In it bloomed water-lilies, fragrant and white, with centres of gold; strange red flowers, too, she saw on the bottom, growing between the pebbles. Dragonflies with crackling wings swept over it in circles. She saw, too, a shoal of tiny fishes of a brownish colour, striped with yellow. They would suddenly dart forward as if something had frightened them, and then poise themselves stock-still, mimicking so many sticks in the shadows of the abundant lily-pads.
She was wading about in the pool when suddenly—where there had been ground for her foot to rest on, nothing was there. The bottom of the pool under her foot had slid forward and collapsed! Suddenly “Clug-glug, clug-glug, chugarum, glug!” reached her, as a big bullfrog’s nose appeared by the side of a lily-pad. A second later the frog diked up on the lily-pad and stared at Eepersip with his goggly eyes. She burst out laughing, he looked so ridiculous staring at her like that.
She stayed in the meadow, playing gaily among the leaves and flowers. Butterflies of all the colours of the rainbow swept over it in great flocks. Flowers bloomed so thickly that there was hardly any grass—white ones with waxen petals, striped and bordered with heavy golden bands; red ones with centres of dark green-gold; great blossoms of pink and purple, whose petals fluttered about in the breeze like butterflies.
One morning she was awakened early by “Peep, peep, twitter-itter‑ee‑e‑e‑e‑e‑e, twit chirup, twitter‑ee‑e‑e, twit!” She looked up and saw a great flock of snow-white birds with long narrow wings. They were flying northward. The flock was much more gigantic than Eepersip had supposed, for it kept on until she began
