Chapter 1. The Hill Of The Muses
_ CHAPTER I. The Hill of the Muses [Sidenote: From the Top of the Hill] The girl paused among the birches and drew a long breath of relief. It was good to be outdoors after the countless annoyances of the day； to feel the earth springing beneath her step, the keen, crisp air bringing the colour to her cheeks, and the silence of the woods ministering to her soul. From the top of the hill she surveyed her little world. Where the small white houses clustered in the valley, far below her, she had spent her five-and-twenty years, shut in by the hills, and, more surely, by the iron bars of circumstance. To her the heights had always meant escape, for in the upper air and in solitude she found detachment--a sort of heavenly perspective upon the affairs of the common day. Down in the bare, brown valley the river lay asleep. Grey patches of melting snow still filled the crevices along its banks, and fragments of broken crystal moved slowly toward t

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