It was a pleasant spot, green, and surrounded with light bowery trees and flowering shrubs, of a different growth from those that belong to the dense forest.

Here the children found, on the hilly ground above, fine ripe strawberries, the earliest they had seen that year, and soon all weariness was forgotten while pursuing the delightful occupation of gathering the tempting fruit; and when they had refreshed themselves, and filled the basket with leaves and fruit, they slaked their thirst from the stream, which wound its way among the bushes.

Catharine neglected not to reach down flowery bunches of the fragrant white-thorn and of the high-bush cranberry, then radiant with nodding umbels of snowy blossoms, or to wreath the handle of the little basket with the graceful trailing runners of the lovely twin-flowered plant, the Linnaea borealis, which she always said reminded her of the twins, Louise and Marie, her little cousins.

And now the day began to wear away, for they had lingered long in the little clearing; they had wandered from the path by which they entered it; and had neglected, in their eagerness to look for the strawberries, to notice any particular mark by which they might regain it.

Just when they began to think of returning, Louis noticed a beaten path, where there seemed recent prints of cattle hoofs on a soft spongy soil beyond the creek.
"Come, Hector," said he gaily, "this is lucky; we are on the cattle path; no fear but it will lead us directly home, and that by a nearer track." Hector was undecided about following it, he fancied it bent too much towards the setting sun; but his cousin overruled his objection.