The view from the railway, unlike that of many beautiful Italian cities, is striking enough to make any traveller change his route, jump from the train and forego all his plans. The situation is singularly fine. The town sits in state, backed by the outposts of the Alps, fronting the Apennines and looking over the plains of Lombardy spread out between: the rushing Adige curves deeply inward, forming the city's western boundary, and then, doubling on itself, flows through the heart and south-eastward to the Adriatic. The surrounding hills are seamed and crested with fortifications of every age, beginning with those of the Romans of the Later Empire, followed by those of Theodoric the Goth, of Charlemagne the Frank, of the mediæval Scaligeri, lords of Verona, of the Venetians in the sixteenth century, and of the Austrians of our own day, when Verona was a point of the once famous Quadrilateral. Within the walls are monuments of all these dynasties. The housewives and tradesfolk pass on their daily errands along the streets spanned by two noble arches which date from the days of the emperor Galienus. Almost in the centre of the town is the grand Roman amphitheatre; the petty, prosaic, middle-class life of an Italian provincial town creeps, noisy yet sluggish, to its base; modern houses abut against all that is left of its outer wall, which was thrown down by an earthquake in 1184; small shops are kept in some of the lower cells. On that side it has none of the silent emphasis of its greater contemporary, the Coliseum. We found afterward that we might have approached from another direction across an open space, the Piazza Brà, but I think the contrast and effect would have been less. The surprise is more overwhelming to emerge from the narrow street into the arena, and see the seats which sustained the amusement of fifty thousand people rising tier above tier in perfect preservation, forty-three vast ellipses, to the very top. It is only two-thirds as large as the Coliseum, but when one has clambered to the upper-most row and looks down from a height of sixty or seventy feet upon an area of nearly a quarter of a mile, the mind takes no cognizance of anything but the actual immensity before the eyes. Looking outward, we beheld a splendid panorama: first, the irregular surface of the city, broken by steep roofs, arcaded galleries on the housetops, battlemented towers square or slim, lofty belfries, black conical skyward cypresses; then the blue hills—blue as cobalt, although so near—striped in zigzags with the ruddy bands of the serrate feudal fortifications, marked at intervals by curious three- and five-sided bastions, which the architect Sanmicheli put up for the conquering Venetian republic; farther off more peaceful slopes, on which white villas cluster and bask like pigeons on a gable; more distant still, sublimer peaks of pale azure brushed with snow; on the other side, the olive-dun plain irregularly mapped out by the windings of the two rivers, the Adige and Po, yellow as gravel-walks, sprinkled thick with towns and villages like tufts of daisies, and hedged by the purple Apennines.

It is easy enough to fix the different events and periods of the local history by the monuments they have created or destroyed, but the influence of an Italian city is wholly against a systematic study of chronology: the relics of various ages are thrown together, sandwiched and dovetailed, on every side, and it is the impression, the collective impression, of the entire place which is pleasantest to get, and worth most: the rest can be learned from books. There is a sort of epic chain which runs through the associations of Verona, and binds them together in heroic series by all sorts of strange, unexpected suggestions and hints. After the ancient epic, represented by the fragments from Roman history, itself one long epic, come the vestiges of Theodoric, one of the heroes of the Niebelungen Lied, in which he is known as Dietrich of Bern (otherwise Verona). His palace, adopted and used for centuries as the device of the municipal seal, survived the violent vicissitudes of the city's history, and remained, after repeated alterations and additions which made it a sort of architectural chronicle, until the present century. This magnificent memorial of earlier times, which had been respected in turn by the mad fury of Gian Galeazzo of Milan and the implacable rivalry of Venice, was blown up by the French in 1801: large barracks now stand upon its site, so that the stones of its warlike builder are not subverted to purposes unbefitting his memory. Then follows Charlemagne—putative founder, more probably first restorer, of the cathedral—in his most mythic and heroic aspect, fresh out of the Chanson de Roland, while Roland and Oliver keep guard on each side of the porch, the latter bearing a mace with a ball and chain, the former his famous sword Durindal, the stone counterpart of the weapon preserved for nearly a thousand years in the monastery of Roncesvalles. The great heroic satire of the twelfth century, Reineke Fuchs, is suggested by figures and groups such as are to be found in all old Gothic churches north of the Alps, but seldom south of them—a hog, dressed as a monk, standing on his hind legs and holding a breviary, on the portal of the cathedral, and in the church of San Zenone two cocks marching off with a fox dangling from a pole. All the associations of the place centre in and radiate from Dante and his unearthly poem, so much of which was written here or hereabouts. It is extraordinary how he has appropriated the memories of the place, even down to Romeo and Juliet—who by virtue of their immortalized loves belong as much to our times as to their own—by the single well-known line:

There is a colossal statue of him by a modern Veronese sculptor, not unworthy of the subject or place, standing in the quiet Piazza dei Signori amid the deserted homes of the Della Scale, looking toward the palace of Can Grande, whose generous hospitality could not sweeten the bread of charity nor ease the steps of a patron's court to the proud exile. Dante could not have been easy to live with upon any terms. "Eh, puir fellow! he looks like a verra ill-tempered mon," quoth Carlyle once after a long contemplation of the poet's portrait. He played the part of Mentor, and a very morose one, to the splendid, gallant, good-natured prince and his gay court, and Can Grande seems to have derived the same sort of diversion from his diatribes as from the quips and cranks of his jesters. At last Dante wore out his welcome, as he did everywhere until the patient earth gave him an abiding-place at Ravenna. His whole life of disappointed ambition, unrecognized patriotism, unspoken love, baffled hatred, lonely rangings in awful spheres, banishment, poverty, mortification, unrest, inspiration, conscious immortality, passes before one in this spot, which he must have crossed and recrossed innumerable times, and his presence even in the marble makes it all his own. Yet if the statue could wake to life, the man would not know the familiar place, which has been wholly transformed since his days. The principal ornament of the square is the Palazzo del Consiglio, a beautiful example of cinque-cento architecture, its exuberant decoration still subordinate to the harmony and proportion of the general design. This has been converted into a pantheon for the celebrated men of Verona, whose statues surmount the building, and among whom we recognize many old acquaintances—Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Pliny the Younger and others of later date and less renown.

The palaces of the Scaligeri, now assigned to the drowsy courts of law, have been altered so often that an inalienable dignity of front is all that marks them for having once been princely habitations. We must look a few steps farther for the pomp of the Scaligers, where a small graveyard before the church of Santa Maria l'Antica contains the tombs of the dynasty. The whole space, as well as each separate grave, is enclosed by an iron trellis of the rarest delicacy: it is, in fact, a flexible network which shakes at a touch, but which has withstood the rough handling of five centuries, composed of open quatrefoils and the ladder (scala), the family bearing, and a few other fanciful patterns, constantly repeated: it is the lace of an iron age. Within this precinct rest ten princes of the line, who from being nobles of Verona were elected in 1261 by unanimous popular choice to succeed the atrocious Eccelin da Romano, the tyrant of Padua, who also held Verona under his execrable rule. There is every variety of tomb, from the plain, heavy sarcophagus of Mastino I. to the magnificent four-storied monument of Can Signorio surmounted by his equestrian statue, a rising succession of small columns, arches, niches, statuettes, canopies, pinnacles, embowered in leafage, bud and flower, as if the splendid art of the fourteenth century were blossoming before one's eyes. The tomb of Can Grande is fine, although much simpler: it has three stories. He lies on the lowest floor, in robes of state, composed to his last sleep, while on the summit he looks down from his horse, a full-armed warrior. Four big dogs, from whom he took his enigmatic cognomen (although the canine proclivity did not begin with him, as his ancestor was Mastino), support the tomb, each bearing a shield with the arms of the family.

Verona is rich in tombs. From our windows in the Due Torri we looked across to the monument of Guglielmo del Castelbarco, a friend of the Delle Scale, whose massive sarcophagus stands beneath a high Gothic canopy over the gateway of a building which once formed part of the convent of Sta. Anastasia. As we gazed down into the square, with its fountain and groups of old women drawing water, and sometimes setting down their ewers to go and say a short prayer in the beautiful old church of Sta. Anastasia, we used to think that if this outlook were included in the charge for our rooms, we were not paying too much. Another fine monument, by the architect Sanmicheli, to two brothers who rejoiced in the surname of Verità encrusts the front of the church of Sta. Eufemia; and in the cemetery of San Zenone are a tomb and sepulchral urn which claim that they contain the mortal remains of Pepin, king of Italy, the son of Charlemagne. Besides these, altar-tombs, pillared and canopied monuments and mortuary chapels meet the eye everywhere inside and outside of the churches. That which attracts most attention now-a-days is decidedly the least ornamental—the doubly-doubtful tomb of Juliet. It is so acknowledged a lion that the street-boys of the quarter beset you with offers to show you the way. This is no new celebrity: Murray assures us that in the last century, before readers of Shakespeare, native or foreign, were common in Italy, a sarcophagus was regularly exhibited as this sentimental relic. That no longer exists: the present one, which was formerly used as a washing-trough, looks so much like that or a horse-trough of the commonest sort that, even without knowing its claims to be apocryphal, the most credulous sentimental tourist would suspect that it had come up rather than gone down in the world. No matter: we were not dupes, but perhaps the full sweetness and sadness of the story never came home to us with such enfolding charm as on the gray autumn afternoon when we stood beside the pseudo relic in the forlorn little garden of the orphan asylum on the bank of the turbid Adige. The house which is pointed out as Juliet's is less palatial than we expected, though it is a lofty old brick edifice with rounded windows, a stone balcony and a large courtyard: on the keystone of the arched entrance, on the inner side of the court, is the cap (cappello) which gives its name to the street, and is supposed to be the heraldic badge of the family, armoiries parlantes, or punning devices, being a favorite fashion in old times all over Europe. If the balcony which remains was Juliet's, Romeo must have had a long ladder and a cooler head than he showed under other circumstances. There is a stone projection at the window of a lower story which once may have supported a small balcony. The Casa de' Cappelletti is now a livery-stable and inn, the Osteria del Cappello.

The street leads straight to the Piazza delle Erbe, the vegetable-market (literally, "grass-market"), the forum in ancient times, the most picturesque spot in all Verona, which seems to collect and concentrate in itself all the reminiscences and characteristics of the town. It communicates on one side with the Piazza dei Signori; and the imposing campanile, or bell-tower, of the latter, a shaft of brickwork nearly three hundred feet high, springing above the intervening palace-roofs, makes a companion to the tall, slender clock-tower at the farther end of the Piazza delle Erbe, one of the many munificent gifts of the Della Scala princes. In the centre of the square is a fountain, originally of great antiquity; near by it the market-cross; close to that a marble column on which once stood the lion of St. Mark, set up by the Venetians when they seized the city, and thrown down when the republic of Venice fell in 1799. Not far from these two pillars is a sort of stone dais beneath a stone canopy, which was the very focus of the historic and municipal life of the place in mediæval days. Here, when Verona was a free city, the capitano del popolo was inaugurated; proclamations were read from it; criminals heard their sentences pronounced from it. Here people who did not pay their debts were compelled to undergo the grotesque penalty common in the Italian republics for that offence, of sitting for a stated time on the pavement—in puris naturalibus as to the sitting portion of the person: flagstones are to be seen worn to a comfortable concavity by the delinquent convexity.

The buildings which enclose the square are of the utmost diversity of style and period—rich palaces of the Late Renaissance, cumbered with ornament; modern houses of light-colored stucco, with striped awnings and Venetian shutters; solemn old bits of architecture of sterner times; frescoed façades, arcades, balconies. And what balconies! Not the poor railing to which we give that name, but projecting parapets of stone, pierced into trefoils, quatrefoils, rosaces, cusps, brackets, balustrades—sometimes running across the whole house-front, more often guarding a single window, itself lofty, arched, mullioned and rich with tracery. It is here that, for the traveller coming from the North, Venetian architecture begins—not Byzantine of course, but the purest, noblest Cisalpine Gothic. It imparts a highly patrician air to the streets with their long lines of deserted palaces, which keep their caste through every change of fortune. Verona has not the fallen look of some old Italian capitals, nor the forsaken air of others, but suggests the idea that once her aristocracy closed their houses and withdrew to some retreat where they maintain their traditions, waiting for better times to return to their former homes. Many of the vaulted carriage-ways frame a glimpse of the rushing river which washes the massive foundations of the courtyards, the blue hills and lines of forked battlement.

In Verona one first sees Venetian painting too, on canvases which are to Titian and Tintoretto as the colors of dawn are to those of sunrise, but the glory is in them. The radiant pencil of Paul Veronese was early lost by his birthplace and given to Venice, in illustration of the parable, but even without her most glorious son native art makes a fair show in the picture-gallery and churches. The picture which struck me most was a fresco by Brusasorci in San Stefano, whither I had been drawn by the report of its antiquity, which is said to be greater than that of any other church in the town, going back to the seventh century. As on many other occasions, I found that a building may be too old, the pristine venerableness having been overbuilt by subsequent ages; but I was consoled for my disappointment by this beautiful fresco—Saint Stephen surrounded by the Holy Innocents. In the church calendar Saint Stephen is the first martyr, and the Innocents are commemorated two days later: in the picture the youthful deacon looks down with an air of paternal pride and affection upon the lovely babes trooping before him with palms in their little hands as he presents them to our Saviour, above in glory. There is a tenderness in the expression of the martyr's face and attitude, as well as in the conception of the group, which appeals to the simplest human feeling. The juxtaposition of the protomartyr and the children is a perfect instance of true ecclesiastical sentiment: it was not until long afterward that I knew it to be a fine work of art.

San Stefano is on the left bank of the river, in the smaller and less-frequented part of the town, and it was in further exploring the same quarter that I wandered into a curious church which had somehow the look of a cast-off garment, owing perhaps to the frequent patching it had evidently undergone, and its appearance of being owned by nobody. It stood open, empty of worshippers, with not even a beggar on the steps in receipt of charitable custom—alone on a little island. It is the church of San Tomaso Cantuariense, otherwise Thomas à Becket, whom it was odd to meet so far from home: he was revered all over Europe for a long time after his canonization, as this church proves, since he was adopted as its patron in 1316, nearly a hundred and fifty years after his so-called martyrdom; but to judge by its desertion he must be pretty well forgotten now. It is hereabouts that, on emerging from a cat's-cradle of little narrow cross streets, a very fine view of Sta. Anastasia from the rear breaks upon one, the pentagonal apse, the chapels, transepts, nave, and towers rising one above another, a beautiful specimen of early Italian Gothic, still strongly impressed with the Lombard spirit.

This Romanesque character is what gives the particular stamp to most of the sacred buildings in Verona, making them a study as distinct in their way as the Norman churches at Caen. They belong to one period and one style, although this is a transitional one: the slender pillars of the porches resting on crouching lions, the round-headed arches, the plain, square, soaring campanili, a majestic boldness and simplicity in general effect, an unconscious quaintness in detail, the line of the prevailing red marble contrasting gratefully with the layers of many-toned gray spread by time over the walls, produce a combination of form and color delightful to the eye. The older, original edifice is seldom visible from without: what remains of it is completely built in and over, and is generally to be found in the crypt. Notwithstanding the stateliness and interest of the cathedral, San Zenone was the church to which our steps returned most persistently. It is composed of three churches of very different date, the first having been erected soon after the year 800, the second in 1138, the third three hundred years later. The main building, which is of the twelfth century, is sunk far below the level of the ground: one descends into it from the main portal by ten steps; and this unusual mode of entrance, the depth, the great height, the rigid absence of ornament, the grave colors, the long unbroken lines of the nave, give the interior a remarkable solemnity, and create an impression and emotion as different as possible from those excited by churches of a later construction, with their florid architecture, their opulence of sculpture and carving, their statues and ornate monuments, their gorgeous paintings, their stained-glass windows—temples

The austere grandeur of San Zenone turns the soul inward upon a range of meditations which a Puritan need not disclaim. The nave terminates in one double flight of steps leading up to the second, most modern church, which is raised above the first and terminates in a pointed tribune; and another double flight which leads down to the vast vaulted crypt, with its pillars and recesses, which is the oldest part of the structure. This place breathes of the earliest Christian antiquity, and somehow reminds one of the Catacombs. The altars are older than the foundations: on one of them are groups of pillars fastened together by a species of Runic knot, such as are to be found in the rudest carving of the Hebrides; ancient sarcophagi and bassirilievi line the walls; yet round one of the recesses of this primitive-seeming sanctuary I found a branch of the Ampelopsis quinquefolia, our Virginia creeper, which I had fondly believed a native of America, painted with the utmost fidelity five hundred years before America was heard of, its five dentated leaves and jointed sprays in colors as rich as the masses we had seen trailing over the marble banisters of the villas on Lake Como, dyeing the pellucid water with their scarlet shadows. Throughout the church everything speaks of early times: the few frescoes are of the twelfth or thirteenth century: the only noteworthy picture is by the serious Mantegna. In the upper church Saint Zeno sits in his episcopal chair with a long fishing-rod in his hand, whence the Veronese, ignorant of sacred symbolism, infer that he was fond of the sport, and have invented an appropriate legend. He was an African by birth, became bishop of Verona A. D. 362, and is said to have suffered martyrdom twenty years afterward under the emperor Julian: his swarthy wooden effigy, of archaic stiffness, reminds one of the idol of some barbarous tribe. One of the most curious bits of the past is a group among the rude sculptures of the porch called The Chase of Theodoric: the dogs have caught the stag, and a fiend is about to seize upon the rider. Orthodox tradition has given the name, because Theodoric, like all the Goths, was a heretic, an Arian, but probably it points to some very early version of the story of the Wild Huntsman, an old German legend. One sees the trace of German ideas—at any rate, of Northern thought—everywhere in the mediæval monuments of Verona: it is the meeting of the genius of the North and South which Ruskin finds in the architecture and sculpture, and which imparts a peculiar and original physiognomy to the whole place. One of its most striking features is the Castel Vecchio ("old castle") and adjacent Ponte del Castello ("castle bridge"), for they seem but parts of one great fortification, turreted and battlemented, built by Can Grande II. in 1355. The bridge is an extraordinary structure, the arches being extremely unequal in size: the span of the largest is about a hundred and sixty feet. The mass, the irregularity, the strength of these piles, the dark river hurrying below, give the spot a grimness not often found on the sunny side of the Alps. The castle has been altered by many successive hands of course, for the history of Verona, like that of most Italian principalities, is the old story of the house out of which one devil was driven by seven worse ones: to Eccelino succeeded the Delle Scale, soon to become as bad as he, and be driven forth by the Visconti of Milan, who in their turn were expelled by the envious, despotic Venetians; and each as they came and went added and took away something of the beauty and might of the town.

But there is a gayer side to Verona than any which we have yet recalled. It was here that we first made acquaintance with many lively humors of Italian street-life which we had not met with in the more northern cities. Here we first noticed the eternal cooking in the open air, the roasting, frying, frizzling which are for ever going on, the people stopping at every few yards to eat macaroni, chestnuts, and Goodness knows what other nameless messes, until we began to wonder whether anything were cooked and eaten at home. Here too I saw the drollest and most charming bit of harlequinade between a rascal boy and an old woman carrying a heavy vessel of water. He popped out from under an archway and struck her a light tap on the shoulder with a bit of hollow cane: she turned round, but he had flown through an open window. On she trudged, and out he came as lightly as he had gone, and following her on tiptoe tickled the back of her neck with his wand: round she turned again, but he was gone too quickly for my eyes this time. She set down her ewer and stared in every direction, muttering curses: he came running swiftly down an alley, seized the ewer, and with every respectful demonstration of relieving her of the burden darted off with it in another direction. She hobbled after him, raining maledictions: back he came with a pantomime of courteous surprise—What! she did not wish to be assisted?—and set the vessel on a high ledge, whence she had much ado to lift it down. As she did so, splash! half the water was spilled: then her tormentor went through a dumb show of sympathy and sorrow until the crone seemed like to burst with fury. At last he broke into a fit of shrill laughter, the first sound he had uttered, made a macaronic gesture, and capered off with the airiest gambols and antics, like a very devil's kid. A street-urchin teasing an old woman is no new sight, but the nimbleness, spirit, grace and gentleness of this young Pickle, the impossibility of guessing what he would do or where he would be next, and the fine dramatic rage of the beldame, who looked like one of Michael Angelo's Fates, kept us standing and staring at the two until the fun was over as if we had been at a play.

In one respect we must have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless under the November sky. Out-of-door life is so large a part of the pleasure of being in Italy, fine weather adds so indescribably there to the beauty of even the most glorious works of man, that to have seen them only under a dull sky is like having seen a human countenance without its smile. Perhaps at another season we should not have thought the streets so melancholy: perhaps even in our admiration we did not pay full justice to

Sarah B. Wister.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

"Jane's hens are in good laying condition, and there are the cherries on the tree," said Miss Fleming tartly. She did not like Jane nor any other woman, but she usually fought for her sex against men in a mannish way—for the pleasure of fighting for the weaker party.

"Hens? Yes, and but for the whim of renting this tumble-down house with its great gardens out on the suburb, we could have had snug rooms in some business street, where I could have earned our bread and butter."

"It was your whim, captain. Why, she has kept up the table out of the garden, and you know it. Don't interfere with the child. She can turn a penny to the best advantage. Her ability is of the most practical kind."

The captain did not like her tone. He glanced uneasily at Jane, who ate her cherries in calm unconsciousness.

"I might as well stick pins in the divine cow Audhumbla!" Miss Fleming said to herself every day. This child, as she called her, irritated her, just as a machine did, or an animal, or any other creature whose motive-power she could by no means comprehend. She was herself a mass of vitalized nerves, all of which centred in that secret I, Cornelia Fleming, over whose hopes, nature and chances she brooded night and day. This other woman, who simply grew in her place, concerning herself no more about her own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the rooms in their house, though she had planned and manœuvred a long time to accomplish that end. When Miss Fleming came up to town to join the art-class at the Academy, she was exceedingly careful not to join also the emancipated lonely sisterhood, who set social laws at defiance. She might live alone, but it must be under the roof of conventionally correct people. She abjured the whole tribe of literary and artistic adventurers who haunted the studios and lecture-halls. She wrote home to her old mother that the Swendons, descended from the leaders of the first Swedish settlers, that family of Svens from whom Penn bought the land for his village of Philadelphia, had possessed culture and social rank, if no money, for centuries. Miss Fleming found for herself a lodging-place under their roof, with very much the motive of the low-born blackbird burrowing in the high, bare nest of the osprey.

She was on her way to the Academy now, and touched her hat jauntily and shook loose her flowing-sleeve as she said good-bye with a lingering look at the captain, to which he did not reply.

The cold ague of despair was on him: he combed his grizzled beard with his fingers, stared at the carpet and saw nobody. "Yes, I ought to have rented two small rooms up town, and found work that would pay. I'll do it now," he grumbled.

Jane had uncovered a long table heaped with tools, glue-pots, drawing-materials, models in wood, in paper, in clay, with others finely draughted on large sheets of Bristol board. The captain preserved his failures as sacredly as a Chinese the dead bodies of his ancestors. She took up one of these models and studied it thoughtfully: "Very well, father. I could go on with the business, I suppose."

The captain burst into a laugh: "Absurd! Though," relapsing into anxiety, "this is, as you say, really my business. But I could easily find a place as professor of Latin and Greek in some Western college which would support us."

"Now, I don't quite understand the action of this screw, A, B," meditatively. "It interferes with the force of the piston, in my judgment."

"Impossible!" hurrying over to the table. "I'll explain that in a moment, Jane. Why, that screw is the finest idea in the machine. It's the meaning, in fact. It all hinges on that."

In five minutes his smoking-cap was pushed back, his spectacles on his hooked nose, and he was lost in the depths of valves, gauges and levers.

Jane took the place of a dozen lost hands. She made the models, she draughted them, she worked with carpenter's tools, needles, pencils, clay, by turns, and was both swift and skillful. She had been at this daily work, indeed, since the time her father had lost his arm. Now and then, being really nothing but a child in years, she clasped her hands over her head and yawned when he was not looking, or, when she was sent to the fire for the glue, sat down on the floor and began a rough-and-tumble romp with the dog, or while she was at work, sang scraps of songs into which the captain threw a fine rolling bass.

The morning was warm: the fire had burned down low in the grate, and both windows were wide open. The wind which entered, though raw, had a breath of spring in it. The scraggy plum trees outside were covered with deep pink blossoms, yellow dandelions blazed up out of the grass, and even in the muddy walks: a half-frozen bee buzzed among them feebly for a while, and then lost his way into the room and fell with a thump on the table.

Jane dropped her tools, and put out her finger for him to crawl upon. "Now you are too early afoot: you're greedy, you fellow," she said. "You are in too great a hurry to be rich. Haven't you a comfortable house? And plenty of honey?" She carried him to the window and set him in the sun on the sill. "He'll fall in some puddle and be frozen to death; and serve him right! I hate your early birds and ants and bees, always at work."

"It is work you hate, Jenny. Now tack this strip in place, child, and then paste on the muslin. We must finish this before night, and there is more than a day's work on it."

Jane tacked and measured diligently a while, and then dropped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her palms. Her face was just in front of her father's. "I was thinking—"

"Yes."

"I mean that I saw in the paper this morning that there was a school of black-fish on the coast, the largest for years. I suppose the Lantrims will be out for them?"

"No doubt. The old captain wrote to me that he had bought Sutphen's Tuckerton skiff."

"Aha? You did not tell me that. What else did he say?"

"Oh, nothing. 'Crabs would be scarce this season; and couldn't we come down?' The larks were beginning to rise in the marshes."

Jane nodded thoughtfully: "A Tuckerton skiff? Now, I'm surprised at that, father. I should prefer something heavier—a yawl, say—for coming in on that beach. Well—The wind must be dead sou'-west to-day. It would bring the spray right up into your face if you were lying on the sand."

She was silent for some time, looking steadily out of doors.

The captain glanced uneasily once or twice at the dark blue eyes and at a ray of sunlight glistening in the loose yellow hair. "It is sou'-west. It really does begin to feel like summer," he said, dropping his pencil and fumbling for his tobacco.

Jane brought his pipe and lighted it for him. "I am dreadfully tired!" stretching her arm out, pushing up the sleeve, and looking at it as if it had done a day's ploughing. "Now, I suppose the men are all out in their boats by this time, but a person could easily rig Lantrim's little sloop and join them; or we could camp on the marshes all day. The scent of the pines would be heavy in this damp wind."

The captain nodded gravely and puffed in silence a while: "It's no use, Jane," taking the pipe from his mouth. "I haven't a penny."

She sprang up, ran to a writing-desk and took out a glove-box. In it were a pair of well-darned kid gloves and two tiny paper packages. She laid them before him: "It's all in silver: this is for your summer hat, and that for my shoes. What do you say, father? We are in time for the eight-o'clock train. We should have nearly the whole day on the beach."

"Hat? What do I want with a hat? But your shoes are broken."

"They can be patched," with a gasp of delight. "Here! clear away the work, father, while I put up a basket of dinner." She stopped by the window, looking out: "Somebody is coming through the apple trees: I smell a cigar. Now, remember, nothing must detain you. We can't break our engagement."

The visitor came in sight from under the apple trees—a sombre, heavy man in gray, the editor Neckart, to whom Mr. Waring had criticised the Swendons with such freedom the night before. Mr. Neckart had known the captain years ago. When he was a boy, too poor to pay for schooling, he used to go to the captain at night for help in his Greek or mathematics. Swendon had always preferred the companionship of younger men than himself, and was never without a "following" of clever, unruly schoolboys, whom he was as ready to help when they were lazy, as to tip with silver half-dollars—when he had them. Some of them had brought young Neckart to the captain, knowing nothing about him, except that he was miserably poor, with a desire for knowledge which they thought insane enough. Now that Neckart was a man, living in New York, and with very different problems to work from those of Euclid, he had but little intercourse with the slow, easy-going captain. They met occasionally, when Neckart came to Philadelphia, at the club or at dinner somewhere, when there would be a few minutes' hasty gossip about the old pranks of the boys—White, who died in California, or Porter, who was now in the Senate—and then a shake of the hand and good-bye, Neckart usually wondering to himself, as they parted, how soon that fellow Laidley would cease to cumber the earth and the captain would have his own and wear a decent coat again and the bits of gaudy jewelry in which he used so to delight.

The old man hurried down the garden-walk now to meet him, and wrung his hand heartily: "Bruce! is it possible? You have not crossed my threshold since the old Epictetus days."

"No, and I interrupt you now? You are going out? I only called for a few words on business."

"Plenty of time, plenty of time! My little girl and I were going to run down to the shore to vagabondize for a day.—Jane, this is my old friend Mr. Neckart.—We have plenty of time in which to catch the train. Sit down, Bruce."

Mr. Neckart did not sit down, however. He found some difficulty now in putting his business into a few concise words. He had heard Laidley's avowal the night before that he proposed to leave the captain penniless. All his boyish regard for the old man woke in force. His boyish feelings were apt to waken and clog Mr. Neckart's strait-lined path to success. He did not sentimentalize about his old teacher, but he set aside half an hour in which to look in on him and see what could be done for him. Anything could be done in half an hour by a man who chose to work hard enough.

He expected to find the captain totally disheartened by this blow, but here he was making ready for a day's fooling on the beach; for the captain, finding that his visitor did not promptly broach the subject of his errand, went on with his preparations.

So it happened that they fell into a brief silence. The old man by the fire screwed his rod as though rods were the business of life: the young girl sat by the window, a white-covered lunch-basket on the floor beside her, sewing strings on a wide-rimmed hat which she meant to wear. Her yellow hair was bound loosely about her head, fastened by a band of black velvet: it made a faint shadow about the calm, delicate face. The dog sat at her feet, his head on her knee, watching her intently. She took her stitches slowly and with care, stopping now and then to put her hand on Bruno's muzzle and nod at him significantly about the fun they were going to have presently. It was a quiet, pretty picture.

Now, silence or leisurely calm of any kind was rare in Mr. Neckart's daily life. He was the controller of a great journal: he was a leading politician. He had been making his own way, and dragging and goading slower men along, since he had left his cradle. Even his own party found the indomitable energy of this dwarfish giant intolerable sometimes. But his own action did not satisfy him. He had held his finger so long on the world's pulse that affairs in New York or Washington seemed but small matters. He liked to feel that they and he were linked by a thousand sympathies to the chances and changes of every country on the globe. A famine in India or an insurrection in Turkey were not mere newspaper items to him, but significant movements of the outer levers and pulleys of the great machine, part of which he was.

It is the straining horse that is always loaded, and there was no man in the party from whom such work was exacted as from Neckart. The night before he had received a deputation of French Communists proposing emigration: this morning he was to meet in secret caucus the leaders who would decide on the next candidate for the Presidency. So it went on day after day. To fall suddenly into this little room, among people to whom a day's fishing or sauntering with a dog through salt marshes was the object of life, startled him.

For years, too, people who talked to Neckart, though in but a street greeting, invariably recognized his power to help or harm them. If they had no favors to ask, they bore themselves deferentially, as to a power that could grant favors. To the captain he was still the boy Bruce, a good fellow, though dull in Greek: to the girl, intent on her holiday, he saw that he was an unwelcome guest, who would interfere with her journey. The jar of falling to the common level was sudden, yet oddly pleasant.

The captain, to fill up the time, began to discuss the different makes of fishing-rods. Mr. Neckart was used to give ten minutes each to men seeking interviews: their words had to be sharp as arrows, and driven straight home to the bull's eye of the matter to command his attention. Yet he listened to this lazy talk. The damp wind drove the perfume of the apple-blossoms in at the open window: the sunlight touched the glistening rings of hair on Jane's throat. How slow-moving and calm the girl was! He was quite sure that the blood had flowed leisurely in the veins under that pearly skin ever since she was born. None of that true American vim, sparkle, pushing energy here which he admired in his countrywomen.

"I really don't understand the new kinds of tackle," he said to Captain Swendon: "I have not had a rod in my hand for fifteen years."

"No. Of course not. You have other work to do. But Jane and I run down to the shore whenever we have money—I mean whenever we can manage to leave home. She knows every fisherman's hut from Henlopen to Barnegat. No better place to go for a breath of salt air than Sutphen's Point. You can troll with him all day, or dig for roots in the pine woods, or sleep on the beach in the sun."

Neckart smiled and glanced at his watch. At nine the committee would meet. Sun? Sleeping on the beach? He was a stout, strongly-built man, with muscles like steel, but, like most Americans who have urged their way relentlessly up, his brain before middle age gave signs of disease. As any other creature would, when overdriven for years it revolted, and failed in its work now and then. Night after night he lay sleepless, conscious only of a dull vacuity at the base of the brain; and by day, when some crisis demanded his most vigilant, keenest thought, thought suddenly blurred into momentary stupor. Any man who overworks his brain will understand how it was with him, and why, for physical reasons, this glimpse of absolute quiet and rest should touch his nerves as the taste of cordial would a fainting man. A sudden vision opened before him of yellow, silent sands, and dusky stretches of solemn pines, and the monotonous dash of the green sea all day, all night long. No doubt there were "old Sutphens" there, whole generations of people, outside of the living world, sleeping and sunning themselves. It was like a glimpse into some newly-discovered, silent, sunlit Hades.

Mr. Neckart put back his watch in his pocket, and looked irresolutely at the captain. The foolish, kindly old face belonged to his boyhood—to the time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation—unreasonable as that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over. Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on the situation which nobody but he could write, that must go to his paper by the next mail.

He took up his hat: "It is time for you to catch the train, captain. Will you take me with you?"

Captain Swendon looked at him hastily: "The very best thing you can do, Bruce! Just what I should advise.—Jane, go on before with Bruno. Mr. Neckart and I will follow."

Mr. Neckart was annoyed. He had forgotten that the girl was to go, and had thought of the captain as his only companion. But she walked far in front of them, through the apple trees, and down the quiet street, engrossed with the dog. She probably would not be in his way.

CHAPTER IV.

Down on the coast the world suddenly broadened and lifted into larger spaces. In lieu of eight-feet strips of pavement to walk on, there were the gray sweeps of sand, and great marshes stained with patches of color in emerald and brown, rolling off into the hazy background: instead of the brick and wooden boxes wherein we shut ourselves up with bad air in town, there were the vast uncovered plain of the sea, shapeless ramparts of fog incessantly rising and fading, an horizon which retreated as you searched for it into opening sunlit space, refusing to shut you in. The very boats and ships in which these people lived were winged, ready for flight into some yet farther region.

"Are you glad to come out of doors, Bruno? I am," said Miss Swendon to her dog as she stood looking at the sea; and then they sauntered away together.

Her father and Mr. Neckart went down to the mouth of the Inlet, where some fishermen were patching a boat which they had drawn up on a heap of mussel-shells. One or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over, with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they shook hands gravely with him, and made room for him on the bottom of an up-turned, worm-eaten scow. They were all captains as well as he, and he was hail, fellow! well met! with them as with everybody.

Mr. Neckart, who was formally introduced, nodded curtly, but did not sit down.

"A good day for the perch, Sutphen," said the captain, handing round a bundle of cigars.

"Yaas."

"But you ought to have been on the banks by daylight." Mr. Neckart's sharp, irritable voice jarred somehow on the quiet sunshine.

"Yaas. But I lent my boat last week, and this here one's out of repair.—Give me more of them nails, David."

"The boat could have been mended at night, and ready for use," in the tone which a teacher might use to idle boys.—"It is singular, Captain Swendon," turning his back on the men as on so many mud-turtles, "that the sea-air begets improvident habits in all coast-people. You cannot account for it rationally, but it is a fact. Along the whole immediate shore-line of Europe you find the same traits. Unreadiness, torpor of mind and body.—Ah! Captain Swendon and I wish to hire a boat for the day," turning to the fishermen again. "Can any of you men furnish us with one?"

Sutphen lighted his cigar leisurely: "We always manage to provide Captain Swendon with a boat when he wants it. We kin obleege him," with a slight stress on the pronoun.

"At what rates?" sharply.

"Waal, we kin talk of rates when the day's over. The captain and us won't disagree, I reckon."

"I never do business in that way. Bring out your boat and put a price on it."

"Come, Neckart," said the captain, rising hastily, "we will walk up the beach a bit.—I'll see you about the boat presently, Sutphen.—You don't know these fellows, Bruce," when they had passed out of hearing and found a seat in the thin salt grass. "They are not used to being dealt with in such a prompt, drill-major fashion."

"I deal with all men alike. Order and promptness have been necessary to me in every step of my way. I must have them from others. I pay to a penny, and I exact to a penny. It is not the money I want: it is discipline in the people about me. They must move as if they were drilled if they move to further my ends."

The captain took his cigar out of his mouth and turned blankly on him: "'Further your ends?' But, Bruce?—"

Neckart laughed: "Oh, no doubt they were created with some other object in view than to serve my purposes. But that is the cognizance which I take of them. Really, captain, if you were in public life, and saw with what eagerness masses of men follow feeble leaders who know the trick of piping to them, and how willing they are to be manipulated, you would soon come to look upon the American public simply as a machine ready for your own use when you had the skill to work it."

The captain's cigar went out in his fingers as he sat staring with dull perplexity at Neckart. There was a certain nobility in the carriage of the powerful figure and black shaggy head, an occasional fire in the deep-set eyes, a humor in the fine smile, which argued a different order of man from this scheming, selfish politician.

"I can't place you at all, Bruce. Now, I should have thought you would have been a reformer—worked for humanity—that line, you know. You were a sensitive lad, like a girl."

"I am quite too warm-hearted a fellow to be a philanthropist," laughed Neckart. "The philanthropists I know work for principles, liberty, education and the like: they don't care a damn for the individual Tom and Jerry. The chances are, that your reformer is a cold-blooded tyrant at home: he makes a god of his one idea: his god makes him nervous, ill-conditioned—the last man in the world to choose for a friend or a husband."

"You amaze me! I should have said that they were the wisest and purest of men. Next to clergymen, of course. I don't go to church myself, but I respect the cloth. But speaking of yourself, Bruce, you were a most affectionate little fellow. Do you remember how you referred every new idea to your mother? I recollect you told me once that you read your lessons in your school classics to her to amuse her. You must have cleaned the translation sometimes to make it fit for her ear."

"Yes."

"And I remember, too," regardless of the sudden silence which had fallen on his companion, "how you watched my wife making a cap one day—she had nice fingers in such work, Virginie—and how you saved your money to buy lace and ribbon for her to make your mother a cap; and how anxiously you sat watching every stitch as it went in, and carried it off triumphantly when it was done."

"I remember quite well. Mrs. Swendon was very kind to me in the matter."

The captain did not reply: he glanced at Neckart with sudden alarm. What was it that he had heard of Bruce's mother? Some wretched story that came out at the time of her death: had she committed a crime or gone mad? He could not recall it, but something in the silence of his companion told him that he had blundered. He began to smoke violently in contrition of soul, and remained silent, while Neckart lay still in the sand, his hands clasped behind his head, looking at the surf.

It was not the surf he saw.

It was that little silly cap which he had held on his boy's chapped fist delighted and proud. Twenty years ago! He had earned the money to buy it by work after the other boys in the shop had gone home. He could see the very pattern now that was worked in the lace, and the ribbon—a pale blue, just the color of his mother's eyes. He had carried it home in the evening, and smoothed the gray hair over the gentle little face, and tied it on her before he would let her go to the glass. She was just as pleased as he, and kissed him with her arms tight about his neck and the tears in her eyes. An hour afterward he had found her tearing it into bits with an idiotic laugh. A little later—

He shut his eyes, as if to keep out some real sight before him.

It seemed to him as if his whole boyhood had been made up of just such nights as this one which he remembered.

It was not often that Neckart looked back at that early time. He was neither morbid nor addicted to self-torture. He had carefully walled up this miserable background of youth from his busy, cheerful, wide-awake life. Why should he go back to it? Something, however, in the air to-day, in the moan of the sea through the sunlight, brought it all before him, more real than the stretch of water and sand.

The captain smoked out his cigar and began to talk. Gaps of silence were so much wasted time in the world; and besides, he owed a duty to Bruce. Here was a man going headlong to the devil by the road of ambition, a sweet, high nature becoming soured and tainted, all for the lack of honest direction from somebody of age and experience.

When Neckart roused himself enough to understand, the captain was in the full swing of his dictatorial oration. "I don't want to intrude with my opinion. But no man should live for himself," he said. "Now, if my scissors had turned out as I expected, I should have been worth a million to-day. I'd have spent a good share of it—let me see—on churches, I think. Small churches—at corners in place of grogshops. Pure Gothic, say—"

"Stained glass and gargoyles instead of whiskey? You must bid higher for souls in back alleys than that, captain."

"Well, schools, then—colleges, asylums, soup-houses. I tell you, Bruce, if I had your opportunities, if I could work political machinery, I'd lift this festering mass below us up—at least to civilization and Christianity."

"I thought you meant me," laughing. "Go on."

"Of course I can't give you detailed advice. Take me on pistons and screws, and I'm at home; but I know only the broad outlines of political economy. My view," ponderously, "is purely philosophic. Our politics need reform, sir. An honest man who would come to the front just now would save the country. The masses would follow him to honesty. The Americans are a just people by instinct. I tell you, sir, if I had your chances—Talk to Pliny Van Ness, Bruce. There's a keen man of the world, who is as pure and lofty in his notions as an enthusiastic woman. He has a scheme just now for bettering the condition of the children of the dangerous classes of Pennsylvania. I wish you knew Van Ness."

"I've seen him;" adding, after a moment's hesitation, "He is as upright a man, I believe, as you say—the very man to be inspired with your heroic rage for reform, and to carry it into effect. I am not the same kind of material."

"Bruce, you belie yourself. I knew you as a boy—"

"Then you knew an ordinary, not bad sort of a fellow, captain, but no hero. I have had one or two qualities which have pushed me up—a skill—craft with using words, as you have with tools, for instance, an inflexibility of purpose, a certain tact in influencing large bodies of men. I have never had any affection for them. I have two or three stanch friends. Other men and women are part of the world's furniture to me. Nothing more."

"But the power which these qualities have gained for you? How do you mean to use it?"

"You press me closely," with an amused scrutiny of the captain's monitorial face. "I shall use it, just now, to make money. That is the thing of which I have had the least in the world, and which has yielded me most substantial pleasure. When I am a rich man I can command knowledge, power and whatever else I covet." His eye kindled at the last words. There was a darkened background in his thoughts, to which Neckart, with all his easy frankness, admitted no man.

The captain studied him with perplexity: then his face lightened: "I have it! You must marry! A wife and children are the very influences you need to soften and broaden your aims. Yes, I know I'm speaking plainly. But—have you never thought of it?"

Mr. Neckart did not reply for a few moments. "It is impossible that I should ever marry," he said gravely. "There is an obstacle which would make it simply criminal in me. I never think of it."

The captain colored: "I beg your pardon, Bruce: I did not know—"

"You have not intruded: you have not hurt me in the least," laying his hand for an instant on the captain's knee. "It is not a matter about which I have any soreness of feeling. The obstacle arose from circumstances: I am not in any sense guilty."

Captain Swendon nodded and occupied himself with rebuckling his shoes. He could neither answer to the purpose nor rid his face of the shocked alarm visible in it. To have been told that Neckart was dying would have startled him less, and seemed not so pitiable to him as to know that he was shut out for life from love and marriage.

Neckart read his thoughts. "There's a difference in men," he said, concealing a smile. "It would not suit you, captain, to go through life as an anchorite or a Catholic priest, but it really agrees with me very well. I am not a domestic man by taste, nor susceptible to woman's influence. I have met a few women, of course, beautiful, and with the intellect and wealth which would make them desirable wives; and I have no doubt if I had been differently situated I should have loved and married. But it never cost me a second thought to pass them by."

"But this obstacle—it may some day be removed?" ventured the captain.

Mr. Neckart's features settled into the hard lines again. "Not while I live," he said.

If there was one quality in himself on which the captain could build with confidence, it was his keen insight into other men. He read Neckart's life as an open book. "Bruce is married already," he said to himself. "He was precisely the kind of lad to be taken in by some creature that is now a secret burden on him. Drinks or chews opium, I've no doubt, or has gone to the devil with one jump. Tut! tut! He would not be divorced. I know what his opinion is on that head. But she'll die: that sort of women never live long.—It will all come right, Bruce," he said aloud. "There's more ruling of eternal justice in all of our lives than we give God credit for. But this matter astonishes me. I've heard of your intimacy with certain women in Washington—leaders of society. I always thought of you as a marrying man."

"Because I cannot marry I have the more right to accept whatever entertainment or friendship women can give me," falling into his ordinary easy tone. "I have the keenest appreciation for an ambitious woman who has intellect and culture, and is alive with energy and coquetry. I know such women. They seem to be full of subtle flame. Certainly, I would make a friend of such a one. Why not? I would marry her if I could."

A moment after he looked up the beach, and seeing the captain's daughter, smiled to think what an absolute contrast she was to this ideal live, brilliant woman. She was sitting on a log, the dog asleep at her feet, her hands clasped about her knees, looking out to sea, and he could swear she had sat there motionless as the stretch of gray sand about her for an hour. Such torpidity revolted Neckart. Neither did it appease him that the nobly-cut, dim-lighted face, the mass of yellowish hair rolling down from its black band, the coarse brown dress which hung about her in thick folds, all gave him pleasure. In the moment he had met her first he had felt an odd repulsion to this girl. The women with whom he had fraternized were akin to himself: Jane, child as she was, was antagonistic. He felt for her the same kind of irritated dislike as that which Miss Fleming gave to her, and which people of active brains are apt to give to any creature whose animus is totally different from their own.

What did the girl sit there for, thinking her own thoughts? Young women at her time of life blushed and fluttered and plumed themselves when a man came near who was of the right age to love and marry. And so they ought, so they ought! Neckart was used to see women of any age plume themselves when he was in sight. It was simple admission of his position. They knew their own capital of beauty or wit, and showed him the best of every point, just as a pheasant turns every golden feather to the sun when a passer-by comes near. He liked these radiant, self-asserting women, to be sure, very much as he did the silly fowl or a Skye terrier conscious of its beauty in every hair. But beauty was so much wasted material on this daughter of Swendon's, who did not seem to know she had it.

Besides, Mr. Neckart had always been thrown into contact with women who had careers and aims. Each one of them wished she had been born a man, and did what she could to snatch a man's prerogatives. One wrote, another painted, a third sang; this one strove for political power in the lobbies of Congress, that for money, the majority for husbands: they were wits, littérateurs, society women. But for a young girl to jog on from year to year striving neither for knowledge nor lovers, making her world of the whims and wants of a weak-minded old man, composedly building up every day models which she knew would prove failures to-morrow,—here was a most inane life.

Any eye which had grown used to the flash and flutter of brilliant tropical birds in a cage would be apt to find the little dull-breasted swallow sitting motionless by her nest a very insipid subject of study. Probably no other man, as active and busy in the world as Neckart, would have wasted so much thought on a chance young girl sitting on a log. But women being forbidden fruit to him, he was morbidly curious about them all. Old Chrysostom, barred into his cave by an impassable line, was much more inquisitive about the princess asleep outside than if he had been a hearty young fellow free to go out and kiss and make love to her.

Miss Swendon came up presently, the dog marching alongside. "Father," she said, "you are spending the whole day with Mr. Neckart. You have not told Sutphen the town news. I am afraid the old man will be hurt."

"That's a fact: I'll go over directly. You will like to be alone a while, Neckart, at any rate.—Come, Jane."

Neckart rose: "You are not going over to those rough fellows, Miss Swendon? There are no women there."

Jane laughed. "I am a woman," with an arch little nod. "One queen-bee makes the whole hive proper, conventionally."

"Of course. But really those men are vulgar and fishy to such a degree—Nothing but a missionary spirit can take you to them?"

"On the contrary," gravely, "they are the best-bred men I know. Their talk is fuller of adventure and sincerity than any book I ever read."

"Still, stay with me. I have feelings to consider as well as Sutphen."

"Very well.—I will come over presently, father. Tell the little boys to make a fire clear enough to broil the fish for dinner." She sat down and called Bruno to her feet. There was a grave, childish simplicity in her motions which was a new study to Neckart.

"I believe," watching her keenly, "you would rather have gone. Sutphen would have been a better companion than I?"

"I don't know as yet. I have never tried you. I do know Ichabod."

"Or perhaps the truer courtesy would be to leave you alone with the sea? You were making a picture of it in your mind a while ago?"

"No," knitting her brows. "I could not do that. I know people who look at the sea or mountains or sky as so much canvas and gamboge and burnt umber and bits of effect. They are very tiresome."

"You have imagination rather than fancy, then? You hear the secret words in that everlasting moan yonder? You know what the mountains say to you at nightfall?" Neckart vaguely remembered the jargon of sentimental novels, the heroines of which always keep their heads on Nature's breast. He did not mean to chaff any woman, but he would gladly have proved this one sentimental and weak to explain his strong antipathy to her.

"No, I never thought of those things. But one grows tired in town—housekeeping, models and all of it. My work is very light, but I do not like to work at all. And here—the beach is silent and the sky blue and the sea rolls—rolls all day long: it is like coming home after one has been out on the streets."

"About as keen comprehension of Nature as the tree yonder," thought Neckart contemptuously. But, after all, the tree was warmed, and its sap ran stronger, and it grew and broadened in the sun and air; and that was more than he could say of painter or poet.

He lay at her feet, leaning on his elbow, for an hour or more. He had meant to gauge her intellect, experience and character in a few minutes. It was a recreation which had sometimes amused him when with women. As soon as his curiosity was satisfied he was done with them. But the discoveries he had made in those pretty little dwellings innocently opening their doors to wandering hearts of marriageable men! The miserable shams inside, the traps, the dark rooms full of all uncleanness! To-day he forgot his system of exploration. He began to feel the physical effect of coming from close streets and striving work into this vast open space—the drowsiness which men experience on high mountains or by the sea, and which has a subtle, lasting enchantment in it. The damp wind bent and whitened the stretches of salt grass in the meadows behind him; brown clouds swept from west to east overhead in endless procession; the great dun-colored plane of the sea rose and fell steadily: for the rest, except the shrill pipe of a fishhawk perched on a dead tree by its nest, there was silence. He spoke to Jane now and then, but for the most part forgot her. She had fallen into the motionless quiet which seemed habitual to her. Some of the brilliant women he knew would have dug holes in the sand, or chattered gossip, or interpreted to him with much intellectual force the meaning of land and sky, or have taken their last love-affair or other private little misery to give words to the complaint of the sea. This girl seemed only a part of the shore, as much as sea or sand. The sun warmed, the air blew on her as on them: if they gave her anything besides, she too kept their secret.

Occasionally Neckart roused himself to talk briefly to her, and noticed then a blunt directness in her speech that would have appalled an ordinary hearer. It was her habit and choice to say nothing, but if pushed to the wall what was there that she would not say?

The dog, lying at her feet watching him steadily, did not give up to him the secret of its own being or its opinion of himself; but if it once did speak it would do both, and with no white lies in the words either. "The girl is like her dog," thought Neckart.

She rose at last, and went across the sands to her father. Neckart was soon conscious of an uneasy change in everything about him. The atmosphere of sunlit rest was broken. The clouds only meant rain, the sand was sand, and the sea but a wet swash of water: he began to look at his watch and think of the trains. The influence that had quieted him so unaccountably had been in the girl, then? He shut his eyes and tried to recall the erect figure, the fall of yellow hair, the clear Scandinavian face. He felt the same strong repulsion from her, yet in their brief interview she had certainly affected him uncontrollably—brought him back to old boyish ways of thinking. It was perhaps, he thought, because he was unused to such absolutely honest women.