pliments, and will Miss Frost take a walk with him on
the beach?"

I started up, and, says I:

"Won't I!" Then I composed myself, and sent back compliments, and Miss
Frost will have great pleasure in complying with Mr. Burke's polite
invitation.

When the--colored messenger was gone, I sat down in the Boston rocker,
clasped my hands, and drew a deep, deep sigh of ecstatic expectation.
Then I remembered that he was waiting, and sprang to my feet.

With my two shaking hands I fastened the other woman's hair over my own,
that would neither curl nor friz worth a cent that awful hot day. Then I
put on a white muslin dress, that looked seraphically innocent, and
tightened it up with a plaid silk sash, that circled my slender waist
and floated off like a rainbow breaking through a cloud.

Then I took my parasol in one hand, held my flowing skirts up with the
other, and went forth to meet my destiny. Oh, how my feet longed to
dance! How my girlish heart beat and fluttered in this innocent bosom.

He was waiting for me in the long stoop, leaning against a post, and
fanning his manly head with the broad brim of his Panama hat. Oh, how
majestic, how--but language fails me here.

Arm in arm we walked along the beach. He leaned toward me, I leaned
with gentle heaviness on him--delightful reciprocity--eloquent silence.
A soft breeze blew up from the ocean, and kissed us both with refreshing
softness.

"Ah!" said the noble man by my side, "this is delicious."

"Deliriously so," I murmured.

"You feel the revivifying effect?" says he.

"Exquisitely," says I, leaning a little more confidingly on his stalwart
arm.

He bent his stately head and looked down into my eyes. Sisters, the
thrill of that glance shook my delicate frame as bumble-bees set a
full-blown rose to trembling when they swarm in its heart.

"Shall we go down to the sands?" says he; "the incoming tide is dashing
them with coolness."

I understood the delicate meaning conveyed in these words. Nothing could
be more exquisitely suggestive. The tide--what was that but his own
noble self? The sands--pure, white, untrodden--in my whole life I never
heard anything more typical.

"If you desire it," I said.

"If I desire it. Ah! Miss Frost, it is for you to say."

My heart leaped to this as a speckled trout snaps at a fly. Nothing so
near a proposal had ever reached me before. But a New England woman is
modest; she does not snatch at the first offer--far from