my friends remember that I did not really belong to
Dunnet Landing.

I sighed, and turned to the half-written page again.

V. Captain Littlepage

IT WAS A long time after this; an hour was very long in that coast
town where nothing stole away the shortest minute. I had lost myself
completely in work, when I heard footsteps outside. There was a steep
footpath between the upper and the lower road, which I climbed to
shorten the way, as the children had taught me, but I believed that Mrs.
Todd would find it inaccessible, unless she had occasion to seek me in
great haste. I wrote on, feeling like a besieged miser of time, while
the footsteps came nearer, and the sheep-bell tinkled away in haste as
if someone had shaken a stick in its wearer's face. Then I looked, and
saw Captain Littlepage passing the nearest window; the next moment he
tapped politely at the door.

"Come in, sir," I said, rising to meet him; and he entered, bowing with
much courtesy. I stepped down from the desk and offered him a chair by
the window, where he seated himself at once, being sadly spent by his
climb. I returned to my fixed seat behind the teacher's desk, which gave
him the lower place of a scholar.

"You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage," I said.

"A happy, rural seat of various views,"

he quoted, as he gazed out into the sunshine and up the long wooded
shore. Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased as a
child.

"My quotation was from Paradise Lost: the greatest of poems, I suppose
you know?" and I nodded. "There's nothing that ranks, to my mind, with
Paradise Lost; it's all lofty, all lofty," he continued. "Shakespeare
was a great poet; he copied life, but you have to put up with a great
deal of low talk."

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain
Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading; she had also made
dark reference to his having "spells" of some unexplainable nature. I
could not help wondering what errand had brought him out in search of
me. There was something quite charming in his appearance: it was a face
thin and delicate with refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if
he had suffered from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his
careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing care
on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari' Harris to be
a very common-place, inelegant person, who would h