about his wife, an' he can't say nothin' too pleasant
neither. She was modest with strangers, but there ain't one o' her old
friends can ever make up her loss. For me, I don't want to go there no
more. There's some folks you miss and some folks you don't, when they're
gone, but there ain't hardly a day I don't think o' dear Sarah Tilley.
She was always right there; yes, you knew just where to find her like
a plain flower. 'Lijah's worthy enough; I do esteem 'Lijah, but he's a
ploddin' man."

XXI. The Backward View

AT LAST IT WAS the time of late summer, when the house was cool and damp
in the morning, and all the light seemed to come through green leaves;
but at the first step out of doors the sunshine always laid a warm hand
on my shoulder, and the clear, high sky seemed to lift quickly as I
looked at it. There was no autumnal mist on the coast, nor any August
fog; instead of these, the sea, the sky, all the long shore line and the
inland hills, with every bush of bay and every fir-top, gained a deeper
color and a sharper clearness. There was something shining in the air,
and a kind of lustre on the water and the pasture grass,--a northern
look that, except at this moment of the year, one must go far to seek.
The sunshine of a northern summer was coming to its lovely end.

The days were few then at Dunnet Landing, and I let each of them slip
away unwillingly as a miser spends his coins. I wished to have one of
my first weeks back again, with those long hours when nothing happened
except the growth of herbs and the course of the sun. Once I had not
even known where to go for a walk; now there were many delightful things
to be done and done again, as if I were in London. I felt hurried and
full of pleasant engagements, and the days flew by like a handful of
flowers flung to the sea wind.

At last I had to say good-by to all my Dunnet Landing friends, and my
homelike place in the little house, and return to the world in which I
feared to find myself a foreigner. There may be restrictions to such a
summer's happiness, but the ease that belongs to simplicity is charming
enough to make up for whatever a simple life may lack, and the gifts of
peace are not for those who live in the thick of battle.

I was to take the small unpunctual steamer that went down the bay in the
afternoon, and I sat for a while by my window looking out on the green
herb garden, with regret for company. Mrs. Todd had hardly spoken all
day