charm of gems, after all! You feel that they are
fashioned through dissimilar processes from yourself,--that there's a
mystery about them, mastering which would be like mastering a new life,
like having the freedom of other stars. I give them more personality
than I would a great white spirit. I like amber that way, because I know
how it was made, drinking the primeval weather, resinously beading each
grain of its rare wood, and dripping with a plash to filter through and
around the fallen cones below. In some former state I must have been a
fly embalmed in amber.

"Oh, Lu!" I said, "this amber's just the thing for me, such a great
noon creature! And as for you, you shall wear mamma's Mechlin and that
aqua-marina; and you'll look like a mer-queen just issuing from the
wine-dark deeps and glittering with shining water-spheres."

I never let Lu wear the point at all; she'd be ridiculous in it,--so
flimsy and open and unreserved; that's for me;--Mechlin, with its
whiter, closer, chaste web, suits her to a T.

I must tell you, first, how this rosary came about, any way. You know
we've a million of ancestors, and one of them, my great-grandfather, was
a sea-captain, and actually did bring home cargoes of slaves; but once
he fetched to his wife a little islander, an Asian imp, six years old,
and wilder than the wind. She spoke no word of English, and was full
of short shouts and screeches, like a thing of the woods. My
great-grandmother couldn't do a bit with her; she turned the house
topsy-turvy, cut the noses out of the old portraits, and chewed the
jewels out of the settings, killed the little home animals, spoiled the
dinners, pranced in the garden with Madam Willoughby's farthingale and
royal stiff brocades rustling yards behind,--this atom of a shrimp,--or
balanced herself with her heels in the air over the curb of the well,
scraped up the dead leaves under one corner of the house and fired
them,--a favorite occupation,--and if you left her stirring a mess in
the kitchen, you met her, perhaps, perched in the china-closet and
mumbling all manner of demoniacal prayers, twisting and writhing and
screaming over a string of amber gods that she had brought with her
and always wore. When winter came and the first snow, she was furious,
perfectly mad. One might as well have had a ball of fire in the house,
or chain-lightning; every nice old custom had been invaded, the ancient
quiet broken into a Bedlam of outlandish sounds,