quadron round Point Judith, and
glide in like a flock of land-bound sea-birds; and above them, yet more
snowy and with softer curves, pressed onward the white squadrons of the
sky.

Within, the tower is full of debris, now disintegrated into one solid
mass, and covered with vegetation. You can lie on the blossoming clover,
where the bees hum and the crickets chirp around you, and can look
through the arch which frames its own fair picture. In the foreground
lies the steep slope overgrown with bayberry and gay with thistle
blooms; then the little winding cove with its bordering cliffs; and
the rough pastures with their grazing sheep beyond. Or, ascending the
parapet, you can look across the bay to the men making hay picturesquely
on far-off lawns, or to the cannon on the outer works of Fort Adams,
looking like vast black insects that have crawled forth to die.

Here our young people spent the day; some sketched, some played croquet,
some bathed in rocky inlets where the kingfisher screamed above them,
some rowed to little craggy isles for wild roses, some fished, and then
were taught by the boatmen to cook their fish in novel island ways. The
morning grew more and more cloudless, and then in the afternoon a fog
came and went again, marching by with its white armies, soon met and
annihilated by a rainbow.

The conversation that day was very gay and incoherent,--little fragments
of all manner of things; science, sentiment, everything: "Like a
distracted dictionary," Kate said. At last this lively maiden got Philip
away from the rest, and began to cross-question him.

"Tell me," she said, "about Emilia's Swiss lover. She shuddered when she
spoke of him. Was he so very bad?"

"Not at all," was the answer. "You had false impressions of him. He was
a handsome, manly fellow, a little over-sentimental. He had travelled,
and had been a merchant's clerk in Paris and London. Then he came back,
and became a boatman on the lake, some said, for love of her."

"Did she love him?"

"Passionately, as she thought."

"Did he love her much?"

"I suppose so."

"Then why did she stop loving him?"

"She does not hate him?"

"No," said Kate, "that is what surprises me. Lovers hate, or those who
have been lovers. She is only indifferent. Philip, she had wound silk
upon a torn piece of his carte-de-visite, and did not know it till I
showed it to her. Even then she did not care."

"Such is woman!" said Philip.

"Nonsense," said