and formed the
harbor.

The family of the old seaman, at the time he took possession of his
"shore quarters," consisted of himself, wife, and daughter Mary--the
rest of his children having died young. As we have no particular concern
with the events of his life from that period to Mary's twenty-first
year, we shall only observe that during that time he had the misfortune
to lose his wife.

Mary Bowline was a young lady, confessedly of the greatest beauty in the
little town of B----, and for many miles round; a trifle above the
middle stature, sufficiently so to relieve her figure from the
imputation of shortness; or, as she was a little inclined to be
"fleshy," or "embonpoint," as our refined authors call it, from what is
sometimes called "stubbidness;" her eyes were of deep celestial blue;
her hair, a dark brown, and her complexion, notwithstanding her
continual rambles along the beach in her girlish days, of exquisite
purity. Her education, I grieve to say, had been most shamefully
neglected; her mother, though a most exemplary woman, both as a
Christian and a member of society, had never tied her up in a
fashionable corset to improve her figure, nor sent her to a fashionable
boarding school to improve her mind; the consequence was that she knew
nothing of the piano,--Virgil seems to have had the gift of prophecy
with regard to this part of modern education, when he said or sang,

"Stridente stipula miserum _disperdere_ carmen,"--

and was equally ignorant of that sublime and useful art, working lace;
she had no further idea of dancing than had been beat into her head, or
rather heels, by the saltatory instructions of an itinerant
dancing-master--I ask pardon, "professor"--who, with a bandy-legged dog
at his heels, and a green baize bag under his arm, paid an annual visit
to the town, to instruct its Thetises in the "poetry of motion;" an apt
illustration of the

"_Bacchum_ in remotis" choreas "rupibus
Vidi docentem
Nymphasque discentes,"

of Horace, with the alteration of a word; said fiddler having "forsworn
thin potations" very soon after the commencement of his capering career.
In the "serene and silent art" she was, however, truly fortunate; the
clergyman of the place, a most amiable and intelligent man, and, to the
credit of his amphibious parishioners, loved and esteemed with the
utmost fervor and unanimity, added to his other accomplishments no mean
skill as a draughtsman; an art, tha