ank you," cried Candace, finding voice and forgetting shyness in
her gratitude; "you've been real kind to me, Captain."

"That child's got mighty pretty eyes," soliloquized Captain King, as he
marched down the wharf. "I wonder what relation she is to the Grays.
She don't seem their sort exactly. She's been raised in the country, I
expect; but Mrs. Gray'll polish her up if anybody can, or I'm mistaken.
Steady there--what're you about?" as a trunk came bounding and
ricochetting across the gangway; "this wharf ain't no skittle-ground!"

Meanwhile the coupe was slowly climbing a steep side-street which led to
the Avenue. Looking forth with observant eyes, Candace noted how the
houses, which at first were of the last-century build, with hipped roofs
and dormer windows like those to which she was accustomed in the old
hill village that had been her birthplace, gave way to modernized old
houses with recent additions, and then to houses which were unmistakably
new, and exhibited all manner of queer peaks and pinnacles and
projections, shingled, painted in divers colors, and broken by windows
of oddly tinted glass. Next the carriage passed a modern church built of
pinkish-brown stone; and immediately after, the equable roll of the
wheels showed that they were on a smooth macadamized road. It was, in
fact, though Candace did not know it, the famous Bellevue Avenue, which
in summer is the favorite drive for all fashionable persons, and
thronged from end to end on every fair afternoon by all manner of
vehicles, from dainty pony-wagons to enormous mail-coaches.

There were only a few carriages in sight now, though they seemed many to
our little country maid. Shops were opening for the season. Men were
busy in hanging Eastern rugs and curtains up to view, and arranging in
the windows beautiful jars and plates of porcelain and pottery,
glittering wares from Turkey and Damascus, carved furniture, and inlaid
cabinets. Half a dozen florists exhibited masses of hot-house flowers
amid a tangle of palms and tree-ferns; beyond was the announcement of an
"opening" by a well-known dressmaker, whose windows were hung with more
beautiful things than Candace in her small experience had ever dreamed
of before,--laces, silks, embroideries.

The shops gave way to houses, each set in a court-yard gay with newly
planted beds of flowers or foliage plants. Vines clustered everywhere;
the trees, not yet fully in leaf, were like a tossing spray of delic