eated ourselves on a white old
cottonwood that had floated out of the Columbia river, and been cast by
the high tides of winter above the shelving sands.

We were rather a silent party for a few minutes. In his abstraction, Mr.
Kittredge reached down and traced a name in the sand with the point of
my parasol stick--TERESA.

Then, seeing the letters staring at him, he looked up at her, and said,
"I could not brush them out if I would. Time has failed to do that." Her
gaze wandered away, out to sea, up towards the Capes, down toward the
Head; and a delicate color grew upon her cheek. "It has scarcely changed
in fifteen years," she said. "I did not count on finding all things the
same."

With that I made a pretense of leaving them, to seek shells along the
beach; for I knew that fate could no longer be averted. When I returned
she was aware that I possessed the secret of both, and she smiled upon
me a recognition of my right to be pleased with what I saw; what I
beheld seeming the prelude to a happy marriage. That night I wrote in my
diary, after some comments on my relations with Mr. Kittredge:

"It is best to be off with the old love,
Before you are on with the new."

AN OLD FOOL.

PART I.

The annual rain-fall on the lower Columbia River is upward of eighty
inches--often almost ninety; and the greater amount of this fall is
during the winter months, from November to March, generally the least
intermittent in December. I mention this climatic fact, the better to be
understood in attempting to describe a certain December afternoon in the
year 186-.

It lacked but two days of Christmas, and the sun had not shone out
brightly for a single hour in three weeks. On this afternoon the steady
pour from the clouds was a strong reminder of the ancient deluge.
Between the rain itself and the mist which always accompanies the
rain-fall in Oregon, the world seemed nearly blotted out. Standing on
the wharf at Astoria, the noble river looked like a great gray caldron
of steaming water, evaporating freely at 42 deg.. The lofty highlands on the
opposite shore had lost all shape, or certain altitude. The stately
forest of firs along their summits were shrouded in ever-changing masses
of whitish-gray fog. Nothing could be seen of the light-house on the
headland at the mouth of the river; nothing of Tongue Point, two miles
above Astoria; and only a dim presentment of the town itself, and the
hills at the back of i