onsideration of a whole."

"Never mind," said Garda to Margaret; "let's be fragmentary. We'll even
pick up the sea-weeds if you like (though generally I hate to pick up
things); we'll fill your basket, and make Mr. Winthrop carry it."

"No," said Margaret. "On the contrary, let us abhor the sea-weeds; let
us give ourselves to the consideration of a whole." And, pausing, she
looked over the sea, then up at the sky and down the beach, with a slow
musing sweep of the head which became her well.

"You're not enough in earnest," said Garda; "we can see the edge of a
smile at the corners of your lips. Wait--I'll do it better." She stepped
apart from them, clasped her hands, and turned her eyes towards the sea,
where they rested with a soft, absorbed earnestness that was remarkable.
"Is this wide enough?" she asked, without change of expression. "Is it
free from details--unfragmentary? In short, is it--a Whole?"

"Yes," said Winthrop; "far too much of one! You are as universal as a
Universal Geography. Come back to us--in as many details and fragments
as you please; only come back."

"By no means; I have still the beach to do, and the sky." And slowly she
turned the same wide, absorbed gaze from the sea to the white shore.

The beach was worth looking at; broad, smooth, gleaming, it stretched
southward as far as eye could follow it; even there it did not end, it
became a silver haze which mixed softly with the sea. On the land side
it was bounded by the sand-cliff which formed the edge of Patricio; this
little cliff, though but twelve or fourteen feet in height, was
perpendicular; it cut off, therefore, the view of the flat ground above
as completely as though it had been five hundred. Great pink-mouthed
shells dotted the beach's white floor; at its edge myriads of minute
disks of rose and pearl lay heaped amid little stones, smooth and white,
all of them wet and glistening. Heaps of bleached drift-wood lay where
high tides had left them. Little beach-birds ran along at the water's
edge with their peculiar gait--many pauses, intermixed with half a dozen
light fleet steps as though running away--the gait, if ever there was
one, of invitation to pursue. There were no ships on the sea; the tracks
of vessels bound for Cuba, the Windward and Leeward islands, lay out of
sight from this low strand. And gentle as the water was, and soft the
air, the silence and the absence of all signs of human life made it a
very wild scene; wil