ends to perch upon these timbers are a more
graceful company than lobsters or fishes. After all, there is something
sublime in that sepulture of the Parsees, who erect near every village
a dokhma, or Tower of Silence, upon whose summit they may bury their
dead in air.

Thus widely may one's thoughts wander from a summer boat. But the
season for rowing is a long one, and far outlasts in Oldport the stay
of our annual guests. Sometimes in autumnal mornings I glide forth over
water so still, it seems as if saturated by the Indian-summer with its
own indefinable calm. The distant islands lift themselves on white
pedestals of mirage; the cloud-shadows rest softly on Conanicut; and
what seems a similar shadow on the nearer slopes of Fort Adams is in
truth but a mounted battery, drilling, which soon moves and slides
across the hazy hill like a cloud.

I hear across nearly a mile of water the faint, Sharp orders and the
sonorous blare of the trumpet That follows each command; the horsemen
gallop and wheel; suddenly the band within the fort strikes up for
guard-mounting, and I have but to shut my eyes to be carried back to
warlike days that passed by,--was it centuries ago? Meantime, I float
gradually towards Brenton's Cove; the lawns that reach to the water's
edge were never so gorgeously green in any summer, and the departure of
the transient guests gives to these lovely places an air of cool
seclusion; when fashion quits them, the imagination is ready to move
in. An agreeable sense of universal ownership comes over the
winter-staying mind in Oldport. I like to keep up this little semblance
of habitation on the part of our human birds of passage; it is very
pleasant to me, and perhaps even pleasanter to them, that they should
call these emerald slopes their own for a month or two; but when they
lock the doors in autumn, the ideal key reverts into my hands, and it
is evident that they have only been "tenants by the courtesy," in the
fine legal phrase. Provided they stay here long enough to attend to
their lawns and pay their taxes, I am better satisfied than if these
estates were left to me the whole year round.

The tide takes the boat nearer to the fort; the horsemen ride more
conspicuously, with swords and trappings that glisten in the sunlight,
while the white fetlocks of the horses twinkle in unison as they move.
One troop-horse without a rider wheels and gallops with the rest, and
seems to revel in the free motion. Her