e also the tide reaches or seems
to reach the very edge of the turf; and when the light battery gallops
this way, it is as if it were charging on my floating fortress. Upon
the other side is a scene of peace; and a fisherman sings in his boat
as he examines the floats of his stake-net, hand over hand. A white
gull hovers close above him, and a dark one above the horsemen, fit
emblems of peace and war. The slightest sounds, the rattle of an oar,
the striking of a hoof against a stone, are borne over the water to an
amazing distance, as if the calm bay amid its seeming quiet, were
watchful of the slightest noise. But look! in a moment the surface is
rippled, the sky is clouded, a swift change comes over the fitful mood
of the season; the water looks colder and deeper, the greensward
assumes a chilly darkness, the troopers gallop away to their stables,
and the fisherman rows home. That indefinable expression which
separates autumn from summer creeps almost in an instant over all.
Soon, even upon this Isle of Peace, it will be winter.

Each season, as winter returns, I try in vain to comprehend this
wonderful shifting of expression that touches even a thing so
essentially unchanging as the sea. How delicious to all the senses is
the summer foam above yonder rock; in winter the foam is the same, the
sparkle as radiant, the hue of the water scarcely altered; and yet the
effect is, by comparison, cold, heavy, and leaden. It is like that
mysterious variation which chiefly makes the difference between one
human face and another; we call it by vague names, and cannot tell in
what it lies; we only know that when expression changes, all is gone.
No warmth of color, no perfection of outline can supersede those
subtile influences which make one face so winning that all human
affection gravitates to its spell, and another so cold or repellent
that it dwells forever in loneliness, and no passionate heart draws
near. I can fancy the ocean beating in vague despair against its shores
in winter, and moaning, "I am as beautiful, as restless, as untamable
as ever: why are my cliffs left desolate? why am I not loved as I was
loved in summer?"

MADAM DELIA'S EXPECTATIONS.

Madam Delia sat at the door of her show-tent, which, as she discovered
too late, had been pitched on the wrong side of the Parade. It was
"Election day" in Oldport, and there must have been a thousand people
in the public square; there were really more than the four p