e, you were suddenly seized with a
slight paralysis of the tongue. Thus it was, at any rate, with me. We
were cemented therefore by the firmest ties,--a nominal seniority on my
part, and a substantial supremacy on his.

We lodged one summer at an old house in that odd suburb of Oldport
called "The Point." It is a sort of Artists' Quarter of the town,
frequented by a class of summer visitors more addicted to sailing and
sketching than to driving and bowing,--persons who do not object to
simple fare, and can live, as one of them said, on potatoes and Point.
Here Severance and I made our summer home, basking in the delicious
sunshine of the lovely bay. The bare outlines around Oldport sometimes
dismay the stranger, but soon fascinate. Nowhere does one feel bareness
so little, because there is no sharpness of perspective; everything
shimmers in the moist atmosphere; the islands are all glamour and
mirage; and the undulating hills of the horizon seem each like the
soft, arched back of some pet animal, and you long to caress them with
your hand. At last your thoughts begin to swim also, and pass into
vague fancies, which you also love to caress. Severance and I were
constantly afloat, body and mind. He was a perfect sailor, and had that
dreaminess in his nature which matches with nothing but the ripple of
the waves. Still, I could not hide from myself that he was a changed
man since that voyage in search of health from which he had just
returned. His mother talked in her humdrum way about heart disease; and
his father, taking up the strain, bored us about organic lesions, till
we almost wished he had a lesion himself. Severance ridiculed all this;
but he grew more and more moody, and his eyes seemed to be laying more
submarine cables than ever.

When we were not on the water, we both liked to mouse about the queer
streets and quaint old houses of that region, and to chat with the
fishermen and their grandmothers. There was one house, however, which
was very attractive to me,--perhaps because nobody lived in it, and
which, for that or some other reason, he never would approach. It was a
great square building of rough gray stone, looking like those sombre
houses which everyone remembers in Montreal, but which are rare in "the
States." It had been built many years before by some millionnaire from
New Orleans, and was left unfinished, nobody knew why, till the garden
was a wilderness of bloom, and the windows of ivy. Oldport is