hung and the ivy-tendrils swayed, while
behind him there appeared a glimmering water-surface, across which
slowly drifted the tall masts of a schooner. It looked strangely like a
view I had seen of some foreign harbor,--Amalfi, perhaps,--with a
vine-clad balcony and a single human figure in the foreground. So real
and startling was the sight that at first it was not easy to resolve
the whole scene into its component parts. Yet it was simply such a
confused mixture of real and reflected images as one often sees from
the window of a railway carriage, where the mirrored interior seems to
glide beside the train, with the natural landscape for a background. In
this case, also, the frame and foliage of the picture were real, and
all else was reflected; the sunlit bay behind us was reproduced as in a
camera, and the dark figure was but the full-length image of myself.

It was easy to explain all this to Severance, but he shook his head.
"So cool a philosopher as yourself," he said, "should remember that
this image is not always visible. At our last visit, we looked for it
in vain. When we first saw it, it appeared and disappeared within ten
minutes. On your mechanical theory it should be other-wise."

This staggered me for a moment. Then the ready solution occurred, that
the reflection depended on the strength and direction of the light; and
I proved to him that, in our case, it had appeared and disappeared with
the sunshine. He was silenced, but evidently not convinced; yet time
and common-sense, it seemed, would take care of that.

Soon after all this, I was called out of town for a week or two. If
Severance would go with me, it would doubtless complete the cure, I
thought; but this he obstinately declined. After my departure, my
sister wrote, he seemed absolutely to haunt the empty house by the Blue
Rocks. He undoubtedly went here to sketch, she thought. The house was
in charge of a real-estate agent,--a retired landscape-painter, whose
pictures did not sell so profitably as their originals; and her theory
was, that this agent hoped to make our friend buy the place, and so
allured him there under pretence of sketching. Moreover, she surmised,
he was studying some effect of shadow, because, unlike most men, he
appeared in decent spirits only on cloudy days. It is always so easy to
fit a man out with a set of ready-made motives! But I drew my own
conclusions, and was not surprised to hear, soon after, that Severance
was se