th their arms about each other's necks. After all, it was not
much like my picture of the great world, this lonely sea, this plunging
up from billow on to billow, this burrowing down in the heart of
green-gloomed hollows, this rocking and creaking and straining, this
buoyant bounding over the crests,--yet the freedom, the monotony, the
wild career of the winds fired me; it set my blood a-tingle; I liked it.
And then I thought of Angus, rocked to sleep each night, as he was now,
in his ocean-cradle. But once at school, and the world was round me; it
hummed up from the streets, it boomed down from the spires. I became a
part of it, and so forgot it. To Effie there were ever stealing rumors
of yet a world beyond, of courts and coronets, of satin shimmer and
glitter of gems, but they glanced off from me,--and other than thus I
have never yet found that great world that used to lie over the river.

We had been at school a happy while, and but for constant letters,
and for the brief visit of Mrs. Strathsay, who had journeyed over the
Atlantic for one last look at sweet home-things, and to see how all went
with us, and then had flitted back again,--but for that, home would have
seemed the veriest dream that ever buzzed in an idle brain: would so
have seemed to other maidens, not to us, for the fibres of the Strathsay
heart were threads that never wore thin or parted. Two twelvemonths
more, and we should cross the sea ourselves at last; and wearying now
of school a bit, all our visions centred in St. Anne's, and the merry
doings, the goings and comings, that we heard of there; and it seemed to
me as if home were to be the beginning of life, as erst it had seemed
that in school we should find the world.

It was the vacation of the long summer term; there was packing and
padlocking to go each on her way, and the long dormitories rang with
shrill clamor. They all had a nest to seek. Effie was already gone away
with her chief crony, whose lady-mother, a distant kinswoman of our own,
fancied the girl's fair countenance. I was to join them in a week or
two,--not yet, because I had wished to send home the screens painted on
white velvet, and they wanted yet a sennight's work, and I knew Mrs.
Strathsay would be proud of them before the crackle of the autumn fires.
The maids ran hither and yon, and the bells pealed, and the knocker
clashed, and the coaches rolled away over the stone pave of the
court-yard, and there was embracing and je