green and vermilion matting of the
partridge-berry was impearled with white velvet blossoms, the
checkerberry hung forth a translucent bell under its varnished green
leaf, and a thousand more fairy bells, white or red, hung on blueberry
and huckleberry bushes. The little Pearl of Orr's Island had wandered
many an hour gathering bouquets of all these, to fill the brown house
with sweetness when her grandfather and Moses should come in from work.

The love of flowers seemed to be one of her earliest characteristics,
and the young spring flowers of New England, in their airy delicacy and
fragility, were much like herself; and so strong seemed the affinity
between them, that not only Mrs. Pennel's best India china vases on the
keeping-room mantel were filled, but here stood a tumbler of scarlet
rock columbine, and there a bowl of blue and white violets, and in
another place a saucer of shell-tinted crowfoot, blue liverwort, and
white anemone, so that Zephaniah Pennel was wont to say there wasn't a
drink of water to be got, for Mara's flowers; but he always said it with
a smile that made his weather-beaten, hard features look like a rock lit
up by a sunbeam. Little Mara was the pearl of the old seaman's life,
every finer particle of his nature came out in her concentrated and
polished, and he often wondered at a creature so ethereal belonging to
him--as if down on some shaggy sea-green rock an old pearl oyster should
muse and marvel on the strange silvery mystery of beauty that was
growing in the silence of his heart.

But May has passed; the arbutus and the Linnea are gone from the woods,
and the pine tips have grown into young shoots, which wilt at noon under
a direct reflection from sun and sea, and the blue sky has that metallic
clearness and brilliancy which distinguishes those regions, and the
planting is at last over, and this very morning Moses is to set off in
the Brilliant for his first voyage to the Banks. Glorious knight he! the
world all before him, and the blood of ten years racing and throbbing in
his veins as he talks knowingly of hooks, and sinkers, and bait, and
lines, and wears proudly the red flannel shirt which Mara had just
finished for him.

"How I do wish I were going with you!" she says. "I could do something,
couldn't I--take care of your hooks, or something?"

"Pooh!" said Moses, sublimely regarding her while he settled the collar
of his shirt, "you're a girl; and what can girls do at sea? you