't
ain't Moses Pennel that's to marry her. I've had peculiar exercises of
mind about that ar child,--well I have;" and Miss Roxy pulled a large
spotted bandanna handkerchief out of her pocket, and blew her nose like
a trumpet, and then wiped the withered corners of her eyes, which were
humid as some old Orr's Island rock wet with sea-spray.

Miss Emily had a secret love of romancing. It was one of the
recreations of her quiet, monotonous life to build air-castles, which
she furnished regardless of expense, and in which she set up at
housekeeping her various friends and acquaintances, and she had always
been bent on weaving a romance on the history of Mara and Moses Pennel.
The good little body had done her best to second Mr. Sewell's attempts
toward the education of the children. It was little busy Miss Emily who
persuaded honest Zephaniah and Mary Pennel that talents such as Mara's
ought to be cultivated, and that ended in sending her to Miss Plucher's
school in Portland. There her artistic faculties were trained into
creating funereal monuments out of chenille embroidery, fully equal to
Miss Emily's own; also to painting landscapes, in which the ground and
all the trees were one unvarying tint of blue-green; and also to
creating flowers of a new and particular construction, which, as Sally
Kittridge remarked, were pretty, but did not look like anything in
heaven or earth. Mara had obediently and patiently done all these
things; and solaced herself with copying flowers and birds and
landscapes as near as possible like nature, as a recreation from these
more dignified toils.

Miss Emily also had been the means of getting Mara invited to Boston,
where she saw some really polished society, and gained as much knowledge
of the forms of artificial life as a nature so wholly and strongly
individual could obtain. So little Miss Emily regarded Mara as her
godchild, and was intent on finishing her up into a romance in real
life, of which a handsome young man, who had been washed ashore in a
shipwreck, should be the hero.

What would she have said could she have heard the conversation that was
passing in her brother's study? Little could she dream that the mystery,
about which she had timidly nibbled for years, was now about to be
unrolled;--but it was even so. But, upon what she does not see, good
reader, you and I, following invisibly on tiptoe, will make our
observations.

When Moses was first ushered into Mr. Sewell's s