ntative. There were aspiring
black spruces, crowned on the very top with heavy coronets of cones;
there were balsamic firs, whose young buds breathe the scent of
strawberries; there were cedars, black as midnight clouds, and white
pines with their swaying plumage of needle-like leaves, strewing the
ground beneath with a golden, fragrant matting; and there were the
gigantic, wide-winged hemlocks, hundreds of years old, and with long,
swaying, gray beards of moss, looking white and ghostly under the deep
shadows of their boughs. And beneath, creeping round trunk and matting
over stones, were many and many of those wild, beautiful things which
embellish the shadows of these northern forests. Long, feathery wreaths
of what are called ground-pines ran here and there in little ruffles of
green, and the prince's pine raised its oriental feather, with a mimic
cone on the top, as if it conceived itself to be a grown-up tree. Whole
patches of partridge-berry wove their evergreen matting, dotted
plentifully with brilliant scarlet berries. Here and there, the rocks
were covered with a curiously inwoven tapestry of moss, overshot with
the exquisite vine of the Linnea borealis, which in early spring rings
its two fairy bells on the end of every spray; while elsewhere the
wrinkled leaves of the mayflower wove themselves through and through
deep beds of moss, meditating silently thoughts of the thousand little
cups of pink shell which they had it in hand to make when the time of
miracles should come round next spring.

Nothing, in short, could be more quaintly fresh, wild, and beautiful
than the surroundings of this little cove which Captain Kittridge had
thought fit to dedicate to his boat-building operations,--where he had
set up his tar-kettle between two great rocks above the highest
tide-mark, and where, at the present moment, he had a boat upon the
stocks.

Mrs. Kittridge, at this hour, was sitting in her clean kitchen, very
busily engaged in ripping up a silk dress, which Miss Roxy had engaged
to come and make into a new one; and, as she ripped, she cast now and
then an eye at the face of a tall, black clock, whose solemn tick-tock
was the only sound that could be heard in the kitchen.

By her side, on a low stool, sat a vigorous, healthy girl of six years,
whose employment evidently did not please her, for her well-marked black
eyebrows were bent in a frown, and her large black eyes looked surly and
wrathful, and one versed