on
a broad forehead, to which a pair of penciled dark eyebrows gave a
striking and definite outline. Beneath, lay a pair of large black eyes,
remarkable for tremulous expression of melancholy and timidity. The
cheek was white and bloodless as a snowberry, though with the clear and
perfect oval of good health; the mouth was delicately formed, with a
certain sad quiet in its lines, which indicated a habitually repressed
and sensitive nature.

The dress of this young person, as often happens in New England, was, in
refinement and even elegance, a marked contrast to that of her male
companion and to the humble vehicle in which she rode. There was not
only the most fastidious neatness, but a delicacy in the choice of
colors, an indication of elegant tastes in the whole arrangement, and
the quietest suggestion in the world of an acquaintance with the usages
of fashion, which struck one oddly in those wild and dreary
surroundings. On the whole, she impressed one like those fragile
wild-flowers which in April cast their fluttering shadows from the mossy
crevices of the old New England granite,--an existence in which
colorless delicacy is united to a sort of elastic hardihood of life, fit
for the rocky soil and harsh winds it is born to encounter.

The scenery of the road along which the two were riding was wild and
bare. Only savins and mulleins, with their dark pyramids or white spires
of velvet leaves, diversified the sandy wayside; but out at sea was a
wide sweep of blue, reaching far to the open ocean, which lay rolling,
tossing, and breaking into white caps of foam in the bright sunshine.
For two or three days a northeast storm had been raging, and the sea was
in all the commotion which such a general upturning creates.

The two travelers reached a point of elevated land, where they paused a
moment, and the man drew up the jogging, stiff-jointed old farm-horse,
and raised himself upon his feet to look out at the prospect.

There might be seen in the distance the blue Kennebec sweeping out
toward the ocean through its picturesque rocky shores, docked with
cedars and other dusky evergreens, which were illuminated by the orange
and flame-colored trees of Indian summer. Here and there scarlet
creepers swung long trailing garlands over the faces of the dark rock,
and fringes of goldenrod above swayed with the brisk blowing wind that
was driving the blue waters seaward, in face of the up-coming ocean
tide,--a conflict which