upon the wide and magnificent
prospect. A soft summer wind waved a little the long gray grass of the
ancient resting-place, and seemed to whisper peace to the weary
generation that lay there. What struggles, what heroisms, the names on
the stones recalled! Here had stood the first fort of 1620, and here the
watchtower of 1642, from the top of which the warder espied the lurking
savage, or hailed the expected ship from England. How much of history
this view recalled, and what pathos of human life these graves made real.
Read the names of those buried a couple of centuries ago--captains,
elders, ministers, governors, wives well beloved, children a span long,
maidens in the blush of womanhood--half the tender inscriptions are
illegible; the stones are broken, sunk, slanting to fall. What a pitiful
attempt to keep the world mindful of the departed!

VI

MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SEA, ISLES OF SHOALS

Mr. Stanhope King was not in very good spirits. Even Boston did not make
him cheerful. He was half annoyed to see the artist and Miss Lamont
drifting along in such laughing good-humor with the world, as if a summer
holiday was just a holiday without any consequences or responsibilities.
It was to him a serious affair ever since that unsatisfactory note from
Miss Benson; somehow the summer had lost its sparkle. And yet was it not
preposterous that a girl, just a single girl, should have the power to
change for a man the aspect of a whole coast-by her presence to make it
iridescent with beauty, and by her absence to take all the life out of
it? And a simple girl from Ohio! She was not by any means the prettiest
girl in the Newport Casino that morning, but it was her figure that he
remembered, and it was the look of hurt sensibility in her eyes that
stayed with him. He resented the attitude of the Casino towards her, and
he hated himself for his share in it. He would write to her..... He
composed letter after letter in his mind, which he did not put on paper.
How many millions of letters are composed in this way! It is a favorite
occupation of imaginative people; and as they say that no thoughts or
mental impressions are ever lost, but are all registered--made, as it
were, on a "dry-plate," to be developed hereafter--what a vast
correspondence must be lying in the next world, in the Dead-letter Office
there, waiting for the persons to whom it is addressed, who will all
receive it and read it some day! How unpleasant and absurd it