r breakfast, Arnold asked the way to the knoll behind the house,
covered with pines. Laura went to show him, though it was but a little
walk. In the woods, by the pine-trees, near the sound of the brook, Arnold
asked Laura, "What had his music said to her?" Whether she answered him in
the words she had given her sister the night before I will not say; but
late to dinner, out from the woods, two happy lovers walked home in the
bright September noon.

* * * * *

The log-cabin was built. If in its walls there were any broad chinks
through which a wind might make its way, there were other draughts to send
it back again,--strains of music, that helped to kindle the household
hearth,--such strains as made sacred the seed that was laid in the earth,
that refined coarse labor, that softened the tone of the new colony rising
up around, so that life, even the rudest, was made noble, and the work was
not merely for the body, but for the spirit, and a new land was planted
under these strains of the musician.

* * * * *

ENGLISH NAVAL POWER AND ENGLISH COLONIES.

What are the considerations which properly enter into any just estimate of
a people's naval power?

In the _first_ place, this certainly is a vital question: Are the people
themselves in any true sense naval in their tastes, habits, and training?
Do they love the sea? Is it a home to them? Have they that fertility of
resources and expedients which the emergencies of sea-life make so
essential, and which can come only from a long and fearless familiarity
with old Ocean in all his aspects of beauty and all his aspects of terror?
Or are they essentially landsmen,--landsmen just as much on the deck of a
frigate as when marshalled on a battle-field? This is a test question. For
if a nation has not sailors, men who smack of the salt sea, then vain are
proud fleets and strong armaments.

I am satisfied that the ordinary explanation of that naval superiority
which England has generally maintained over France is the true
explanation. Certainly never were there stouter ships than those which
France sent forth to fight her battles at the Nile and Trafalgar. Never
braver men trod the deck than there laid down their lives rather than
abase their country's flag. Yet they were beaten. The very nation which,
on land, fighting against banded Europe, kept the balance for more than a
generation at equipoise, on the w