have had to keep right on, shouldn't we?"

"Yes," said the doctor. Something in his tone arrested Hetty's ear. She
looked at him inquiringly; then she said slowly:

"I understand you. I am ashamed. We were only three people out of
hundreds: it is just like life, isn't it: how selfish we are without
realizing it! It isn't of any consequence how or where or when any one
of us dies: the train must keep right on. I see."

"Yes," said the doctor again: and this monosyllable meant even more than
the other. Dr. Eben was a philosopher. Epictetus, and that most royal
of royal emperors, Marcus Aurelius, had been his masters: their words
were ever present with him. "It is not possible that the nature of the
universe, either through want of power or want of skill, has made a
mistake;" "nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature
to bear,"--were hourly watchwords of thought with him. In this regard he
and Hetty were alike, though they had reached their common standpoint by
different roads: he by education and reasoning, and a profound
admiration for the ancient classics; she by instinct and healthfulness
of soul, and a profound love for that old Massachusetts militiaman, her
grandfather.

"The Runs" was, as Hetty had said, one of the loveliest of sea-side
places. Dr. Eben, who was familiar with all the well-known sea-side
resorts in America, was forced to admit that this little nook had a
charm of its own, unlike all the others. The epithet "hugged in," which
Hetty had used, was the very phrase to best convey it. It was at the
mouth of a small river, which, as it drew near the sea, widened so
suddenly that it looked like a lake. The country, for miles about, was
threaded by little streams of water: which of them were sea making up,
and which were river coming down, it was hard to tell. In early morning
they were blue as the sky overhead; at sunset they glowed like a fiery
net, suddenly flung over the grasses and rushes. Great flocks of marsh
birds dwelt year after year in these cool, green labyrinths, and made no
small part of the changeful beauty of the picture, rising sometimes,
suddenly, in a dusky cloud, and floating away, soaring, and sinking, and
at last dropping out of sight again, as suddenly as they had risen. The
meadows were vivid green in June, vivid claret in October: no other
grass spreads such splendor of tint on so superb a palette, as the
salt-marsh grasses on the low, wide stretches of some of Ne