warmest
cheek when it blushes.--Love shuts itself up in sympathy like a
knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily. All the rest followed in
due order according to Nature's kindly programme.

Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell desperately in
love with the daughter of this second wife, married her, and carried her
to India, where their first and only child was born, and received the
name of Myrtle, as fitting her cradle in the tropics. So her earliest
impressions,--it would not be exact to call them recollections,--besides
the smiles of her father and mother, were of dusky faces, of loose white
raiment, of waving fans, of breezes perfumed with the sweet exhalations
of sandal-wood, of gorgeous flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas,
of gliding palanquins, and all the languid luxury of the South. The
pestilence which has its natural home in India, but has journeyed so far
from its birth place in these later years, took her father and mother
away, suddenly, in the very freshness of their early maturity. A
relation of Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was returning to
America on a visit, and the child was sent back, under her care, while
still a mere infant, to her relatives at the old homestead. During the
long voyage, the strange mystery of the ocean was wrought into her
consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to have become a part of her
being. The waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother; and,
looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with tender
care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the rhythm of their
movement became a part of her, almost as much as her own pulse and
breath.

The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral traits which
predominated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this child in
embryo, waiting to come to maturity. It was as when several grafts,
bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same
stock. Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her
father and mother, but all the ancestors who have been mentioned, and
more or less obscurely many others, came uppermost in their time, before
the absolute and total result of their several forces had found its
equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known as an
individual. These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting,
some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil held
mortgages o