shore was in its most gracious mood, the landscape as
if newly created. There was a light, luminous fog, which revealed just
enough to excite the imagination, and refined every outline and softened
every color. Mr. King and Irene left the carriage to follow the road,
and wandered along the sea path. What softness and tenderness of color
in the gray rocks, with the browns and reds of the vines and lichens!
They went out on the iron fishing-stands, and looked down at the shallow
water. The rocks under water took on the most exquisite shades--purple
and malachite and brown; the barnacles clung to them; the long
sea-weeds, in half a dozen varieties, some in vivid colors, swept over
them, flowing with the restless tide, like the long locks of a drowned
woman's hair. King, who had dabbled a little in natural history, took
great delight in pointing out to Irene this varied and beautiful life
of the sea; and the girl felt a new interest in science, for it was all
pure science, and she opened her heart to it, not knowing that love can
go in by the door of science as well as by any other opening. Was
Irene really enraptured by the dear little barnacles and the exquisite
sea-weeds? I have seen a girl all of a flutter with pleasure in a
laboratory when a young chemist was showing her the retorts and the
crooked tubes and the glass wool and the freaks of color which the
alkalies played with the acids. God has made them so, these women, and
let us be thankful for it.

What a charm there was about everything! Occasionally the mist became so
thin that a long line of coast and a great breadth of sea were visible,
with the white sails drifting.

"There's nothing like it," said King--"there's nothing like this island.
It seems as if the Creator had determined to show man, once for all,
a landscape perfectly refined, you might almost say with the beauty
of high-breeding, refined in outline, color, everything softened into
loveliness, and yet touched with the wild quality of picturesqueness."

"It's just a dream at this moment," murmured Irene. They were standing
on a promontory of rock. "See those figures of people there through
the mist--silhouettes only. And look at that vessel--there--no--it has
gone."

As she was speaking, a sail-vessel began to loom up large in the
mysterious haze. But was it not the ghost of a ship? For an instant it
was coming, coming; it was distinct; and when it was plainly in sight
it faded away, like a diss