her most
bosom friends will hate her; they will turn so green like the grass on
the ground with envy. It is a great pleasure when my wife wears those
kind: her very sisters cannot speak for anger, and her own mother looks
so rigid like the Cardiff Giant."

"Well, I guess I shall have to take them," said David, "and you 'll have
to wrap them right up: we have n't got more than about time to get the
train, have we, Calvin?"

"So help me gracious!" said Mr. Isaacs, "is there no time to sell our
friend Calvin a pair? He will repent not to secure those other pair,
until his dying day; so sorry like he lose his ship some day upon those
rocks. I suppose there is no others like those in the whole creation."

But he wrapped the purchase up in a bit of white paper and gave David
Prince four trade dollars in change for a ten-dollar bill, and the two
men went out, leaving Mr. Isaacs free to attend to a timid woman in
black who had just come in to raise fifty cents upon a ring, while Mrs.
Isaacs looked after a carpenter who proposed to pawn his edge-tools for
rent-money.

Mr. Isaacs waved his hand and smiled as the men went out of the door.
"You will find they are a success, to surprise yourself," he called out:
"her most bosom friends will writhe and scream with envy."

*****

The winding line of the long New England coast faces the sea, in its
sweeping curves, in every direction. From the Callender place, the ocean
lay to the south. Though elsewhere east winds might be blowing harsh
upon the coast, here, almost every day, and all day long, in summer,
the southwest wind came pouring in from the expanse of waters, fresh and
cool, boisterous often, but never chill; and even winds from the east
lost edge in crossing miles of pitch-pine woods, of planted fields, of
sandy ponds, of pastures, and came in softened down and friendly.

A gentle breeze was drifting in from sea. All day long it had been
blowing, salt and strong and riotous, tossing the pine-tops, bending the
corn, swaying the trees in the orchards, but now it was preparing to die
away, as was its wont, at sundown, to give to the woods, the cornfields
and the orchards a little space of rest and peace before it should rise
again in the early evening to toss them all night long. The blue of the
sky was blue in the water. Every object stood out sharp and clear. Down
the low, curving shore-line, curls of smoke rose from distant roofs, and
on the headland, up the coast, the