Heaven I am an old man now and have done with
all such vanities!

Still this dimness of mine eyes!--Come nearer, Susan, and stand before
the fullest blaze of the hearth. Now I behold you illuminated from
head to foot, in your clean cap and decent gown, with the dear lock of
gray hair across your forehead and a quiet smile about your mouth,
while the eyes alone are concealed by the red gleam of the fire upon
your spectacles. There! you made me tremble again. When the flame
quivered, my sweet Susan, you quivered with it and grew indistinct, as
if melting into the warm light, that my last glimpse of you might be
as visionary as the first was, full many a year since. Do you remember
it? You stood on the little bridge over the brook that runs across
King's Beach into the sea. It was twilight, the waves rolling in, the
wind sweeping by, the crimson clouds fading in the west and the silver
moon brightening above the hill; and on the bridge were you,
fluttering in the breeze like a sea-bird that might skim away at your
pleasure. You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a creature of
the ocean-foam and the crimson light, whose merry life was spent in
dancing on the crests of the billows that threw up their spray to
support your footsteps. As I drew nearer I fancied you akin to the
race of mermaids, and thought how pleasant it would be to dwell with
you among the quiet coves in the shadow of the cliffs, and to roam
along secluded beaches of the purest sand, and, when our Northern
shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lonely, far amid
summer seas. And yet it gladdened me, after all this nonsense, to find
you nothing but a pretty young girl sadly perplexed with the rude
behavior of the wind about your petticoats. Thus I did with Susan as
with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my
mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues before I could see
her as she really was.

Now, Susan, for a sober picture of our village. It was a small
collection of dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the sea
with the rock-weed and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or
to have come ashore among the pipe-staves and other lumber which had
been washed from the deck of an Eastern schooner. There was just space
for the narrow and sandy street between the beach in front and a
precipitous hill that lifted its rocky forehead in the rear among a
waste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a brok