re, you did free things without indelicacy, displayed a
maiden's thoughts to every eye, and proved yourself as innocent as
naked Eve.--It was beautiful to observe how her simple and happy
nature mingled itself with mine. She kindled a domestic fire within my
heart and took up her dwelling there, even in that chill and lonesome
cavern hung round with glittering icicles of fancy. She gave me warmth
of feeling, while the influence of my mind made her contemplative. I
taught her to love the moonlight hour, when the expanse of the
encircled bay was smooth as a great mirror and slept in a transparent
shadow, while beyond Nahant the wind rippled the dim ocean into a
dreamy brightness which grew faint afar off without becoming gloomier.
I held her hand and pointed to the long surf-wave as it rolled calmly
on the beach in an unbroken line of silver; we were silent together
till its deep and peaceful murmur had swept by us. When the Sabbath
sun shone down into the recesses of the cliffs, I led the mermaid
thither and told her that those huge gray, shattered rocks, and her
native sea that raged for ever like a storm against them, and her own
slender beauty in so stern a scene, were all combined into a strain of
poetry. But on the Sabbath-eve, when her mother had gone early to bed
and her gentle sister had smiled and left us, as we sat alone by the
quiet hearth with household things around, it was her turn to make me
feel that here was a deeper poetry, and that this was the dearest hour
of all. Thus went on our wooing, till I had shot wild-fowl enough to
feather our bridal-bed, and the daughter of the sea was mine.

I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the form
of a Gothic arch by setting up a whale's jaw-bones. We bought a heifer
with her first calf, and had a little garden on the hillside to supply
us with potatoes and green sauce for our fish. Our parlor, small and
neat, was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt frame, and with
shells and pretty pebbles on the mantelpiece, selected from the sea's
treasury of such things on Nahant Beach. On the desk, beneath the
looking-glass, lay the Bible, which I had begun to read aloud at the
book of Genesis, and the singing-book that Susan used for her evening
psalm. Except the almanac, we had no other literature. All that I
heard of books was when an Indian history or tale of shipwreck was
sold by a pedler or wandering subscription-man to some one in the
vill