hands, with their oval nails polished and opalescent,
were exceedingly beautiful; and, where the creamy foam of the fine
lace fell back from the dimpled wrists, quaintly carved jet serpents
with blazing diamond eyes coiled around the throbbing thread-like
pulses of sullen _sang azure_.

Bending over the carnations, she examined the gorgeous hues,--toyed
with their fragile stems,--and then, glancing shyly over her shoulder
like a startled fawn half expectant of hounds and hunter, she glided
rapidly to an artificial mound crowned with a mouldering mossy plaster
image of Ariadne and her pard, and stood surveying her new domain.

"Solitude" filled a semicircular hollow between low wooded hills,
which ran down to lave their grassy flanks in the blue brine of the
Atlantic, and constituted the horns of a crescent bay, on whose
sloping sandy beach the billows broke without barrier.

The old-fashioned brick house--with sharp, peaked roof, turreted
chimneys, and gable window looking down in front upon the clumsily
clustered columns that supported the arched portico--was built upon a
rocky knoll, of which nature laid the foundation and art increased the
height; and, around and above it, towered a dense grove of ancient
trees that shut out the glare of the sea and effectually screened the
mansion from observation. The damp walls were heavily draped with the
sombre verdure of ivy, whose ambitious tendrils clambered to the cleft
chimney-tops, and peered impertinently over the broad stone
window-sills, whence the indignant housemaid remorselessly sheared
them away as often as their encroachments grew perceptible.

In the rear of the house, and toward the west, stretched orchard,
vegetable garden, vineyard, and wheat-field, whose rolling green waves
seemed almost to break against the ruddy trunks of cedars that clothed
the hillside. To the left and north lay low, marshy, meadow land,
covered with rank grass and frosted with saline incrustations; while
south of the building extended spacious grounds, studded here and
there with noble groups of deodars, Norway spruce, and various
ornamental shrubs, and bounded by a tall impenetrable hedge of osage
orange. Before the house, which faced the ocean and fronted east, the
lawn sloped gently down to a terrace surmounted by a granite
balustrade; and just beyond, supported by stone piers on the golden
sands, stood an octagonal boat-house, built in the Swiss style, with
red-tiled roof, and flo