knee-deep in water, browsing on a wild rose that
clambered over the willows to peep at its pink image in the pond, a
proud pair of gray geese convoyed a brood of yellow younglings that
dived and breasted the ripples with evident glee.

With her arms clasped around her knees, Salome sat watching the blue
tendrils of smoke that rose from a clump of elms beyond the mill and
curled lazily upward until they lost themselves in air; and, though
the arching elm boughs hid mossy roof and chimney, she nevertheless
felt that she was looking on the old house where she was born, and
where ten dreary years of sorrow and humiliation had embittered and
perverted her nature.

Those elms had seen her mother die, had heard her father's drunken
revelry, and bent their aged heads to listen on that wild wintry
night, when in blood-curdling curses his soul rent itself from the
degraded tenement of clay. Apparently peace brooded over earth, sky,
and water; but to that lonely figure under the riven beech, every
object within the range of vision babbled horrible tales of the early
years, and memory pointed to a corner of the lumber-shed adjoining the
mill where she had often secreted herself to avoid her father's
brutality,--always keeping her head in the moonshine, because she
dreaded the darkness inside, which childish fancy filled with ghostly
groups. She hated the place as she hated the past, and this was the
second time she had visited it since the day that consigned her to the
poor-house; for it was impossible for her to look at the pond without
recollecting one dark passage in her life, known only to God and
herself. To-day she recalled, with startling vividness a dusky,
starlit June evening, when, maddened by an unmerited and unusually
severe punishment inflicted by her father, she had resolved to drown
herself, and find peace in the mud at the bottom of the mill-pond.
Placing her infant sister on the grass, she had kissed her good-by,
and selecting the deepest portion of the water, had climbed out on a
willow branch and prepared for the final plunge. Putting her fingers
in her ears that she might not hear the bubbling of the murderous
water, she shut her eyes and sprang into the pond; but her long hair
caught the willow twigs, and, half strangled and quite willing to
live, she scrambled up into the low limbs that seemed so anxious to
rescue her from a watery grave; and, dripping and trembling, crept
back to the house, comforting herse