tragedy,
but the interest arrives with the performers. Till then the shores
remain vacant, like the great conventional armchairs of the French
drama, that wait for Rachel to come and die.

Yet as I ride along this fashionable avenue in August, and watch the
procession of the young and fair,--as I look at stately houses, from
each of which has gone forth almost within my memory a funeral or a
bride,--then every thoroughfare of human life becomes in fancy but an
ocean shore, with its ripples and its wrecks. One learns, in growing
older, that no fiction can be so strange nor appear so improbable as
would the simple truth; and that doubtless even Shakespeare did but
timidly transcribe a few of the deeds and passions he had personally
known. For no man of middle age can dare trust himself to portray
life in its full intensity, as he has studied or shared it; he must
resolutely set aside as indescribable the things most worth describing,
and must expect to be charged with exaggeration, even when he tells the
rest.

I. AN ARRIVAL.

IT was one of the changing days of our Oldport midsummer. In the morning
it had rained in rather a dismal way, and Aunt Jane had said she should
put it in her diary. It was a very serious thing for the elements when
they got into Aunt Jane's diary. By noon the sun came out as clear and
sultry as if there had never been a cloud, the northeast wind died away,
the bay was motionless, the first locust of the summer shrilled from the
elms, and the robins seemed to be serving up butterflies hot for their
insatiable second brood, while nothing seemed desirable for a human
luncheon except ice-cream and fans. In the afternoon the southwest wind
came up the bay, with its line of dark-blue ripple and its delicious
coolness; while the hue of the water grew more and more intense, till we
seemed to be living in the heart of a sapphire.

The household sat beneath the large western doorway of the old Maxwell
House,--he rear door, which looks on the water. The house had just been
reoccupied by my Aunt Jane, whose great-grandfather had built it, though
it had for several generations been out of the family. I know no finer
specimen of those large colonial dwellings in which the genius of Sir
Christopher Wren bequeathed traditions of stateliness to our democratic
days. Its central hall has a carved archway; most of the rooms have
painted tiles and are wainscoted to the ceiling; the sashes are
red-cedar, the