g, strewn with polished pebbles and tiny shells, it seemed some
half-hidden magic beach on which shallops of fairies might any moment
come to moor. On the farther point, so close to the sea that it
seemed to rise out of the water, stood a high stone lighthouse, with
a revolving light, whose rays swept the open sea for many miles. The
opposite river bank was a much higher one, and ran farther out to sea.
On this promontory was Safe Haven, a small, thickly settled town, whose
spires and house-tops, as seen from the beach at "The Runs," looked
always like a picture, painted on the sky; white on gray in the morning,
gray on crimson at sunset. The farmhouse of which we have spoken stood
only a few rods back from the beach, and yet it had green fields on
either hand; and a row of Balm of Gilead trees in front; an old and
sandy road, seldom disturbed by wheels, ran between these trees and the
house, and rambled down towards the light-house. Wild pea and pimpernel
made this road gay; white clover and wild rose made it fragrant; and
there branched off from it a lane, on which if you turned and strayed
back into the fields, a mile or so, you came to thickets of wild azalia,
and tracts of pink laurel; and, a little way farther in, you came to
fresh-water ponds which in July were white with lilies. No storm ever
lashed the water high on the beach at "The Runs"; no sultriest summer
calm ever stilled it; the even rhythm and delightsome cooling of its
waves seemed to obey a law of their own, quite independent of the great
booming sea outside the light-house bar.

In the quiet, and the beauty, and the keen salt air of this charmed
spot, poor Sally Little lifted up her head, and began to live again,
like a flower taken from desert sands and set by a spring. The baby also
bloomed like a rose. In an incredibly short time, both mother and child
had so altered that one would hardly have known them. The days went by,
to them all, as days go by for children: unnamed, uncounted; only marked
by joy of sleep, and the delight of waking. In after years, when Hetty
looked back upon these weeks, they seemed to her, not like a dream,
which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the
swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other
planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of
supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The
harsh New England May laid aside for them a