d become somewhat more than a
reigning beauty, and held her sceptre with such apparent indifference
that she seemed about abandoning it forever, she no longer dazzled with
unventured combinations of colors and materials in dress. She wore
most frequently, at this epoch, black velvet that suppled about her
well-asserted contours; and the very trail of her skirt was unlike
another woman's, for it coiled and bristled after her with a life and
motion of its own, like a serpent. Her hair, of too dead a black for
gloss or glister, was always adorned with a nasturtium-vine, whose vivid
flames seemed like some personal emanation, and whose odor, acrid and
single, dispersed a character about her; and the only ornaments she
condescended to assume were of Etruscan gold, severely simple in design,
elaborately intricate in workmanship. It is evident she was a poet in
costume, and had at last _en regle_ acquired a manner. But thirteen
years ago she apparelled herself otherwise, and thirteen years ago it
was that Mr. Roger Raleigh fell in love with her. This is how it was.

Among the many lakes in New Hampshire, there is one of extreme
beauty,--a broad, shadowy water, some nine miles in length, with steep,
thickly wooded banks, and here and there, as if moored on its calm
surface, an island fit for the Bower of Bliss. At one spot along its
shore was, and still is, an old country-house, formerly used as a hotel,
but whose customers, always pleasure-seekers from the neighboring towns,
had been drawn away by the erection of a more modern and satisfactory
place of entertainment at the other extremity of the lake, and it had
now been for many years closed. There were no dwellings of any kind in
its vicinity, so that it reigned over a solitude of a half-dozen miles
in every direction. Once in a while the gay visitors in the more
prosperous regions stretched their sails and skimmed along till they saw
its white porticos and piazzas gleaming faintly up among the trees; once
in a while a belated traveller tied his horse at the gate, and sought
admittance in vain, at the empty house, of the shadows who may have kept
it. It was not pleasant to see so goodly a mansion falling to ruin for
want of fit occupancy, truly; and just as the walls had grown gray with
rain and time, the chimneys choked and the casements shrunken, a merry
company of friends and families, from another portion of the country,
consolidated themselves into a society for the purs