ance.

"Let her alone!" said Marsden, with unmoved calmness, shifting the
tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. "That girl don't need
no guardeen. She's been a-drivin' raound here all summer, and I reckon
she knows more about managin' that there colt'n you do. It's my colt,
and I wouldn't let her drive it ef she didn't."

"I hope to thunder you won't again, at least while I'm about, unless
you intend to pay for damage to life and property," Flint answered
testily.

By this time colt and driver had been whirled away in a cloud,
Elijah-like.

"Nice kind of a girl that!" said Flint to himself with savage,
solitaire sarcasm. He felt that he had appeared like a fool; and it
must be a generous soul which can forgive one who has been both cause
and witness of such humiliation. To conquer his irritation, Flint
proceeded to take his injured rod to pieces, and repack it gloomily in
its bag of green felt. When he looked up again, all petty annoyances
faded out of his mind, for there ahead of him, behind the little patch
of pines, lay the great cool, cobalt stretch of ocean, unfathomably
deep, unutterably blue.

The young man felt a vague awe and exaltation tugging at his heart.
But the only outward expression they gained was a throwing back of the
head, and a deep indrawing of the breath, followed by the quite
uninspired exclamation, "Holloa, there's the ocean!"

"Why shouldn't it be there?" inquired the practical Marsden. "You
didn't think it had got up and moved inland after you left, did you?"

"Well, I didn't know," Flint answered carelessly. "I've seen it come
in a good two hundred feet while I was here, and I couldn't tell how
far it might have been carried, allowing for its swelling emotions
over my departure. But I'm glad to see it at the old stand still; and
there's the pond too, and the cross-roads and the Nepaug Inn. I
declare, Marsden, it is like its owner,--grows better looking as it
gets old and gray."

Marsden's face assumed that grim New England smile which gives notice
that a compliment has been received and its contents noted, but that
the recipient does not commit himself to undue satisfaction therein.

"Yes," he responded, "the old inn weathers the winters down here
pretty middlin' well; but it's gettin' kind o' broken down, and its
doors creak in a storm like bones that's got the rheumatiz. I wish I
could afford to give it a coat o' paint."

"Ah!" said Flint, with a shrug, "I hope, for