old woman as I am, to be told that people like
me--more pleasant, I think, every year. I never take it for truth, of
course, but I believe it means good feeling, and it makes an atmosphere
easy to breathe. I purred like a contented cat under Sally's talking,
yet, to save my dignity, kept up a protest.

"Sally, my dear! Delicious dark eyes! I'm ashamed of you--a common
sailor!"

"I didn't smile at him," said Sally, reflectively.

So, struggling up the steep street of Clovelly, we went home to the "New
Inn," to cold broiled lobster, to strawberries and clotted Devonshire
cream, and dreamless sleep in the white beds of the quiet rooms whose
windows looked toward the woods and cliffs of Hobby Drive on one side,
and on the other toward the dark, sparkling jewel of the moon-lighted
ocean, and the shadowy line of Lundy Island far in the distance.

That I, an inland woman, an old maid of sixty, should tell a story of
sailing and of love seems a little ridiculous. My nephews at college
beguile me to talk about boats, and then laugh to hear me, for I think
I get the names of things twisted. And as for what I know of the
other--the only love-making to which I ever listened was ended forty
years ago by one of the northern balls that fell in fiery rain on
Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Yet, if I but tell the tale as it came
to me, others may feel as I did the thrill of the rushing of the keel
through dashing salt water, the swing of the great white sail above, the
flapping of the fresh wind in the slack of it, the exhilaration of
moving with power like the angels, with the great forces of nature for
muscles, the joy of it all expanding, pulsing through you, till it seems
as if the sky might crack if once you let your delight go free. And some
may catch, too, that other thrill, of the hidden feeling that glorified
those days. Few lives are so poor that the like of it has not brightened
them, and no one quite forgets.

It is partly Sally Meade's Southern accent that has made me love her
above nearer cousins, from her babyhood. The modulations of her voice
seem always to bring me close to the sound of the voice that went into
silence when Geoffrey Meade, her father's young kinsman, was killed
long ago.

The Meades, old-time planters in Virginia, have been very poor since the
distant war of the sixties, and it has been one of my luxuries to give
Sally a lift over hard places. Always with instant reward, for the
smallest bit of