t Winthrop
in her place would go, and would make himself exceedingly
acceptable; she knew he would; and in the light of that idea,
more than of any other argument that could be brought to bear,
Elizabeth's conscience troubled her. She lay still on her oars
now and then to think about it; she could not go on and get
rid of the matter. She pondered Winthrop's fancied doing in
the circumstances; she knew how he would comport himself among
these poor people; she felt it; and then it suddenly flashed
across her mind, "Even Christ pleased not himself;" -- and she
knew then why Winthrop did not. Elizabeth's head drooped for a
minute. "I'll go," -- she said to herself.

Her head was raised again then, and with a good will the oars
made the little boat go over the water. She was elated to find
her arms so strong, stronger now than they had been five
minutes ago; and she took her way down towards the bottom of
the bay, where once she had gone huckleberrying, and where a
rich growth of wood covered the banks and shewed in one or two
of its members here and there already a touch of frost. Here
and there an orange or reddish branch of maple leaves -- a
yellow-headed butternut, partly bare -- a ruddying dogwood or
dogwood's family connection, -- a hickory shewing suspicions of
tawny among its green. A fresh and rich wall-side of beauty
the woody bank was. Elizabeth pulled slowly along, coasting
the green wilderness, exulting in her freedom and escape from
all possible forms of home annoyance and intrusion; but that
exulting, only a very sad break in a train of weary and
painful thoughts and remembrances. It was the only break to
them; for just then sorrowful things had got the upper hand;
and even the Bible promises to which she had clung, and the
faith that laid hold of them, and the hopes that grew out of
them, could not make her be other than downcast and
desponding. Even a Christian life, all alone in the world,
with nobody and for nobody, seemed desolate and uncheering.
Winthrop Landholm led such a life, and was not desolate, nor
uncheered. -- "But he is very different from me; he has been
long a traveller on the road where my unsteady feet have but
just set themselves; he is a man and I am a woman!" -- And once
Elizabeth even laid down her oars, and her head upon the hands
that had held them, to shed the tears that would have their
own peculiar way of comfort and relief. The bay, and the boat,
and the woody shore, and the