tory
remained with me, as the story itself did. I think I understood dimly,
even then, that mean avarice and self-seeking ambition always find
their true level in muddy earth, never among the stars.

So it proved that my dear mother-sister was preparing me for life when
she did not know it, when she thought she was only amusing me.

This sister, though only just entering her teens, was toughening
herself by all sorts of unnecessary hardships for whatever might await
her womanhood. She used frequently to sleep in the garret on a hard
wooden sea-chest instead of in a bed. And she would get up before
daylight and run over into the burying-ground, barefooted and
white-robed (we lived for two or three years in another house than our
own, where the oldest graveyard in town was only separated from us by
our garden fence), "to see if there were any ghosts there," she told
us. Returning noiselessly,--herself a smiling phantom, with long,
golden-brown hair rippling over her shoulders,--she would drop a trophy
upon her little sisters' pillow, in the shape of a big, yellow apple
that had dropped from "the Colonel's" "pumpkin sweeting" tree into the
graveyard, close to our fence.

She was fond of giving me surprises, of watching my wonder at seeing
anything beautiful or strange for the first time. Once, when I was very
little, she made me supremely happy by rousing me before four o'clock
in the morning, dressing me hurriedly, and taking me out with her for a
walk across the graveyard and through the dewy fields. The birds were
singing, and the sun was just rising, and we were walking toward the
east, hand in hand, when suddenly there appeared before us what looked
to me like an immense blue wall, stretching right and left as far as I
could see.

"Oh, what is it the wall of?" I cried.

It was a revelation she had meant for me. "So you did not know it was
the sea, little girl!" she said.

It was a wonderful illusion to My unaccustomed eyes, and I took in at
that moment for the first time something of the real grandeur of the
ocean. Not a sail was in sight, and the blue expanse was scarcely
disturbed by a ripple, for it was the high-tide calm. That morning's
freshness, that vision of the sea, I know I can never lose.

From our garret window--and the garret was my usual retreat when I
wanted to get away by myself with my books or my dreams--we had the
distant horizon-line of the bay, across a quarter of a mile of trees
and mow