t scene in our story.

CHAPTER II

MARA

Down near the end of Orr's Island, facing the open ocean, stands a brown
house of the kind that the natives call "lean-to," or "linter,"--one of
those large, comfortable structures, barren in the ideal, but rich in
the practical, which the workingman of New England can always command.
The waters of the ocean came up within a rod of this house, and the
sound of its moaning waves was even now filling the clear autumn
starlight. Evidently something was going on within, for candles
fluttered and winked from window to window, like fireflies in a dark
meadow, and sounds as of quick footsteps, and the flutter of brushing
garments, might be heard.

Something unusual is certainly going on within the dwelling of Zephaniah
Pennel to-night.

Let us enter the dark front-door. We feel our way to the right, where a
solitary ray of light comes from the chink of a half-opened door. Here
is the front room of the house, set apart as its place of especial
social hilarity and sanctity,--the "best room," with its low studded
walls, white dimity window-curtains, rag carpet, and polished wood
chairs. It is now lit by the dim gleam of a solitary tallow candle,
which seems in the gloom to make only a feeble circle of light around
itself, leaving all the rest of the apartment in shadow.

In the centre of the room, stretched upon a table, and covered partially
by a sea-cloak, lies the body of a man of twenty-five,--lies, too,
evidently as one of whom it is written, "He shall return to his house
no more, neither shall his place know him any more." A splendid manhood
has suddenly been called to forsake that lifeless form, leaving it, like
a deserted palace, beautiful in its desolation. The hair, dripping with
the salt wave, curled in glossy abundance on the finely-formed head; the
flat, broad brow; the closed eye, with its long black lashes; the firm,
manly mouth; the strongly-moulded chin,--all, all were sealed with that
seal which is never to be broken till the great resurrection day.

He was lying in a full suit of broadcloth, with a white vest and smart
blue neck-tie, fastened with a pin, in which was some braided hair under
a crystal. All his clothing, as well as his hair, was saturated with
sea-water, which trickled from time to time, and struck with a leaden
and dropping sound into a sullen pool which lay under the table.

This was the body of James Lincoln, ship-master of the brig Fly