Sewell. "It is my Thursday
evening lecture on Justification, and Emily has got tea ready, and here
I am catching cold out on the bay."

CHAPTER XII

SEA TALES

Mr. Sewell, as the reader may perhaps have inferred, was of a nature
profoundly secretive. It was in most things quite as pleasant for him to
keep matters to himself, as it was to Miss Emily to tell them to
somebody else. She resembled more than anything one of those trotting,
chattering little brooks that enliven the "back lot" of many a New
England home, while he was like one of those wells you shall sometimes
see by a deserted homestead, so long unused that ferns and lichens
feather every stone down to the dark, cool water.

Dear to him was the stillness and coolness of inner thoughts with which
no stranger intermeddles; dear to him every pendent fern-leaf of memory,
every dripping moss of old recollection; and though the waters of his
soul came up healthy and refreshing enough when one really must have
them, yet one had to go armed with bucket and line and draw them
up,--they never flowed. One of his favorite maxims was, that the only
way to keep a secret was never to let any one suspect that you have one.
And as he had one now, he had, as you have seen, done his best to baffle
and put to sleep the feminine curiosity of his sister.

He rather wanted to tell her, too, for he was a good-natured brother,
and would have liked to have given her the amount of pleasure the
confidence would have produced; but then he reflected with dismay on the
number of women in his parish with whom Miss Emily was on tea-drinking
terms,--he thought of the wondrous solvent powers of that beverage in
whose amber depths so many resolutions yea, and solemn vows, of utter
silence have been dissolved like Cleopatra's pearls. He knew that an
infusion of his secret would steam up from every cup of tea Emily should
drink for six months to come, till gradually every particle would be
dissolved and float in the air of common fame. No; it would not do.

You would have thought, however, that something was the matter with Mr.
Sewell, had you seen him after he retired for the night, after he had so
very indifferently dismissed the subject of Miss Emily's inquiries. For
instead of retiring quietly to bed, as had been his habit for years at
that hour, he locked his door, and then unlocked a desk of private
papers, and emptied certain pigeon-holes of their contents, and for an
hour or