organization, was nursed and
brooded into a beautiful womanhood, and then found a protector in a
high-spirited, manly young ship-master, and she became his wife.

And now we see in the best room--the walls lined with serious
faces--men, women, and children, that have come to pay the last tribute
of sympathy to the living and the dead. The house looked so utterly
alone and solitary in that wild, sea-girt island, that one would have as
soon expected the sea-waves to rise and walk in, as so many neighbors;
but they had come from neighboring points, crossing the glassy sea in
their little crafts, whose white sails looked like millers' wings, or
walking miles from distant parts of the island.

Some writer calls a funeral one of the amusements of a New England
population. Must we call it an amusement to go and see the acted despair
of Medea? or the dying agonies of poor Adrienne Lecouvreur? It is
something of the same awful interest in life's tragedy, which makes an
untaught and primitive people gather to a funeral,--a tragedy where
there is no acting,--and one which each one feels must come at some time
to his own dwelling.

Be that as it may, here was a roomful. Not only Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey,
who by a prescriptive right presided over all the births, deaths, and
marriages of the neighborhood, but there was Captain Kittridge, a long,
dry, weather-beaten old sea-captain, who sat as if tied in a double
bow-knot, with his little fussy old wife, with a great Leghorn bonnet,
and eyes like black glass beads shining through in the bows of her horn
spectacles, and her hymn-book in her hand ready to lead the psalm. There
were aunts, uncles, cousins, and brethren of the deceased; and in the
midst stood two coffins, where the two united in death lay sleeping
tenderly, as those to whom rest is good. All was still as death, except
a chance whisper from some busy neighbor, or a creak of an old lady's
great black fan, or the fizz of a fly down the window-pane, and then a
stifled sound of deep-drawn breath and weeping from under a cloud of
heavy black crape veils, that were together in the group which
country-people call the mourners.

A gleam of autumn sunlight streamed through the white curtains, and fell
on a silver baptismal vase that stood on the mother's coffin, as the
minister rose and said, "The ordinance of baptism will now be
administered." A few moments more, and on a baby brow had fallen a few
drops of water, and the littl