ng with
sharp decision the form of every promontory and rock, and distant
island.

The blue of the sea and the blue of the sky were so much the same, that
when the children had rowed far out, the little boat seemed to float
midway, poised in the centre of an azure sphere, with a firmament above
and a firmament below. Mara leaned dreamily over the side of the boat,
and drew her little hands through the waters as they rippled along to
the swift oars' strokes, and she saw as the waves broke, and divided and
shivered around the boat, a hundred little faces, with brown eyes and
golden hair, gleaming up through the water, and dancing away over
rippling waves, and thought that so the sea-nymphs might look who came
up from the coral caves when they ring the knell of drowned people.
Moses sat opposite to her, with his coat off, and his heavy black curls
more wavy and glossy than ever, as the exercise made them damp with
perspiration.

Eagle Island lay on the blue sea, a tangled thicket of
evergreens,--white pine, spruce, arbor vitae, and fragrant silver firs. A
little strip of white beach bound it, like a silver setting to a gem.
And there Moses at length moored his boat, and the children landed. The
island was wholly solitary, and there is something to children quite
delightful in feeling that they have a little lonely world all to
themselves. Childhood is itself such an enchanted island, separated by
mysterious depths from the mainland of nature, life, and reality.

Moses had subsided a little from the glorious heights on which he
seemed to be in the first flush of his return, and he and Mara, in
consequence, were the friends of old time. It is true he thought himself
quite a man, but the manhood of a boy is only a tiny masquerade,--a
fantastic, dreamy prevision of real manhood. It was curious that Mara,
who was by all odds the most precociously developed of the two, never
thought of asserting herself a woman; in fact, she seldom thought of
herself at all, but dreamed and pondered of almost everything else.

"I declare," said Moses, looking up into a thick-branched, rugged old
hemlock, which stood all shaggy, with heavy beards of gray moss drooping
from its branches, "there's an eagle's nest up there; I mean to go and
see." And up he went into the gloomy embrace of the old tree, crackling
the dead branches, wrenching off handfuls of gray moss, rising higher
and higher, every once in a while turning and showing to Mara his