nto the
blue belt of Harpswell Bay, bordered on the farther edge by Harpswell
Neck, dotted here and there with houses, among which rises the little
white meeting-house, like a mother-bird among a flock of chickens. The
third window, on the other side of the room, looks far out to sea, where
only a group of low, rocky islands interrupts the clear sweep of the
horizon line, with its blue infinitude of distance.

The furniture of this room, though of the barest and most frigid
simplicity, is yet relieved by many of those touches of taste and fancy
which the indwelling of a person of sensibility and imagination will
shed off upon the physical surroundings. The bed was draped with a white
spread, embroidered with a kind of knotted tracery, the working of which
was considered among the female accomplishments of those days, and over
the head of it was a painting of a bunch of crimson and white trillium,
executed with a fidelity to Nature that showed the most delicate gifts
of observation. Over the mantelpiece hung a painting of the Bay of
Genoa, which had accidentally found a voyage home in Zephaniah Pennel's
sea-chest, and which skillful fingers had surrounded with a frame
curiously wrought of moss and sea-shells. Two vases of India china stood
on the mantel, filled with spring flowers, crowfoot, anemones, and
liverwort, with drooping bells of the twin-flower. The looking-glass
that hung over the table in one corner of the room was fancifully webbed
with long, drooping festoons of that gray moss which hangs in such
graceful wreaths from the boughs of the pines in the deep forest shadows
of Orr's Island. On the table below was a collection of books: a whole
set of Shakespeare which Zephaniah Pennel had bought of a Portland
bookseller; a selection, in prose and verse, from the best classic
writers, presented to Mara Lincoln, the fly-leaf said, by her sincere
friend, Theophilus Sewell; a Virgil, much thumbed, with an old, worn
cover, which, however, some adroit fingers had concealed under a coating
of delicately marbled paper;--there was a Latin dictionary, a set of
Plutarch's Lives, the Mysteries of Udolpho, and Sir Charles Grandison,
together with Edwards on the Affections, and Boston's Fourfold
State;--there was an inkstand, curiously contrived from a sea-shell,
with pens and paper in that phase of arrangement which betokened
frequency of use; and, lastly, a little work-basket, containing a long
strip of curious and delicate