ge," he said to himself; "I
wouldn't have such a girl for a wife. Nothing to her but foam and
frisk,--no heart more than a bobolink! But isn't she amusing? By George!
isn't she, though?"

"But," thought Moses, "it's time I settled this matter who is to be my
wife. I won't marry till I'm rich,--that's flat. My wife isn't to rub
and grub. So at it I must go to raise the wind. I wonder if old Sewell
really does know anything about my parents. Miss Emily would have it
that there was some mystery that he had the key of; but I never could
get any thing from him. He always put me off in such a smooth way that I
couldn't tell whether he did or he didn't. But, now, supposing I have
relatives, family connections, then who knows but what there may be
property coming to me? That's an idea worth looking after, surely."

There's no saying with what vividness ideas and images go through one's
wakeful brain when the midnight moon is making an exact shadow of your
window-sash, with panes of light, on your chamber-floor. How vividly we
all have loved and hated and planned and hoped and feared and desired
and dreamed, as we tossed and turned to and fro upon such watchful,
still nights. In the stillness, the tide upon one side of the Island
replied to the dash on the other side in unbroken symphony, and Moses
began to remember all the stories gossips had told him of how he had
floated ashore there, like a fragment of tropical seaweed borne landward
by a great gale. He positively wondered at himself that he had never
thought of it more, and the more he meditated, the more mysterious and
inexplicable he felt. Then he had heard Miss Roxy once speaking
something about a bracelet, he was sure he had; but afterwards it was
hushed up, and no one seemed to know anything about it when he inquired.
But in those days he was a boy,--he was nobody,--now he was a young man.
He could go to Mr. Sewell, and demand as his right a fair answer to any
questions he might ask. If he found, as was quite likely, that there was
nothing to be known, his mind would be thus far settled,--he should
trust only to his own resources.

So far as the state of the young man's finances were concerned, it
would be considered in those simple times and regions an auspicious
beginning of life. The sum intrusted to him by Captain Kittridge had
been more than doubled by the liberality of Zephaniah Pennel, and Moses
had traded upon it in foreign parts with a skill and energy that