nd bite,
For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For 'tis their nature too.'

That's all the account I can give of it."

"But," said Mara, "I never can rest easy a moment when I see I am making
a person uncomfortable."

"Well, I don't tease anybody but the men. I don't tease father or mother
or you,--but men are fair game; they are such thumby, blundering
creatures, and we can confuse them so."

"Take care, Sally, it's playing with edge tools; you may lose your heart
some day in this kind of game."

"Never you fear," said Sally; "but aren't you sleepy?--let's go to
sleep."

Both girls turned their faces resolutely in opposite directions, and
remained for an hour with their large eyes looking out into the moonlit
chamber, like the fixed stars over Harpswell Bay. At last sleep drew
softly down the fringy curtains.

CHAPTER XXX

THE LAUNCH OF THE ARIEL

In the plain, simple regions we are describing,--where the sea is the
great avenue of active life, and the pine forests are the great source
of wealth,--ship-building is an engrossing interest, and there is no
fete that calls forth the community like the launching of a vessel. And
no wonder; for what is there belonging to this workaday world of ours
that has such a never-failing fund of poetry and grace as a ship? A ship
is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it: its white wings touch the
regions of the unknown and the imaginative; they seem to us full of the
odors of quaint, strange, foreign shores, where life, we fondly dream,
moves in brighter currents than the muddy, tranquil tides of every day.

Who that sees one bound outward, with her white breasts swelling and
heaving, as if with a reaching expectancy, does not feel his own heart
swell with a longing impulse to go with her to the far-off shores? Even
at dingy, crowded wharves, amid the stir and tumult of great cities, the
coming in of a ship is an event that never can lose its interest. But on
these romantic shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, and the
blue sea lies embraced in the arms of dark, solitary forests, the sudden
incoming of a ship from a distant voyage is a sort of romance. Who that
has stood by the blue waters of Middle Bay, engirdled as it is by soft
slopes of green farming land, interchanged here and there with heavy
billows of forest-trees, or rocky, pine-crowned promontories, has not
felt that sense of seclusion and solitud