h
seaweed, of which we have often spoken. They are Moses and Sally going
on an evening walk to that favorite grotto retreat, which has so often
been spoken of in the course of this history.

Moses has come home from long wanderings. It is four years since they
parted, and now they meet and have looked into each other's eyes, not as
of old, when they met in the first giddy flush of youth, but as fully
developed man and woman. Moses and Sally had just risen from the
tea-table, where she had presided with a thoughtful housewifery gravity,
just pleasantly dashed with quaint streaks of her old merry willfulness,
while the old Captain, warmed up like a rheumatic grasshopper in a fine
autumn day, chirruped feebly, and told some of his old stories, which
now he told every day, forgetting that they had ever been heard before.
Somehow all three had been very happy; the more so, from a shadowy sense
of some sympathizing presence which was rejoicing to see them together
again, and which, stealing soft-footed and noiseless everywhere, touched
and lighted up every old familiar object with sweet memories.

And so they had gone out together to walk; to walk towards the grotto
where Sally had caused a seat to be made, and where she declared she had
passed hours and hours, knitting, sewing, or reading.

"Sally," said Moses, "do you know I am tired of wandering? I am coming
home now. I begin to want a home of my own." This he said as they sat
together on the rustic seat and looked off on the blue sea.

"Yes, you must," said Sally. "How lovely that ship looks, just coming in
there."

"Yes, they are beautiful," said Moses abstractedly; and Sally rattled on
about the difference between sloops and brigs; seeming determined that
there should be no silence, such as often comes in ominous gaps between
two friends who have long been separated, and have each many things to
say with which the other is not familiar.

"Sally!" said Moses, breaking in with a deep voice on one of these
monologues. "Do you remember some presumptuous things I once said to
you, in this place?"

Sally did not answer, and there was a dead silence in which they could
hear the tide gently dashing on the weedy rocks.

"You and I are neither of us what we were then, Sally," said Moses. "We
are as different as if we were each another person. We have been trained
in another life,--educated by a great sorrow,--is it not so?"

"I know it," said Sally.

"And why should w