racked! It's 'most always so, when people goes to sea,"
added she, in a plaintive tone.

Dorcas meditated; she looked wistfully at her mother.

"It's a pretty pin,--dreadful pretty round the edge."

"Yes, 't is! I expect likely them's di'mon's. 'T was made over in
foreign parts. He was goin' to bring his picter, too, from there. But
he's lost and gone! Your Aunt Dorcas never had no more suitors after
that, and she kind o' gin in, and never had no sperits."

Dorcas's eyes filled, and she closed the box.

Henry Mowers would not come to the Fox farm till the next Sunday
night. That was as much settled as the new moon. So Dorcas had the
whole week to herself, to be thoroughly unhappy in,--all the more so,
a thousand times more so, for being utterly incapable of saying or
seeing why. An instinctive delicacy kept her from showing to any
of the family that she was even depressed; and her voice was heard
steadily warbling one of Wesley's hymns, or "Wolfe's Address to his
Army," in clear, brilliant tones, that rang up-stairs and down. The
general impression of distance and water associated her absent lover
with all that was heroic and romantic in song; for of novels she knew
nothing,--the Colonel's library being limited, in the imaginative
line, to a torn copy of the "Iliad," which had been left at the house
by a travelling cobbler.

However, romance is before all rules, and shapes its own adventures.
The beauty of Swan Day, which, dark and slight as it was, gleamed with
a power for Dorcas's eye and heart before which Buonarotti's
would have been only pale stone forever,--that beauty dwelt in her
imagination and memory, as only first romantic impressions can.
Distance canonized him, enthroned him, glorified him. And when she
thought of his setting forth so boldly, so bravely, to tread the
wide water, to tempt the hot sun, the foreign exposure, the perpetual
dangers of heathen countries, for her unworthy sake, all that was
tenderest, most grateful, in her now first wakened nature, rose up in
distressful tumult, and agitated the depths that are in all women's
souls.

If there had been anybody to whom she could confide the sad wrenching
of her spirit, any one who would have cleared her vision, and taught
her to look on "this picture and on this," she might not have been so
puzzled between her two Hyperions. But as it was, it was a sorrowful
struggle. One had the advantage of distance and imagination,--one of
presence, an