unker and
his young wife, and he had succeeded in wresting from the hard soil
pasturage for a cow and goats, while his lateen-sailed fishing-boat
occasionally rode quietly in the sheltered cove below.

Three years ago Zephas Bunker, an ex-whaler, had found himself stranded
on a San Francisco wharf and had "hired out" to a small Petaluma farmer.
At the end of a year he had acquired little taste for the farmer's
business, but considerable for the farmer's youthful daughter, who,
equally weary of small agriculture, had consented to elope with him
in order to escape it. They were married at Oakland; he put his scant
earnings into a fishing-boat, discovered the site for his cabin, and
brought his bride thither. The novelty of the change pleased her,
although perhaps it was but little advance on her previous humble
position. Yet she preferred her present freedom to the bare restricted
home life of her past; the perpetual presence of the restless sea was a
relief to the old monotony of the wheat field and its isolated drudgery.
For Mary's youthful fancy, thinly sustained in childhood by the lightest
literary food, had neither been stimulated nor disillusioned by her
marriage. That practical experience which is usually the end of girlish
romance had left her still a child in sentiment. The long absences
of her husband in his fishing-boat kept her from wearying of or even
knowing his older and unequal companionship; it gave her a freedom her
girlhood had never known, yet added a protection that suited her still
childish dependency, while it tickled her pride with its equality. When
not engaged in her easy household duties in her three-roomed cottage, or
the care of her rocky garden patch, she found time enough to indulge her
fancy over the mysterious haze that wrapped the invisible city so near
and yet unknown to her; in the sails that slipped in and out of the
Golden Gate, but of whose destination she knew nothing; and in the long
smoke trail of the mail steamer which had yet brought her no message.
Like all dwellers by the sea, her face and her thoughts were more
frequently turned towards it; and as with them, it also seemed to her
that whatever change was coming into her life would come across that
vast unknown expanse. But it was here that Mrs. Bunker was mistaken.

It had been a sparkling summer morning. The waves were running before
the dry northwest trade winds with crystalline but colorless brilliancy.
Sheltered by the