y brown hair, springing from a
low point on her forehead and gently rippling back, which she wore
plaited and tied with a ribbon and destitute of powder? How sweetly
simple it looked to him after the bepowdered and betowered misses of
the town with whom he was most acquainted! Was it in the broad low
brow, or the brown, almost black eyes which laughed beneath it; or the
very fair complexion, which seemed to him a strangely delightful and
unusual combination? Or was it in the perfection of a faultless, if
somewhat slender and still undeveloped figure, half concealed by the
vivid "Cardinal" cloak she wore, which one little hand held loosely
together about her, while the other dabbled in the water by her side?

Be this as it may, the whole impression she produced was one which
charmed and fascinated to the last degree, and Mistress Katharine
Wilton's sway among the young men of the colony was-well-nigh
undisputed. A toast and a belle in half Virginia, Seymour was not the
first, nor was he destined to be the last, of her adorers.

The strong, steady, practised stroke, denoting the accomplished
oarsman, with which he had urged the little boat through the water, had
given way to an idle and purposeless drift. He longed to cast himself
down before the little feet, in their smart high-heeled buckled shoes
and clocked stockings, which peeped out at him from under her
embroidered camlet petticoat in such a maliciously coquettish manner;
he longed to kneel down there in the skiff, at the imminent risk of
spoiling his own gay attire, and declare the passion which consumed
him; but something--he did not know what it was, and she did not tell
him--constrained him, and he sat still, and felt himself as far away as
if she had been in the stars.

In his way he was quite as good to look at as the young maiden; tall,
blond, stalwart, blue-eyed, pleasant-featured, with the frank engaging
air which seems to belong to those who go down to the sea in ships,
Lieutenant John Seymour Seymour was an excellent specimen of that
hardy, daring, gallant class of men who in this war and in the next
were to shed such imperishable lustre upon American arms by their
exploits in the naval service. Born of an old and distinguished
Philadelphia family, so proud of its name that in his instance they had
doubled it, the usual bluntness and roughness of the sea were tempered
by this gentle birth and breeding, and by frequent attrition with men
and wome