. The ocean is of a deep
purple blue; above it, the pure, bright sky looks pale, though it bends
with an infinite depth over the inland horizon. Here and there on the
dark breezy water gleams the white cap of a wave, or flaps the white
cloak of a fishing-boat. I have been sketching sedulously; I have
discovered, within a couple of miles' walk, a large, lonely pond, set in
quite a grand landscape of barren rocks and grassy slopes. At one
extremity is a broad outlook on the open sea; at the other, deep buried
in the foliage of an apple-orchard, stands an old haunted-looking
farm-house. To the west of the pond is a wide expanse of rock and grass,
of beach and marsh. The sheep browse over it as upon a Highland moor.
Except a few stunted firs and cedars, there is not a tree in sight. When
I want shade, I seek it in the shelter of one of the great mossy
boulders which upheave their scintillating shoulders to the sun, or of
the long shallow dells where a tangle of blackberry-bushes hedges about
a sky-reflecting pool. I have encamped over against a plain, brown
hillside, which, with laborious patience, I am transferring to canvas;
and as we have now had the same clear sky for several days, I have
almost finished quite a satisfactory little study. I go forth
immediately after breakfast. Miss Blunt furnishes me with a napkin full
of bread and cold meat, which at the noonday hours, in my sunny
solitude, within sight of the slumbering ocean, I voraciously convey to
my lips with my discolored fingers. At seven o'clock I return to tea, at
which repast we each tell the story of our day's work. For poor Miss
Blunt, it is day after day the same story: a wearisome round of visits
to the school, and to the houses of the mayor, the parson, the butcher,
the baker, whose young ladies, of course, all receive instruction on the
piano. But she doesn't complain, nor, indeed, does she look very weary.
When she has put on a fresh calico dress for tea, and arranged her hair
anew, and with these improvements flits about with that quiet hither and
thither of her gentle footsteps, preparing our evening meal, peeping
into the teapot, cutting the solid loaf,--or when, sitting down on the
low door-step, she reads out select scraps from the evening paper,--or
else, when, tea being over, she folds her arms, (an attitude which
becomes her mightily,) and, still sitting on the door-step, gossips away
the evening in comfortable idleness, while her father and I i