ighlands. We will, if you can bear a sea-voyage, go to the Isles--the
Hebrides, the Shetland, the Orkney Islands. Would you not like that? I
see you would.--Mrs. Pryor, I call you to witness. Her face is all
sunshine at the bare mention of it."

"I should like it much," returned Caroline, to whom, indeed, the notion
of such a tour was not only pleasant, but gloriously reviving. Shirley
rubbed her hands.

"Come; I can bestow a benefit," she exclaimed. "I can do a good deed
with my cash. My thousand a year is not merely a matter of dirty
bank-notes and jaundiced guineas (let me speak respectfully of both,
though, for I adore them), but, it may be, health to the drooping,
strength to the weak, consolation to the sad. I was determined to make
something of it better than a fine old house to live in, than satin
gowns to wear, better than deference from acquaintance and homage from
the poor. Here is to begin. This summer, Caroline, Mrs. Pryor and I go
out into the North Atlantic, beyond the Shetland, perhaps to the Faroe
Isles. We will see seals in Suderoe, and, doubtless, mermaids in
Stromoe.--Caroline is laughing, Mrs. Pryor. _I_ made her laugh; _I_ have
done her good."

"I shall like to go, Shirley," again said Miss Helstone. "I long to hear
the sound of waves--ocean-waves--and to see them as I have imagined them
in dreams, like tossing banks of green light, strewed with vanishing and
reappearing wreaths of foam, whiter than lilies. I shall delight to pass
the shores of those lone rock-islets where the sea-birds live and breed
unmolested. We shall be on the track of the old Scandinavians--of the
Norsemen. We shall almost see the shores of Norway. This is a very vague
delight that I feel, communicated by your proposal, but it _is_ a
delight."

"Will you think of Fitful Head now when you lie awake at night, of gulls
shrieking round it, and waves tumbling in upon it, rather than of the
graves under the rectory back-kitchen?"

"I will try; and instead of musing about remnants of shrouds, and
fragments of coffins, and human bones and mould, I will fancy seals
lying in the sunshine on solitary shores, where neither fisherman nor
hunter ever come; of rock crevices full of pearly eggs bedded in
seaweed; of unscared birds covering white sands in happy flocks."

"And what will become of that inexpressible weight you said you had on
your mind?"

"I will try to forget it in speculation on the sway of the whole great
deep above