and restless--differing herein, as you see, fatally from the ideal "fine
eyes," which we always imagine to be both brilliant and tranquil. The
doors and windows of the large square house were all wide open, to admit
the purifying sunshine, which lay in generous patches upon the floor
of a wide, high, covered piazza adjusted to two sides of the mansion--a
piazza on which several straw-bottomed rocking-chairs and half a dozen
of those small cylindrical stools in green and blue porcelain, which
suggest an affiliation between the residents and the Eastern trade, were
symmetrically disposed. It was an ancient house--ancient in the sense
of being eighty years old; it was built of wood, painted a clean, clear,
faded gray, and adorned along the front, at intervals, with flat wooden
pilasters, painted white. These pilasters appeared to support a kind of
classic pediment, which was decorated in the middle by a large triple
window in a boldly carved frame, and in each of its smaller angles by
a glazed circular aperture. A large white door, furnished with a
highly-polished brass knocker, presented itself to the rural-looking
road, with which it was connected by a spacious pathway, paved with worn
and cracked, but very clean, bricks. Behind it there were meadows and
orchards, a barn and a pond; and facing it, a short distance along the
road, on the opposite side, stood a smaller house, painted white, with
external shutters painted green, a little garden on one hand and an
orchard on the other. All this was shining in the morning air, through
which the simple details of the picture addressed themselves to the eye
as distinctly as the items of a "sum" in addition.

A second young lady presently came out of the house, across the piazza,
descended into the garden and approached the young girl of whom I have
spoken. This second young lady was also thin and pale; but she was older
than the other; she was shorter; she had dark, smooth hair. Her eyes,
unlike the other's, were quick and bright; but they were not at all