As his call died away on the sullen wind, the mysterious "Man of
the Sea" rose in his wrath out of the billows, and said,--

"Go back to your old mud hut, and stay there with your wife
Alice, and never come to trouble me again."

I sympathized with the "Man of the Sea" in his righteous
indignation at the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman; and the
moral of the story remained with me, as the story itself did. I
think I understood dimly, even then, that mean avarice and self-
seeking ambition always find their true level in muddy earth,
never among the stars.

So it proved that my dear mother-sister was preparing me for life
when she did not know it, when she thought she was only amusing
me.

This sister, though only just entering her teens, was toughening
herself by all sorts of unnecessary hardships for whatever might
await her womanhood. She used frequently to sleep in the garret
on a hard wooden sea-chest instead of in a bed. And she would get
up before daylight and run over into the burying-ground,
barefooted and white-robed (we lived for two or three years in
another house than our own, where the oldest graveyard in town
was only separated from us by our garden fence), "to see if there
were any ghosts there," she told us. Returning noiselessly,--
herself a smiling phantom, with long, golden-brown hair rippling
over her shoulders,--she would drop a trophy upon her little
sisters' pillow, in the shape of a big, yellow apple that had
dropped from "the Colonel's" "pumpkin sweeting" tree into the