subtile quality called genius, perhaps, to spoil first his
companions, and then himself. His words had weight with you,
though you might know yourself wiser; and if you went to give him
the most reasonable advice, you were suddenly seized with a
slight paralysis of the tongue. Thus it was, at any rate, with
me. We were cemented therefore by the firmest ties,--a nominal
seniority on my part, and a substantial supremacy on his.

We lodged one summer at an old house in that odd suburb of
Oldport called "The Point." It is a sort of Artists' Quarter of
the town, frequented by a class of summer visitors more addicted
to sailing and sketching than to driving and bowing,--persons who
do not object to simple fare, and can live, as one of them said,
on potatoes and Point. Here Severance and I made our summer home,
basking in the delicious sunshine of the lovely bay. The bare
outlines around Oldport sometimes dismay the stranger, but soon
fascinate. Nowhere does one feel bareness so little, because
there is no sharpness of perspective; everything shimmers in the
moist atmosphere; the islands are all glamour and mirage; and the
undulating hills of the horizon seem each like the soft, arched
back of some pet animal, and you long to caress them with your
hand. At last your thoughts begin to swim also, and pass into
vague fancies, which you also love to caress. Severance and I
were constantly afloat, body and mind. He was a perfect sailor,
and had that dreaminess in his nature which matches with nothing
but the ripple of the waves. Still, I could not hide from myself
that he was a changed man since that voyage in search of health
from which he had just returned. His mother talked in her humdrum
way about heart disease; and his father, taking up the strain,
bored us about organic lesions, till we almost wished he had a