lesion himself. Severance ridiculed all this; but he grew more
and more moody, and his eyes seemed to be laying more submarine
cables than ever.

When we were not on the water, we both liked to mouse about the
queer streets and quaint old houses of that region, and to chat
with the fishermen and their grandmothers. There was one house,
however, which was very attractive to me,--perhaps because nobody
lived in it, and which, for that or some other reason, he never
would approach. It was a great square building of rough gray
stone, looking like those sombre houses which everyone remembers
in Montreal, but which are rare in "the States." It had been
built many years before by some millionnaire from New Orleans,
and was left unfinished, nobody knew why, till the garden was a
wilderness of bloom, and the windows of ivy. Oldport is the only
place in New England where either ivy or traditions will grow;
there were, to be sure, no legends about this house that I could
hear of, for the ghosts in those parts were feeble-minded and
retrospective by reason of age, and perhaps scorned a mansion
where nobody had ever lived; but the ivy clustered round the
projecting windows as densely as if it had the sins of a dozen
generations to hide.

The house stood just above what were commonly called (from their
slaty color) the Blue Rocks; it seemed the topmost pebble left by
some tide that had receded,--which perhaps it was. Nurses and
children thronged daily to these rocks, during the visitors'
season, and the fishermen found there a favorite lounging-place;
but nobody scaled the wall of the house save myself, and I went
there very often. The gate was sometimes opened by Paul, the