Captain Jim was a passionate worshipper of beauty.
Every lovely thing heard or seen gave him a deep,
subtle, inner joy that irradiated his life. He was
quite keenly aware of his own lack of outward
comeliness and lamented it.

"Folks say I'm good," he remarked whimsically upon one
occasion, "but I sometimes wish the Lord had made me
only half as good and put the rest of it into looks.
But there, I reckon He knew what He was about, as a
good Captain should. Some of us have to be homely, or
the purty ones--like Mistress Blythe here--wouldn't
show up so well."

One evening Anne and Gilbert finally walked down to the
Four Winds light. The day had begun sombrely in gray
cloud and mist, but it had ended in a pomp of scarlet
and gold. Over the western hills beyond the harbor
were amber deeps and crystalline shallows, with the
fire of sunset below. The north was a mackerel sky of
little, fiery golden clouds. The red light flamed on
the white sails of a vessel gliding down the channel,
bound to a southern port in a land of palms. Beyond
her, it smote upon and incarnadined the shining, white,
grassless faces of the sand dunes. To the right, it
fell on the old house among the willows up the brook,
and gave it for a fleeting space casements more
splendid than those of an old cathedral. They glowed
out of its quiet and grayness like the throbbing,
blood-red thoughts of a vivid soul imprisoned in a dull