prosaic profession of bookkeeper, had an opulent though as yet unworked
vein of romance running through his composition, and he said to himself
as he gave a slight twitch to the reins, "I'll put up there to-night at
the sign of the Golden Fleece, or may be I'll quarter myself on one of
those rich old merchants who used to do business with the bank in the
colonial days." Before he had finished speaking the city was destroyed
by a general conflagration; the round red sun rose slowly above the
pearl-gray ruins, and it was morning.

In his three years' residence at Rivermouth, Edward Lynde had never
chanced to see the town at so early an hour. The cobble-paved street
through which he was riding was a commercial street; but now the shops
had their wooden eyelids shut tight, and were snoozing away as
comfortably and innocently as if they were not at all alive to a sharp
stroke of business in their wakeful hours. There was a charm to Lynde in
this novel phase of a thoroughfare so familiar to him, and then the
morning was perfect. The street ran parallel with the river, the
glittering harebell-blue of which could be seen across a vacant lot here
and there, or now and then at the end of a narrow lane running up from
the wharves. The atmosphere had that indescribable sparkle and bloom
which last only an hour or so after daybreak, and was charged with fine
sea-flavors and the delicate breath of dewy meadow-land. Everything
appeared to exhale a fragrance; even the weather-beaten sign of "J.
Tibbets & Son, West India Goods & Groceries," it seemed to Lynde,
emitted an elusive spicy odor.

Edward Lynde soon passed beyond the limits of the town, and was
ascending a steep hill, on the crest of which he proposed to take a
farewell survey of the picturesque port throwing off its gauzy
counterpane of sea-fog. The wind blew blithely on this hilltop; it