remember it? You stood on the little bridge, over the brook, that
runs across King's Beach into the sea. It was twilight; the waves
rolling in, the wind sweeping by, the crimson clouds fading in the
west, and the silver moon brightening above the hill; and on the
bridge were you, fluttering in the breeze like a sea-bird that might
skim away at your pleasure. You seemed a daughter of the viewless
wind, a creature of the ocean foam and the crimson light, whose merry
life was spent in dancing on the crests of the billows, that threw up
their spray to support your footsteps. As I drew nearer, I fancied
you akin to the race of mermaids, and thought how pleasant it would be
to dwell with you among the quiet coves, in the shadow of the cliffs,
and to roam along secluded beaches of the purest sand, and when our
northern shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lonely,
far amid summer seas. And yet it gladdened me, after all this
nonsense, to find you nothing but a pretty young girl, sadly perplexed
with the rude behavior of the wind about your petticoats.

Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days,
dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic
hues, before I could see her as she really was. Now, Susan, for a
sober picture of our village! It was a small collection of dwellings
that seemed to have been cast up by the sea, with the rock-weed and
marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or to have come ashore
among the pipe-staves and other lumber, which had been washed from the
deck of an Eastern schooner. There was just space for the narrow and
sandy street between the beach in front, and a precipitous hill that
lifted its rocky forehead in the rear, among a waste of juniper-bushes
and the wild growth of a broken pasture. The village was picturesque,
in the variety of its edifices, though all were rude. Here stood a
little old hovel, built, perhaps, of drift-wood, there a row of boat-