feeling, while the influence of my mind made her contemplative. I
taught her to love the moonlight hour, when the expanse of the
encircled bay was smooth as a great mirror and slept in a transparent
shadow; while beyond Nahant, the wind rippled the dim ocean into a
dreamy brightness, which grew faint afar off, without becoming
gloomier. I held her hand and pointed to the long surf wave, as it
rolled calmly on the beach, in an unbroken line of silver; we were
silent together, till its deep and peaceful murmur had swept by us.
When the Sabbath sun shone down into the recesses of the cliffs, I led
the mermaid thither, and told her that those huge, gray, shattered
rocks, and her native sea, that raged forever like a storm against
them, and her own slender beauty, in so stern a scene, were all
combined into a strain of poetry. But on the Sabbath eve, when her
mother had gone early to bed, and her gentle sister had smiled and
left us, as we sat alone by the quiet hearth, with household things
around, it was her turn to make me feel that here was a deeper poetry,
and that this was the dearest hour of all. Thus went on our wooing,
till I had shot wild-fowl enough to feather our bridal bed, and the
Daughter of the Sea was mine.

I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the form
of a Gothic arch, by setting up a whale's jaw-bones. We bought a
heifer with her first calf, and had a little garden on the hillside,
to supply us with potatoes and green sauce for our fish. Our parlor
small and neat, was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt
frame, and with shells and pretty pebbles on the mantel-piece,
selected from the sea's treasury of such things, on Nahant Beach. On
the desk, beneath the looking-glass, lay the Bible, which I had begun
to read aloud at the Book of Genesis, and the singing-book that Susan
used for her evening psalm. Except the almanac, we had no other