possibilities of danger and dismay. The ocean provides the
scenery and properties of a perpetual tragedy, but the interest
arrives with the performers. Till then the shores remain
vacant, like the great conventional armchairs of the French
drama, that wait for Rachel to come and die.

Yet as I ride along this fashionable avenue in August, and
watch the procession of the young and fair,--as I look at
stately houses, from each of which has gone forth almost within
my memory a funeral or a bride,--then every thoroughfare of
human life becomes in fancy but an ocean shore, with its
ripples and its wrecks. One learns, in growing older, that no
fiction can be so strange nor appear so improbable as would the
simple truth; and that doubtless even Shakespeare did but
timidly transcribe a few of the deeds and passions he had
personally known. For no man of middle age can dare trust
himself to portray life in its full intensity, as he has
studied or shared it; he must resolutely set aside as
indescribable the things most worth describing, and must expect
to be charged with exaggeration, even when he tells the rest.



I.

AN ARRIVAL.

IT was one of the changing days of our Oldport midsummer. In
the morning it had rained in rather a dismal way, and Aunt Jane
had said she should put it in her diary. It was a very serious