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“ Doctor McCall meanwhile went down the cinder-path, to all passers-by a clean-shaven, healthy gentleman out in search of an appetite for breakfast. But in reality he was deciding his whole life in that brief walk. Why, he asked himself once or twice, should he be unlike the other clean-shaven, healthy men that he met? God knows he had no relish for mystery. He was, as he had told Kitty, a commonplace man, a thrifty Delaware farmer, in hearty good-fellowship with his neighbors, his cattle, the ground he tilled, and, he thought reverently, with the God who had made him and them. ”

“ The roar of the steam-pipes ceased, the throb of the engines struck the water, and the great steamer steamed away from the quay and out of the plain of the harbor into a wide world of gray waves and wind and rain. There stood Mackenzie as they passed, the dark figure clearly seen against the pallid colors of the dismal day; and Sheila waved a handkerchief to him until Stornoway and its lighthouse and all the promontories and bays of the great island had faded into the white mists that lay along the horizon. ”

“ Doctor McCall was just the man to fall into such a habit. Down on the farm, his cattle, his hands, even the neighbors with whom he argued on politics, could all have testified to his easy, large good-humor.
"Oh, we are the best of friends," he said indifferently when Maria found Kitty chattering to him once, very much as she did to old Peter. But when Miss Muller, who had no petty jealousies, enlarged on the singular beauty of her eyes and some good points in her shape, he did not respond. "I never could talk of a woman as if she were a horse," he said. ”

“ They watched the salmon splash in the shallower creeks where the sea had scooped out a tiny bay of ruddy sand, and then a slowly rolling porpoise would show his black back above the water and silently disappear again. All this was pleasant enough on a pleasant morning, in fresh sea-air and sunlight, in holiday-time; and was there any reason, Mackenzie may fairly have thought, why this young man, if he did marry Sheila, should not come and live in a place where so much healthy amusement was to be found? ”

“ Far as the eye could see the successive headlands of pale white jutted out into the dark ocean, until in the south they faded into a gray mist and became invisible. And when they got into Stornoway harbor, how black seemed the waters of the little bay and the hulls of the boats and the windows of the houses against the blinding white of the encircling hills!
"Yes," said Lavender to the captain, "it will be a cold drive across to Loch Roag. I shall give Mackenzie's man a good dram before we start." ”

“ One goes to the seaside not for pomp and peacock's tails, but for saltness, Nature and a bite of fresh fish. To build a city there that shall not be an insult to the sentiment of the place is a matter of difficulty. One's ideal, after all, is a canvas encampment. A range of solid stone villas like those of Newport, so far as congruity with a watering-place goes, pains the taste like a false note in music. Atlantic City pauses halfway between the stone house and the tent, and erects herself in woodwork. ”

“ He belongs to the world outside. I always did wonder if people would like me out there," said Kitty, too doggedly in earnest to see how her words hurt her listener. "If one could be like those two people yonder! They seem to know everything—they can do everything!"
"Maria is well enough—for a woman," dryly. "But I never heard McCall credited with exceptional ability of any sort."
Kitty glanced at him: "Of course you're right," quickly. "Men only can judge of character: we women are apt to be silly about such things." ”

“ If a husband and wife cannot manage their own affairs satisfactorily, no third person can; and I am getting to be an elderly man, who likes peace and comfort and his own quiet."
"I wish you wouldn't talk such nonsense!" said Lavender impetuously. "You know you are bound to marry; and the woman you ask to marry you will be a precious fool if she refuses. I don't know, indeed, how you and Sheila ever escaped—"
"Look here, Lavender," said his companion, speaking in a somewhat more earnest fashion, "if you marry Sheila Mackenzie I suppose I may see something of both of you from time to time. ”

“ Lavender had hanging up in his rooms? Had he not even a sketch of her? An artist, and yet not have a portrait of the girl he had chosen to marry? Lavender had no portrait of Sheila to show. Some little photographs he had he kept for his own pocket-book, while in vain had he tried to get some sketch or picture that would convey to the little world of his friends and acquaintances some notion of his future bride. They were left to draw on their imagination for some presentiment of the coming princess.
He told Mrs. Lavender, of course. She said little, but sent for Edward Ingram. ”

“ As for Doctor McCall, he leaned comfortably back in his arm-chair and dried his legs at the grate filled with red-hot coals, while he listened to the soft rustle of her skirts as she moved noiselessly about him. It is the peculiarity of women like Kitty, to whom Nature has denied the governing power of ideas or great personal beauty or magnetism, such as she gave to Miss Muller, that there is a certain impalpable force and attraction in their most petty actions and words, to which men yield. ”

“ But our business is not with the land, but the sea. Here it lies, basking at our feet, the warm amethystine sea of the South. It does not boom and thunder, as in the country of the "cold gray stones." On the contrary, saturating itself with sunny ease, thinning its bulk over the shoal flat beach with a succession of voluptuous curves, it spreads thence in distance with strands and belts of varied color, away and away, until blind with light it faints on a prodigiously far horizon. ”

“ By the way, what an infamous shame it was of you to go and gammon old Mackenzie into the belief that he can read poetry! Why, he will make that girl's life a burden to her. I heard him propose to read Paradise Lost to her as soon as the rain set in."
"I didn't gammon him," said Lavender with a laugh. "Every man thinks he can read poetry better than every other man, even as every man fancies that no one gets cigars as good and as cheap as he does, and that no one can drive a horse safely but himself. My talking about his reading was not as bad as Sheila's persuading him that he can play whist. ”

“ The tourist who has crossed the lagoons of Venice to see the fitful lights flash up from the glass-furnaces of Murano, will find more than one locality here where leaping lights, crowning low banks of sand, are preparing the crystal for our infant industries in glass, and will remind him of his hours by the Adriatic. Every year bubbles of greater and greater beauty are being blown in these secluded places, and soon we hope to enrich commerce with all the elegances of latticinio and schmelze, the perfected glass of an American Venice. ”

“ Lavender aware that frequently you could see the Sutherlandshire hills from this very town of Stornoway?
There Sheila laughed, and Lavender, who kept watching her face always to read all her fancies and sentiments and wishes in the shifting lights of it, immediately demanded an explanation.
"It is no good thing," said Sheila, "to see the Sutherland hills often, for when you see them it means to rain."
But Lavender had not been taught to fear the rain of the Western Isles. The very weather seemed to have conspired with Mackenzie to charm the young man with the island. ”

“ Ten miles of uninterrupted beach spread before them, which the ocean, transformed for the purpose into a temporary Haussmann, is rolling into a marble boulevard for their use twice a day. On the hard level the wheels scarcely leave a trace. The ride seems like [pg 11] eternity, it lapses off so gentle and smooth, and the landscape is so impressively similar: everywhere the plunging surf, the gray sand-hills, the dark cedars with foliage sliced off sharp and flat by the keen east wind—their stems twisted like a dishclout or like the olives around Florence. ”

“ He retires, and we all rush to the windows and look out upon the quaint old village—a curious, old-fashioned scene. We feel as if we had somehow become transmogrified, and instead of being flesh-and-blood men and women from practical New York, were playing our parts in some old English novel. Odd little tumble-down houses, with peaked roofs and mullioned windows, ranged about a triangular common, look sleepily out upon a statue of Palmerston in the middle of the open place, the gray walls of Romsey Abbey, a thousand years old, against the blue sky behind them. ”

“ She had bidden good-bye to Ingram already, but somehow she could not speak to his companion just at this last moment. She pressed his hand and turned away, and went ashore with her father. Then the big steamer throbbed its way out of the harbor, and by and by the island of Lewis lay but as a thin blue cloud along the horizon; and who could tell that human beings, with strange hopes and fancies and griefs, were hidden away in that pale line of vapor? ”

“ The husbands and brothers, who are due in the city before business hours, are out for a good, royal, irresponsible tumble in the surf. There is the great yeasty bath-tub, full of merry dashing figures, dipping the sleek shoulder to the combing wave. On the shore, active humanities hastily undressing. Then the heavens are filled with a new glory, and the dazzling sun leaves his bath at the same time with all these merry roisterers who have shared it with him. ”

“ As we descend we seem to waken the white, red-roofed villages with our steps. The plateaus are gradually enlivened with spreading herds and men going forth to labor. We skirt the precipice of Azrou-n'hour, crowned with its marabout's tomb. The plains at our feet are green and glorious, pearled with white, distant villages. Opposite the precipice the granite rocks open to let us pass by a narrow portal where formerly the Kabyles used to stand and levy a toll on all travelers. ”

“ A delicious ride back to Romsey in the twilight, carrying two of the Boyce children with us. In the evening I stroll out alone, to look at the village in the moonlight. The streets are like narrow lanes. The houses are very old, and for the most part dilapidated, but streets and houses are all as clean and neat as wax. Presently I come upon the old abbey, its rugged walls and towers looming solemnly in the moonlight, and pass the parson's house near by, all overrun with vines, thinking of Trollope again and Framley parsonage. ”

“ A narrow pathway is left quite round the basin, from which one looks down a sheer descent of more than a hundred feet; but this is so dangerous, the earth and coarse grass that carpet it so deceptive and loose, and the wind almost always so high on this spot, that only the most foolhardy or youngest of visitors would dare in broad daylight to attempt to walk round it. Yet it is on record that the duke of Richmond, some sixty or seventy years ago, made a bet at Lord Erroll's dinner-table that he would ride round it after dark. ”

“ That pair of proud Philadelphia sisters, statues sculptured in peach-pulp and wrapped in gauze, look somehow like twin Muses at the gates of a temple. Whole rows of unmatched girls stare at the sea, desolate but implacable, waiting for partners equal to them in social position. In such a dearth a Philadelphia girl will turn to her old music-teacher and flirt solemnly with him for a whole evening, sooner than involve herself with well-looking young chits from Providence or New York, who may be jewelers' clerks when at home. ”

“ It is none of the gentlemen who will come here in the autumn will want the Gaelic; and what for would you want the Gaelic—ay, if you was staying here the whole year round?"
"But Sheila will teach me all the same—won't you, Sheila?" he said, turning to his companion, who was gazing somewhat blankly at the rough steamer and at the rough gray sea beyond the harbor.
"Yes," said the girl: she seemed in no mood for joking.
Lavender returned to town more in love than ever; and soon the news of his engagement was spread abroad, he nothing loath. ”

“ People really do bathe, really do take walks on the beach for the love of the ocean, really do pick up shells and throw them away again, really do go yachting and crab-catching; and if they try city manners in the evening, they are so tired with their honest day's work that it is apt to end in misery. On the hotel piazzas you see beauties that surprise you with exquisite touches of the warm and languid South. ”

“ The rocks in the immediate neighborhood of the castle are rugged in the extreme, here and there rent by a gigantic fissure reaching far inland, and up which the foaming waters gurgle continually as if in impatience of their narrow bounds, now jutting far into the sea like a Titanic staircase and thickly matted with coarse sea-weed, and again reared up on high, a sheer glistening wall, with not a cranny for the steadiest foot, and with Niagaras of spray for ever veiling its smooth, unchanging face. ”

“ As you wander through the lanes of these cunning little houses, you catch strange fragments of conversation. Gentlemen living vis-à-vis, and standing with one leg in the grave and the other on their own piazzas, are heard on sunny mornings exciting themselves with the maddest abuse of each other's doctor. There are large boarding-houses, fifty or more of them, each of which has its contingent of puling valetudinarians. The healthy inmates have the privilege of listening to the symptoms, set forth with that full and conscientious detail not unusual with invalids describing their own complaints. ”

“ Ingram would make use of some wicked words, rub his eyes, ask what was the last station they had passed, and then begin to preach to Lavender about the great obligations he was under to Sheila, and what would be expected of him in after times.
"You are coming away just now," he would say, while Lavender, who could not sleep at all, was only anxious that Sheila's name should be mentioned, "enriched with a greater treasure than falls to the lot of most men. If you know how to value that treasure, there is not a king or emperor in Europe who should not envy you." ”

“ The Boyces have returned to Paris, but nurse and the children are still at the gardener's house, and thither we drive along the banks of a sylvan lake, beyond which the rooks are cawing about the chimneys.
The old gardener is nurse's father, and though he is now so old that he no longer does any work, he is maintained in comfort by the family in whose service he has spent a lifetime. Forty years of honest service in one family! No wonder he feels that his destiny is for ever linked with that of the people who have been his masters, man and boy, for forty years. ”

“ A Tyrolese anthem having been sung by some invisible voices, in which jodels leapt up and smothered Gregorians, a middle-aged Capuchin took his stand in the pulpit, and having greeted the congregation, promised to explain to them the mystery and the advantage of the Holy Scapulary.
"My beloved," he began, "there are some who think too little of the scapulary, and there are others who lay too great a stress on this aid to faith. Let us meditate on both these conditions. But first, how must we ourselves regard the scapulary? Now, we are told not to love the world nor the things of the world. ”