the year.  It was in the heats of summer that they were most common and most strongly characterized.  In winter, on the other hand, she was less excitable, and even at times heavy and as if chilled and dulled in her sensibilities.  It was a strange, paroxysmal kind of life that belonged to her.  It seemed to come and go with the sunlight.  All winter long she would be comparatively quiet, easy to manage, listless, slow in her motions; her eye would lose something of its strange lustre; and the old nurse would feel so little anxiety, that her whole expression and aspect would show the change, and people would say to her, “Why, Sophy, how young you’re looking!”

As the spring came on, Elsie would leave the fireside, have her tiger-skin spread in the empty southern chamber next the wall, and lie there basking for whole hours in the sunshine.  As the season warmed, the light would kindle afresh in her eyes, and the old woman’s sleep would grow restless again,—­for she knew, that, so long as the glitter was fierce in the girl’s eyes, there was no trusting her impulses or movements.

At last, when the veins of the summer were hot and swollen, and the juices of all the poison-plants and the blood of all the creatures that feed upon them had grown thick and strong,—­about the time when the second mowing was in hand, and the brown, wet-faced men were following up the scythes as they chased the falling waves of grass, (falling as the waves fall on sickle-curved beaches; the foam-flowers dropping as the grass-flowers drop,—­with sharp semivowel consonantal sounds,—­frsh,—­for that is the way the sea talks, and leaves all pure vowel-sounds for the winds to breathe over it, and all mutes to the unyielding earth,)—­about this time of over-ripe midsummer, the life of Elsie seemed fullest of its malign and restless instincts.  This was the period of the year when the Rockland people were most cautious of wandering in the leafier coverts which skirted the base of The Mountain, and the farmers liked to wear thick, long boots, whenever they went into the bushes.  But Elsie was never so much given to roaming over The Mountain as at this season; and as she had grown more absolute and uncontrollable, she was as like to take the night as the day for her rambles.

At this season, too, all her peculiar tastes in dress and ornament came out in a more striking way than at other times.  She was never so superb as then, and never so threatening in her scowling beauty.  The barred skirts she always fancied showed sharply beneath her diaphanous muslins; the diamonds often glittered on her breast as if for her own pleasure rather than to dazzle others; the asp-like bracelet hardly left her arm.  Without some necklace she was never seen,—­either the golden cord she wore at the great party, or a chain of mosaics, or simply a ring of golden scales.  Some said that Elsie always slept in a necklace, and that when she died she was to be buried in one.  It was a fancy of hers,—­but many thought there was a reason for it.