Aunt Merce rummaged her pocket for flagroot; mother resumed her paper.

“May I put on, for a little while, my new slippers?” I asked, longing to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the room.

“Yes,” answered mother, “but come in soon, it will be supper-time.”

I bounded away, found my slippers, and was walking down stairs on tiptoe, holding up my linsey-woolsey frock, when I saw the door of my great-grandfather’s room ajar.  I pushed it open, went in, and saw a very old man, his head bound with a red-silk handkerchief, bolstered in bed.  His wife, grandmother-in-law, sat by the fire reading a great Bible.

“Marm Tamor, will you please show me Ruth and Boaz?” I asked.

She complied by turning over the leaves till she came to the picture.

“Did Ruth love Boaz dreadfully much?”

“Oh, oh,” groaned the old man, “what is the imp doing here?  Drive her away.  Scat.”

I skipped out by a side door, down an alley paved with blue pebbles, swung the high gate open, and walked up and down the gravel walk which bordered the roadside, admiring my slippers, and wishing that some acquaintance with poor shoes could see me.  I thought then I would climb the high gateposts, which had a flat top, and take there the position of the little girl in “The Shawl Dance.”  I had no sooner taken it than Aunt Merce appeared at the door, and gave a shriek at the sight, which tempted me to jump toward her with extended arms.  I was seized and carried into the house, where supper was administered, and I was put to bed.

CHAPTER II.

At this time I was ten years old.  We lived in a New England village, Surrey, which was situated on an inlet of a large bay that opened into the Atlantic.  From the observatory of our house we could see how the inlet was pinched by the long claws of the land, which nearly enclosed it.  Opposite the village, some ten miles across, a range of islands shut out the main waters of the bay.  For miles on the outer side of the curving prongs of land stretched a rugged, desolate coast, indented with coves and creeks, lined with bowlders of granite half sunken in the sea, and edged by beaches overgrown with pale sedge, or covered with beds of seaweed.  Nothing alive, except the gulls, abode on these solitary shores.  No lighthouse stood on any point, to shake its long, warning light across the mariners’ wake.  Now and then a drowned man floated in among the sedge, or a small craft went to pieces on the rocks.  When an easterly wind prevailed, the coast resounded with the bellowing sea, which brought us tidings from those inaccessible spots.  We heard its roar as it leaped over the rocks on Gloster Point, and its long, unbroken wail when it rolled in on Whitefoot Beach.  In mild weather, too, when our harbor was quiet, we still heard its whimper.  Behind the village, the ground rose toward the north, where the horizon was bounded