I had once a like pleasure in raking over an Indian shell-heap with Wyman.  The quiet, amused amazement of the native who plied the spade for us was an odd contrast to Wyman’s mood of deep interest and serious occupation.  He had a boy’s pleasure in the quest, and again displayed for me the most ready learning as to everything involved in the search.  Bits of bones were named as I would name the letters of the alphabet:  bone needles, fragments of pottery and odds and ends of nameless use went with a laugh or some ingenious comment into his little basket.  In truth, a walk with Wyman at Mount Desert was something to remember.

The acquaintances of the merchant or lawyer grow fewer as age comes on, but the naturalist is always enlarging his circle of living or dead things in which he takes interest, and none more profited thus by the years as they came than Wyman.  The bird, the tree, the flower, the rock, tiny worlds beneath damp stones, little dramas of minute life within mouldy tree-trunks, the quaint menageries in the sea-caves, shifted with every tide, whatever the waves brought or the winds carried or the earth bore were one and all acquaintances of this delightful and delighted companion.  Not without a manly interest in the world of men and politics, he lived for the most part serenely above its ferment and passions.  Without the large means which, had they been his, had been in the truest sense and for the best purposes means, he lived a life of quiet, studious content, made somewhat hard by ill-health, but, so far as I know, undisturbed by envy of easier lots than his.  Whatever were his crosses in this world—­and they must have been many—­no man who knew Wyman could now wish them to have been changed, if, as no doubt was the case, they helped to build up a character so filled with honest labor, so pure, so lofty and so generous—­

  Nor could Humanity resign
    A life which bade her heart beat high,
  And blazoned Duty’s stainless shield,
    And set a star in Honor’s sky.

S. WEIR MITCHELL.

PLAYING WITH FIRE.

Apple-blossoms and the pale wild roses that grow in the shadow of woody lanes were things of which she always reminded you, she was so slight and so fair, with just a suggestion of bloom about her—­the bloom of youth.  Hardly beautiful, but then seventeen summers have a beauty of their own—­a beauty of firm round curves and velvety color, whose absence a dozen years later works utter transformation.  When Lilian should approach thirty, and the blush that shifted now with every word she spoke, almost with every thought, should have paled—­when time and tears should perhaps have dimmed the soft eyes—­then she might be, to those who love fleshly magnificence alone, of sufficiently commonplace appearance, but just now there was something about her so unique and so attractive that every one when she passed by turned to discover what it was.