“It seemed to me like butterflies,” said Clara.  She did not explain what she meant.

The next morning, as it had been arranged in sisterly council, Laura was to entertain the stranger while Clara made the preparations for breakfast.  Laura found him in the porch, already rejoicing in the morning view.  But, after the first greeting, she found talking with him difficult.  They fell into a silence; and to escape from it Laura finally ran into the kitchen, blue muslin and all.  She pushed Clara away from the fireplace.

“You must let me help,” she said, and moved pots, pans, and kettles.

“Another stick of wood would make this water boil,” she went on.

“Where shall I find it?” said a voice behind her; and Arnold directly answered his own question with his ready help.

There followed great bustling, laughter, help, and interruption to work.  When Mrs. Ashton came down, she found the breakfast-table in its wonted place in the broad kitchen, instead of being laid in the back-parlor, as was the custom when there were guests in the house.  It was a very happy breakfast; the door opened wide upon the green behind the house, and the September morning air brought in an appetite for the generously laden table.

After breakfast, Arnold asked the way to the knoll behind the house, covered with pines.  Laura went to show him, though it was but a little walk.  In the woods, by the pine-trees, near the sound of the brook, Arnold asked Laura, “What had his music said to her?” Whether she answered him in the words she had given her sister the night before I will not say; but late to dinner, out from the woods, two happy lovers walked home in the bright September noon.

* * * * *

The log-cabin was built.  If in its walls there were any broad chinks through which a wind might make its way, there were other draughts to send it back again,—­strains of music, that helped to kindle the household hearth,—­such strains as made sacred the seed that was laid in the earth, that refined coarse labor, that softened the tone of the new colony rising up around, so that life, even the rudest, was made noble, and the work was not merely for the body, but for the spirit, and a new land was planted under these strains of the musician.

* * * * *

ENGLISH NAVAL POWER AND ENGLISH COLONIES.

What are the considerations which properly enter into any just estimate of a people’s naval power?

In the first place, this certainly is a vital question:  Are the people themselves in any true sense naval in their tastes, habits, and training?  Do they love the sea?  Is it a home to them?  Have they that fertility of resources and expedients which the emergencies of sea-life make so essential, and which can come only from a long and fearless familiarity with old Ocean in all his aspects of beauty and all his aspects of terror?  Or are they essentially landsmen,—­landsmen just as much on the deck of a frigate as when marshalled on a battle-field?  This is a test question.  For if a nation has not sailors, men who smack of the salt sea, then vain are proud fleets and strong armaments.