“What a gloomy picture!” said Kate, laughing.  “Do you know that I have understood something lately better than I ever did before,—­it is that success and happiness are not things of chance with us, but of choice.  I can see how we might so easily have had a dull summer here.  Of course it is our own fault if the events of our lives are hindrances; it is we who make them bad or good.  Sometimes it is a conscious choice, but oftener unconscious.  I suppose we educate ourselves for taking the best of life or the worst, do not you?”

“Dear old Deephaven!” said Kate, gently, after we had been silent a little while.  “It makes me think of one of its own old ladies, with its clinging to the old fashions and its respect for what used to be respectable when it was young.  I cannot make fun of what was once dear to somebody, and which realized somebody’s ideas of beauty or fitness.  I don’t dispute the usefulness of a new, bustling, manufacturing town with its progressive ideas; but there is a simple dignity in a town like Deephaven, as if it tried to be loyal to the traditions of its ancestors.  It quietly accepts its altered circumstances, if it has seen better days, and has no harsh feelings toward the places which have drawn away its business, but it lives on, making its old houses and boats and clothes last as long as possible.”

“I think one cannot help,” said I, “having a different affection for an old place like Deephaven from that which one may have for a newer town.  Here—­though there are no exciting historical associations and none of the veneration which one has for the very old cities and towns abroad—­it is impossible not to remember how many people have walked the streets and lived in the houses.  I was thinking to-day how many girls might have grown up in this house, and that their places have been ours; we have inherited their pleasures, and perhaps have carried on work which they began.  We sit in somebody’s favorite chair and look out of the windows at the sea, and have our wishes and our hopes and plans just as they did before us.  Something of them still lingers where their lives were spent.  We are often reminded of our friends who have died; why are we not reminded as surely of strangers in such a house as this,—­finding some trace of the lives which were lived among the sights we see and the things we handle, as the incense of many masses lingers in some old cathedral, and one catches the spirit of longing and prayer where so many heavy hearts have brought their burdens and have gone away comforted?”

“When I first came here,” said Kate, “it used to seem very sad to me to find Aunt Katharine’s little trinkets lying about the house.  I have often thought of what you have just said.  I heard Mrs. Patton say the other day that there is no pocket in a shroud, and of course it is better that we should carry nothing out of this world.  Yet I can’t help wishing that it were possible to keep some of my worldly goods always.  There are one or two