savage, or hailed the expected ship from England.  How much of history this view recalled, and what pathos of human life these graves made real.  Read the names of those buried a couple of centuries ago—­captains, elders, ministers, governors, wives well beloved, children a span long, maidens in the blush of womanhood—­half the tender inscriptions are illegible; the stones are broken, sunk, slanting to fall.  What a pitiful attempt to keep the world mindful of the departed!

VI

MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SEA, ISLES OF SHOALS

Mr. Stanhope King was not in very good spirits.  Even Boston did not make him cheerful.  He was half annoyed to see the artist and Miss Lamont drifting along in such laughing good-humor with the world, as if a summer holiday was just a holiday without any consequences or responsibilities.  It was to him a serious affair ever since that unsatisfactory note from Miss Benson; somehow the summer had lost its sparkle.  And yet was it not preposterous that a girl, just a single girl, should have the power to change for a man the aspect of a whole coast-by her presence to make it iridescent with beauty, and by her absence to take all the life out of it?  And a simple girl from Ohio!  She was not by any means the prettiest girl in the Newport Casino that morning, but it was her figure that he remembered, and it was the look of hurt sensibility in her eyes that stayed with him.  He resented the attitude of the Casino towards her, and he hated himself for his share in it.  He would write to her.....  He composed letter after letter in his mind, which he did not put on paper.  How many millions of letters are composed in this way!  It is a favorite occupation of imaginative people; and as they say that no thoughts or mental impressions are ever lost, but are all registered—­made, as it were, on a “dry-plate,” to be developed hereafter—­what a vast correspondence must be lying in the next world, in the Dead-letter Office there, waiting for the persons to whom it is addressed, who will all receive it and read it some day!  How unpleasant and absurd it will be to read, much of it!  I intend to be careful, for my part, about composing letters of this sort hereafter.  Irene, I dare say, will find a great many of them from Mr. King, thought out in those days.  But he mailed none of them to her.  What should he say?  Should he tell her that he didn’t mind if her parents were what Mrs. Bartlett Glow called “impossible”?  If he attempted any explanation, would it not involve the offensive supposition that his social rank was different from hers?  Even if he convinced her that he recognized no caste in American society, what could remove from her mind the somewhat morbid impression that her education had put her in a false position?  His love probably could not shield her from mortification in a society which, though indefinable in its limits and code, is an entity more vividly felt than the government of the United States.