"It's an awful sightly place to fail in, anyway," she thought.

Her one boarder came and stood beside her. She was a young woman with a creamy skin, regular features, dark, dreaming eyes, and a pleasant, slow smile.

"Are you gathering inspiration, Miss Burridge?" she asked, settling a white tam-o'-shanter on her smooth brown locks.

"I hope so, Miss Wilbur. I need it."

"How could any one help it!" was Diana Wilbur's soft exclamation, as she took a[Pg 2] deep breath and gazed at the illimitable be-diamonded blue.

[Pg 2]

Priscilla Burridge turned her middle-aged gaze upon the enthusiasm of the twentieth year beside her.

"Do you know of any inspiration that would make me able to get the carpenter to come and jack up the saggin' corner of that piazza?" she asked. "Or get the plumber to mend the broken pipe in the kitchen?"

Miss Wilbur's dreaming gaze came back to the bony figure in brown calico.

"It seems almost sacrilege, doesn't it," she said in a voice of awe, "to speak of carpenters and plumbers in a place like this? Such odors, such crystal beauty untouched by the desecrating hand of man."

Miss Priscilla snorted. "If I don't get hold of the desecrating hand of man pretty soon, you'll be havin' a stream o' water come down on your bed, the first rain."

The girl's attitude of adoration remained unchanged.

"I noticed that little rift," she said slowly. "As I lay in bed this morning, I looked up at a spot of sapphire that seemed like a day-star full of promise of this transcendent beauty."

Miss Wilbur's pretty lips moved but little[Pg 3] when she spoke and her slow utterance gave the effect of a recitation.

[Pg 3]

Miss Priscilla, for all her harassment, could not forbear a smile.

"I'm certainly glad you're so easily pleased, but you don't know Casco Bay as well as I do, or that day-star would look powerful stormy to you. When it rains here, all other rains are mere imitations. It comes down from the sky and up from the ground, and the 

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