when suddenly an engine went thundering over the bridge and startled me into stillness. The tube slung in my hold and steadied against the chimney, and there——What was it in the field? what ghastly picture?

The glass crashed from my hand, and I staggered shrieking down the ladder.

The sound wasn’t well through my lips, when the door slammed, and Dan had darted out of the house and to the shore. I after him. There was a knot sitting and standing round there in the gray, shivering, with their hands in their pockets and their pipes set in their teeth; but the gloom was on them as well, and the pipes went out between the puffs.

“Where’s Dennis’s boat?” Dan demanded, as he strode.

“The six-oar’s all the one not——”

“The six-oar I want. Who goes with me?”

There wasn’t a soul in the ward but would have followed Dan’s lead to the end of the world and jumped off; and before I could tell their names there were three men on the thwart, six oars in the air, Dan stood in the bows, a word from him, and they shot away.

I watched while I could see, and then in and up to the attic, forgetting to put mother in her bed, forgetting all things but the one. And there lay the glass broken. I sat awhile with the pieces in my hand, as if I’d lost a kingdom; then down, and mechanically put things to rights, and made mother comfortable,——and she’s never stood on her feet from that day to this. At last I seated myself before the fire, and stared into it to blinding.“Won’t some one lend you a glass, Georgie?” said mother.

“Of course they will!” I cried, ——for, you see, I hadn’t a wit of my own, ——and I ran out.

There’s a glass behind every door in the street, you should know, and there’s no day in the year that you’ll go by and not see one stretching from some roof where the heart of the house is out on the sea. O, sometimes I think all the romance of the town is clustered down here on the Flats and written in pale cheeks and starting eyes! But what’s the use? After one winter, one, I gave mine away, and never got another. It’s just an emblem of despair. Look, and look again, and look till your soul sinks, and the thing you want never crosses it; but you’re down in the kitchen stirring a porridge, or you’re off at a neighbor’s asking the news, and somebody shouts at you round the corner, and there, black and 

 Prev. P 99/142 next