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As vividly as if I had read it only the day before, I recalled the description of a wild and stormy night when the heroine placed a lighted lamp in the window of her sea-bound cottage, to guide her lover home in safety. Gentlemen, the reading of that book in my boyhood days was but a trivial thing.

Something in the atmosphere of the sea-bound retreat made him feel emancipated, as if he had stepped out of the prison of civilized life into a larger, more thoughtless existence, an existence for which his inner nature fitted him, for which he had surely been meant all these years that he had lived, unconscious of what he really was and of what he really needed.

All those makeshifts were condemned and punished, for the law was harshly applied, in hopes to break up the clan spirit; but in that out-of-the-way, sea-bound isle, there were few to make remarks and fewer to tell tales. And here again I marked a difference from my own part of the country.

Meantime Fyne was telling me rather remarkable things for him. He declared first it was a mercy in a sense. Then he asked me if it were not real madness, to saddle one's existence with such a perpetual reminder. The daily existence. The isolated sea-bound existence. To bring such an additional strain into the solitude already trying enough for two people was the craziest thing.

All those makeshifts were condemned and punished, for the law was harshly applied, in hopes to break up the clan spirit; but in that out-of-the-way, sea-bound isle, there were few to make remarks and fewer to tell tales. And here again I marked a difference from my own part of the country.

A brilliant light floods the figures in the foreground and melts across the green slopes into the hazy distance of the sea-bound horizon. In the second it is twilight, and a calm stillness broods over all, as under the feathery palms the Mother bends, watchful, over her little one's slumbers. Such were the revelations of Nature to the country-bred painter from the little town of Correggio.

And when Captain Jim had proudly encircled every bed with a rim of the big, milk-white shells, Anne found to her surprise that she liked the effect. On a town lawn, or even up at the Glen, they would not have been in keeping, but here, in the old-fashioned, sea-bound garden of the little house of dreams, they BELONGED. "They DO look nice," she said sincerely.

The island, over which I wandered in common with others of the goodly company of adventurers, presented one uniform view: a rolling surface, without any considerable elevation; sea-bound, without a single harbour, or a village in the least attractive; half-a-dozen huts are scattered here and there in irregular lines, indifferently built, and having no care bestowed in the way of out-door adornment; not a tree appears on the place, although in the sheltered situations I should, imagine they would thrive: in short, a less attractive islet I never remember to have visited, or one so utterly divested of interest.

These varied accomplishments, however, seemed of little assistance in showing her how to stretch her father's small pension beyond the barest necessities of the household. Tales had been told her of a great land, far beyond her sea-bound home, where women of the highest birth went out to work in the busy world.

There are many of these crosses hereabout; they are set up on the most advanced cliffs of the sea-bound land, as if to implore mercy, and to calm that restless mysterious power which draws men away, never to give them back, and in preference retains the bravest and noblest. Around this cross stretches the evergreen waste, strewn with short rushes.