herself been less perfect and immaculate, I might have felt more hopes of my own amendment; but I felt that I was not in her class at all, and I gave up at the start. She was a wonderful human ornament, the despair, I thought, of all pursuit, not to mention rivalry. Beside the heroic figure of her captain, she looked like a lily mated with an oak; but they were as happy a pair, and as well mated, as one could hope to see. I was, perhaps, more in my proper element among the captains down in the smoking-room, which was at the back of the house, at the end of the hallway, on the left. My father sat there foot to foot with them, played euchre with them, listened to their yarns, laughed at their jokes, and felt, probably, the spirit of his own old sea-captain ancestors stirring within him. Some of them were a little shy of his official position at first, and indeed he was occasionally constrained to adopt towards one or another of them, in the consulate, a bearing very different from the easy comradeship of the Blodgett evenings; but in process of time they came to understand him, and accepted him, on the human basis, as a friend and brother. My father had the rare faculty of retaining his dignity without putting it on. No one ever took liberties with him, and he took none with anybody; yet there was no trace in his intercourse of stiffness or pose; there did not need to be, since there was behind his eye that potentiality of self--protection which renders superfluous all outward demonstration of personal sanctity. On the other hand, he obviously elevated the tone of our little society; the stout captains, who feared nothing else, feared their worser selves in his presence. None of them knew or cared a straw for his literary genius and its productions; but they were aware of something in him which they respected as well as liked, and there was no member of the company who was more popular or influential.