either by breaking the ice or through an air-hole, and there was a story that he had ventured under the ice as fearless as a cold fish. No one could dive from such a height as he, or stay so long under water; he liked to stay under long enough to scare the spectators, and then appear at a distance, thrashing about in the water as if he were rescuing himself from drowning, sputtering out at the same time the most diabolical noises--curses, no doubt, for he had been heard to swear. But as he skated alone he swam alone, appearing and disappearing at the swimming-place silently, with never a salutation to any one. And he was as skillful a fisher as he was a swimmer. No one knew much about him. He lived with his mother in a little cabin up among the hills, that had about it scant patches of potatoes and corn and beans, a garden fenced in by stumproots, as ill-cared for as the shanty. Where they came from no one knew. How they lived was a matter of conjecture, though the mother gathered herbs and berries and bartered them at the village store, and Murad occasionally took a hand in some neighbor's hay-field, or got a job of chopping wood in the winter. The mother was old and small and withered, and they said evil-eyed. Probably she was no more evil-eyed than any old woman who had such a hard struggle for existence as she had. An old widow with an only son who looked like a Spaniard and acted like an imp! Here was another sort of exotic in the New England life. Celia had been brought to Rivervale by her mother about a year before this time, and the two occupied a neat little cottage in the village, distinguished only by its neatness and a plot of syringas, and pinks, and marigolds, and roses, and bachelor's-buttons, and boxes of the tough little exotics, called “hen-and-chickens,” in the door-yard, and a vigorous fragrant honeysuckle over the front porch. She only dimly remembered her father, who had been a merchant in a small way in the city, and dying left to his widow and only child a very moderate fortune. The girl showed early an active and ingenious mind, and an equal love for books and for having her own way; but she was delicate, and Mrs. Howard wisely judged that a few years in a country village would improve her health and broaden her view of life beyond that of cockney provincialism. For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement than strength of mind, and passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive little woman, she did not lack a certain true perception of values, due doubtless to the fact that she had been a New England girl, and, before her marriage and emigration to the great city, had passed her life among unexciting realities, and among people who had leisure to think out things in a slow way. But the girl's energy and self-confidence had no doubt been acquired from her father, who was cut off in mid-career of his struggle for place in the metropolis, or from some remote ancestor.