back to the house. That is all, and perhaps quite enough of such rambling nonsense as it is!" "Rambling nonsense?" Whatever the other members of the company may have thought, evidently Margaret Hayley did not so regard it as she leaned anxiously forward, the presence of others apparently forgotten, her eyes fascinated in a sort of strange wonder by something in the face of the speaker, while her mind seemed not less singularly under the control of the utterance itself. Five minutes afterwards the parody on a steamboat touched the little wharf again and the company disembarked. Five minutes after that secondary period they separated from the close communion into which they had been transiently thrown during the preceding half-hour, many of them never to meet again in the same familiarity of intercourse, and perhaps some of them, though as yet inmates of the same abode, never to see each other's faces again in life! Such are the meetings and the partings of summer travel and watering-place existence, to which the nameless rhymer no less truly than touchingly referred when he spoke of those friendships quickly made and as quickly broken: "----In hostels free to all commands Save penury's and pity's;-- "In common rooms, where all have right To tread with little heed or warning, And where the guests of overnight Are gone at early morning;-- "By tables where we sit at meat-- Sit, with our food almost untasted Because we find some vacant seat From which a friend has hasted;-- "In parlors where at eve we sit, Among the music and the dancing, And miss some lip of genial wit, Some bright eye kindly glancing. "--------the haunted chambers left, That almost choke us as we ponder, And leave _us_ quite as much bereft As dearer ties and fonder." CHAPTER XVI. CLOUD AND STORM AT THE PROFILE--SIGHTS AND SENSATIONS OF A RAINY-DAY RIDE TO THE CRAWFORD--HORACE TOWNSEND AND HALSTEAD ROWAN ONCE MORE TOGETHER--UNEXPECTED ARRIVALS--A CAVALCADE OF MISERABLES--AN ASCENT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON, WITH EQUESTRIANISM AND WAR-WHOOPS EXTRAORDINARY.