By his presence of mind she was saved as by a miracle. When she was removed to her lodgings, and able to converse, she asked me who it was that had rescued her. "Mr. Kittredge," I said. "The same I met on the beach?" "The same." She smiled in a faint, half-dreaming way, and turned away her face. She thought I did not know her secret. I am not going to let my hero take advantage of the first emotion of gratitude after a service, to mention his wishes in, as many story-tellers do. I consider it a mean advantage; besides Mr. Kittredge did not do it. In fact, he absented himself for a week. When he returned, I introduced him formally to Mrs. Sancy, and we three walked together down to the beach, and seated ourselves on a white old cottonwood that had floated out of the Columbia river, and been cast by the high tides of winter above the shelving sands. We were rather a silent party for a few minutes. In his abstraction, Mr. Kittredge reached down and traced a name in the sand with the point of my parasol stick--TERESA. Then, seeing the letters staring at him, he looked up at her, and said, "I could not brush them out if I would. Time has failed to do that." Her gaze wandered away, out to sea, up towards the Capes, down toward the Head; and a delicate color grew upon her cheek. "It has scarcely changed in fifteen years," she said. "I did not count on finding all things the same." With that I made a pretense of leaving them, to seek shells along the beach; for I knew that fate could no longer be averted. When I returned she was aware that I possessed the secret of both, and she smiled upon me a recognition of my right to be pleased with what I saw; what I beheld seeming the prelude to a happy marriage. That night I wrote in my diary, after some comments on my relations with Mr. Kittredge: "It is best to be off with the old love, Before you are on with the new." AN OLD FOOL. PART I. The annual rain-fall on the lower Columbia River is upward of eighty inches--often almost ninety; and the greater amount of this fall is during the winter months, from November to March, generally the least intermittent in December. I mention this climatic fact, the better to be understood in attempting to describe a certain December afternoon in the year 186-.