"No,--I thought you were." "I wanted to ask you," said Mara, "did Moses ever say anything to you about me?--you know I told you how much he said about you." "Yes; he asked me once if you were engaged to Mr. Adams." "And what did you tell him?" said Mara, with increasing interest. "Well, I only plagued him. I sometimes made him think you were, and sometimes that you were not; and then again, that there was a deep mystery in hand. But I praised and glorified Mr. Adams, and told him what a splendid match it would be, and put on any little bits of embroidery here and there that I could lay hands on. I used to make him sulky and gloomy for a whole evening sometimes. In that way it was one of the best weapons I had." "Sally, what does make you love to tease people so?" said Mara. "Why, you know the hymn says,-- 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite, For God hath made them so; Let bears and lions growl and fight, For 'tis their nature too.' That's all the account I can give of it." "But," said Mara, "I never can rest easy a moment when I see I am making a person uncomfortable." "Well, I don't tease anybody but the men. I don't tease father or mother or you,--but men are fair game; they are such thumby, blundering creatures, and we can confuse them so." "Take care, Sally, it's playing with edge tools; you may lose your heart some day in this kind of game." "Never you fear," said Sally; "but aren't you sleepy?--let's go to sleep." Both girls turned their faces resolutely in opposite directions, and remained for an hour with their large eyes looking out into the moonlit chamber, like the fixed stars over Harpswell Bay. At last sleep drew softly down the fringy curtains. CHAPTER XXX THE LAUNCH OF THE ARIEL In the plain, simple regions we are describing,--where the sea is the great avenue of active life, and the pine forests are the great source of wealth,--ship-building is an engrossing interest, and there is no fête that calls forth the community like the launching of a vessel. And no wonder; for what is there belonging to this workaday world of ours that has such a never-failing fund of poetry and grace as a ship? A ship is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it: its white wings touch the regions of the unknown and the imaginative; they seem to us full of the odors of quaint, strange, foreign shores, where life, we fondly dream, moves in brighter currents than the muddy, tranquil tides of every day.