This Sunday the shore was in its most gracious mood, the landscape as if newly created. There was a light, luminous fog, which revealed just enough to excite the imagination, and refined every outline and softened every color. Mr. King and Irene left the carriage to follow the road, and wandered along the sea path. What softness and tenderness of color in the gray rocks, with the browns and reds of the vines and lichens! They went out on the iron fishing-stands, and looked down at the shallow water. The rocks under water took on the most exquisite shades--purple and malachite and brown; the barnacles clung to them; the long sea-weeds, in half a dozen varieties, some in vivid colors, swept over them, flowing with the restless tide, like the long locks of a drowned woman's hair. King, who had dabbled a little in natural history, took great delight in pointing out to Irene this varied and beautiful life of the sea; and the girl felt a new interest in science, for it was all pure science, and she opened her heart to it, not knowing that love can go in by the door of science as well as by any other opening. Was Irene really enraptured by the dear little barnacles and the exquisite sea-weeds? I have seen a girl all of a flutter with pleasure in a laboratory when a young chemist was showing her the retorts and the crooked tubes and the glass wool and the freaks of color which the alkalies played with the acids. God has made them so, these women, and let us be thankful for it. What a charm there was about everything! Occasionally the mist became so thin that a long line of coast and a great breadth of sea were visible, with the white sails drifting. “There's nothing like it,” said King--“there's nothing like this island. It seems as if the Creator had determined to show man, once for all, a landscape perfectly refined, you might almost say with the beauty of high-breeding, refined in outline, color, everything softened into loveliness, and yet touched with the wild quality of picturesqueness.” “It's just a dream at this moment,” murmured Irene. They were standing on a promontory of rock. “See those figures of people there through the mist--silhouettes only. And look at that vessel--there--no--it has gone.” As she was speaking, a sail-vessel began to loom up large in the mysterious haze. But was it not the ghost of a ship? For an instant it was coming, coming; it was distinct; and when it was plainly in sight it faded away, like a dissolving view, and was gone. The appearance was unreal. What made it more spectral was the bell on the reefs, swinging in its triangle, always sounding, and the momentary scream of the fog-whistle. It was like an enchanted coast. Regaining the carriage, they drove out to the end, Agassiz's Point, where, when the mist lifted, they saw the sea all round dotted with sails, the irregular coasts and islands with headlands and lighthouses, all the picture still, land and water in a summer swoon.