A
well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without
a cap,--pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely
hinted,--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her
eye on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her.--
* * * * *
My record is a blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have
contrived to make out the person and the story of our young lady,
who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a
boarding-house romance before a year is out. It is very curious that
she should prove connected with a person many of us have heard of.
Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck with the
circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly striking each
other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of miles apart pass
close to each other in the naked breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes
even touch, in the dark, with a crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a
cry of startled sleepers,--a cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams,
as the wife of some Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes
with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy
slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a widow.
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