with the bare stone walls and the bare wooden floor, and the three

patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole adornment--poor man's

patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and

Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room,

like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so

neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous

additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger. In view of

the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust;

but it burned high, at the first moment, in my heart.

'Mary, girl,' said I, 'this is the place I had learned to call my home,

and I do not know it.'

'It is my home by nature, not by the learning,' she replied; 'the place I

was born and the place I'm like to die in; and I neither like these

changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them. I would

have liked better, under God's pleasure, they had gone down into the sea,

and the Merry Men were dancing on them now.'

Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only trait that she shared

with her father; but the tone with which she uttered these words was even

graver than of custom.

'Ay,' said I, 'I feared it came by wreck, and that's by death; yet when

my father died, I took his goods without remorse.'

'Your father died a clean strae death, as the folk say,' said Mary.

'True,' I returned; 'and a wreck is like a judgment. What was she

called?'

'They ca'd her the _Christ-Anna_,' said a voice behind me; and, turning

round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.

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