The sea lay like an unbroken mirror all around the pine-girt, lonely shores of Orr's Island. Tall, kingly spruces wore their regal crowns of cones high in air, sparkling with diamonds of clear exuded gum; vast old hemlocks of primeval growth while feathery larches, turned to brilliant gold by autumn frosts, lighted up the darker shadows of the evergreens. It was one of those hazy, calm, dissolving days of Indian summer, when everything is so quiet that the faintest kiss of the wave on the beach can be heard, and white clouds seem to faint into the blue of the sky, and soft swathing bands of violet vapor make all earth look dreamy, and give to the sharp, clear-cut outlines of the northern landscape all those mysteries of light and shade which impart such tenderness to Italian scenery. The funeral was over, -the tread of many feet, bearing the heavy burden of two broken lives, had been to the lonely graveyard, and had come again, -each footstep lighter and more unconstrained as each one went his way from the great old tragedy of Death to the common cheerful life. The solemn black clock stood swaying with its eternal "tick-tock, tick-cock," in the kitchen of the brown house on Orr's Island. There was there that sense of a stillness that can be left, -such as settles down on a dwelling when any of its inmates have passed though its doors for the last time, to go whence they shall not return. The best room was shut up and darkened, with only so much light as could fall through a little heart-shaped hole in the window-shutter, -for except on solemn visits, or prayer-meeting or weddings, or funerals, that room formed no part of the daily family scenery. The kitchen was clean and ample, with a great open fireplace and wide stone hearth, and oven on one side, and rows of old-fashioned splint-bottomed chairs against the wall. A table scoured no snowy whiteness, and a little work-stand whereon lay the Bible, the Missionary Herald, and the Weekly Christian Mirror, before named, formed the principal furniture. One feature, however, must not be forgotten, -a great sea-chest, which had been the companion of Zephaniah through all the countries of the earth. Old, and battered, and unsightly it looked, yet report said that there was good store within of that which men for the most part respect more than anything else; and, indeed, it proved often when a deed of grace was to be done -when a woman was suddenly made a widow in a coast gale, or a fishing -smack was run down in the fogs off the banks, leaving in some neighboring cottage a family of orphans, -in all such cases, the opening of this sea-chest was an event of good omen to the bereaved; for Zephaniah had a large heart and a large hand, and was apt to take it out full of silver dollars when once it went in. So the ark of the covenant could not have been looked on with more reverence than the neighbors usually showed to Captain Pennel's sea-chest.