相思夢裏

"I took her up, and carried her with us, but she went back the next day."

"I see a black and white cat now," said Morton, "sitting on the spur root of yonder big white oak."

Rich called, "Puss, Puss." The cat came running, jumped into his lap, and put her fore paws on the collar of his vest, opening and shutting her claws, lifting her feet up, and putting them down in the same place, as cats do when they feel happy, rubbing the side of her face against his chin, and shoving her nose between his vest and shirt bosom, and purring all the time.

"She loves me," said Rich, "but she can't bear to leave the old place.—We must go, Mort. Our folks won't know what has become of us. I do wish you could have come up here to thanksgiving, as you were going to do when we were in college, and the place was ours. To see it now is very much like looking at persons after they are dead—the house all shut up, and nothing alive but a homesick, heart-broken cat."
CHAPTER XI. A STRIKING CONTRAST.
They walked along some time, each busied with the reflections excited by the previous conversation ..

"Mort," said Rich at length, "I'm sorry, but you'll have to sleep in a poor place to-night."

"We've slept together in David Johnson's barn, in Peleg Curtis's fish-house, on a pile of wet menhaden nets, and in the woods on Great French. Didn't we make a fire and warm the ledge on the north-west side of Hope Island, sweep off the coals, and lie down—in November too?"

"Yes; but when folks go to visit their friends, they expect a little better treatment than when camping out. Don't you remember when we used to walk down to Maquoit of an afternoon in June, just before anything had faded, and it was high water, how beautiful everything looked? the sharp line of color, where the points fringed with the bright green of the thatch parted the blue water, the bolder outlines of the gray[Pg 135] rocks, and the trees reflected in the calm water; and yet go down there two or three days after, at low tide, and there would be only a hundred acres of steaming flats, the shores and the grass on their edge strown with kelp, dead clams, horse-shoe crabs, dead limbs of trees, dead fish, chips, and rotten eel grass; no water to be seen nearer than a mile and a half!"