blend with the serene sky, Mrs. Mansfield said, "Lizzie, I wonder that in the enumeration of the beautiful objects of which heaven consists, the inspired writer should exclude the most beautiful of all. In "the holy city," "the New-Jerusalem," he tells us, "there shall be no more sea." Rev. xxi, 1, 2.

"Ah, Mary," answered Aunt Lizzie, "had you seen it as rough and terrible as I did last year at Cape May, you would not wonder that so wild and angry an element should be excluded from the land where "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither any more pain." Rev. xxi, 4.

"The land in which there will be no painful partings from those we love," added Linda's mother, "and of which the old poet so sweetly sings:

66

'Thy gardens and thy goodly walks

Continually are green;

Where grow such sweet and pleasant flowers
As nowhere else are seen."

.

Just then the girls, warm and tired, returned with their baskets filled with the treasures of the deep. Carrie was a little annoyed to find her dress somewhat soiled by her ramble through the sand, while Linda laughingly displayed her draggled skirts. Her mother wished she would show more sensibility upon the subject, for she knew that she was careless to a fault about out

ward things. Their mothers admired the shells which the girls had collected, and which they now spread out before them. They knew they had been the habitation of living creatures; and were framed for their reception by the gracious

Father, who had created "things creeping innumerable, both small and great;" and whose eye beholds "whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea." Psalm viii, 8.

The girls had also gathered a quantity of sea-weed. One specimen sends out flat sprays like branches of trees. From this circumstance it has been called "the oak of the sea." It is covered with dark knobs, which Linda thought she could string for a natural bracelet.

"But this is still prettier," said Carrie, holding in her hand a branch of what naturalists call laminaria. "Look at it, mother, with its puckered-up frill. Do you not think that Sir Walter Raleigh and others, in Queen Elizabeth's day took the idea of their ruffs from this specimen of sea-weed?"

Her mother thought it not improbable. She said that artists had always found their most beautiful models in nature. Mrs. Mansfield remarked that a writer of the present day said, that if he were rich enough to have a dinner service of silver, it should be modeled after a vegetable that bears the vulgar name of squash at the north, and the prettier one of cimblin at the south.

Among their collection were a few frail and gauzy mosses, which they laid aside, intending, if possible, to preserve them. Linda had seen the Newport mosses dried so that they retained their vivid and delicate coloring; and she had learned the process by which this is accomplished. Then they spoke of Whittier's beautiful lines on sea mosses. calls them

He

"Ocean flowers,

Born where the golden drift

Of the slant sunshine falls

Down the green tremulous walls

Of water, to the cool, still, coral bowers,

Where, under rainbows of perpetual showers,

God's garden of the deep,

His patient angels keep."

They returned to the Pavilion just in time to get ready for tea.