Captain Belgrave.
"My eyes make picture when they are shut."
In one of those villages peculiar to our Eastern coast, whose long lines of pepper-and-salt stone-fences indicate laborious if not profitable farming, and the saline breath of the ocean has the effect of making fruit-trees more picturesque than productive, in a stone chunk of a house, whose aspect is quite as interesting to the geologist as to the architect, lives Captain Belgrave.
The Captain, as he says himself, "is American clean through, on the father's side, up to Plymouth Rock, and knows little, and cares less, of what is beyond that." To hear him talk, you would suppose Adam and Eve had landed there from the May-Flower, and the Garden of Eden was located within rifle distance of that celebrated land-mark. His genealogical table, however, stands upon unequal legs; for, on his mother's side he is part German and part Irishman. I mention this for the benefit of those who believe that certain qualities in men are hereditary. Of course it will be easy for them to assign those of Captain Belgrave to their proper source.
The house is square, and not remarkable except for its stone turret on one corner. This, rising from the ground some forty feet, embroidered with ivy, and pierced with arrow-slits, has rather a feudal look. It stands in a by-lane, apart from the congregated village. On the right side of the road is a plashy spring, somewhat redolent of mint in the summer. Opposite to this, in a clump of
