ever we leave Massachusetts-that we are as cold as one and as hard as the other." "Dear me! no," said Nancy. "We're cool and firm, not cold and hard. How ever, you must remember, if you make such comparisons, that granite is not always so hard, either. Don't you know it was melted, to begin with ?-all whitehot, flowing out of the centre of the earth ?" "Some geologists think it was not," said Bessy. However, I know, dear Anastasia, that you occasionally turn white-hot, and I'm ready to believe that the granite does. It also, I hear, explodes sometimes in case of fire." "Yes," said Anastasia, looking into her note-book. "That's because of the unequal expansion of the parts. You're telling me all the things I meant to tell you. I've been looking them up in the encyclopædia, or rather in several different encyclopædias. Did you know, Bessy, that Mont Blanc was of granite, and the Aiguilles, which you admire so much?" "There isn't anything of that sort at Rockport, is there?" said Bessy. "The country hereabouts doesn't promise it." "No. I suppose these are the low, rounded hills, scantily covered with vegetation, which the Britannica tells about. How charming the Manchester shore is! and how the people who own all these pretty houses must hate to leave their perches on the rocks above the sea! Bessy, you can't share all my emotions here, because you have never sketched in Manchester and Magnolia and Gloucester. Magnolia Point used to be, once upon a time, the nearest approach to a French sketching town of which this shore could boast. Our easels by the road-side blew over as often as if we had been in Normandy, and to my mind the sea was much bluer and the sun brighter. I never can enter the wood by the little station without remembering the kind friends, the clever set, who used to sit on the platform here in October, with bundles of canvas, waiting regretfully for the Boston train. I used to think we had American Art herself in some of those packages." "Cheer up, my dear impressionist, or naturalist, if that's what you call your self," says Bessy; "remember the Gloucester etchers and sketchers, and the drawings in your bag. There's plenty of good summer work done on our cape still, and before you know it some of you will be able to paint Captain John Smith himself discovering it, and naming it, as we all know he did, after the beautiful Princess Tragabigzanda." They had not ended their idle talk when their journey ended in the Rockport station. They took possession of the ladies' room, which Anastasia, who had seen many, pronounced a very good one. They ate their lunch, drank their coffee, after bringing it to a tolerably lukewarm temperature upon the stove, and, much heartened and refreshed, they started on their walk to Pigeon Cove, leaving behind them Rockport village, picturesque above the water. It was not too cold a day for them to enjoy the keen air, the hard road, and the constantly changing views of the rock and sea at their right, and of the little weatherstained houses tightly shut against the frost, with here and there boats hauled up into their brown gardens. But I think they had most pleasure in feeling that they were in a country strange to them both, and that not one of the people they met knew who they were. For neither of these young ladies was insensible to the charm possessed by an unknown high-road -a charm which George Sand describes better than any one else. If the two friends had been of gypsy family, they would never have left the family profession; and it is to be supposed that it was this turn of mind which two hundred years ago had led their ancestors over the rough path of the western sea. They came before long to the works of the Rockport Company, with its vessels lying at the dock, its long breakwater of granite extending out into the sea, and its precipitous quarry on the landward side of the road, its irregular blocks recalling to Bessy the drawing she had supposed to represent a Pyramid. Five teams of oxen were standing about, and Anastasia informed her friend that she expected to find just such a team standing under a beautiful arch hereabouts-she had a drawing of it in her bag. No such arch, however, was to be seen. The travellers made some inquiries at the office of the company, and were treated with a kindness and attention which they will not soon forget. They were taken into the depths of the quarry, where the dark rocks looked high and awful, with here and there cataracts of thick white icicles making them look darker. Here the steam-drill was at work, which makes in a day a hole twenty to thirty feet deep and two inches in diameter, and sometimes enables the quarrymen to loosen at one blast a mass of from five hundred to a thousand tons of granite. This great blast was the preliminary to the hand drilling, which they could see going on busily in the quarry. Anastasia stared about her, taking mental notes of the relations of light and shade, and trying to fix in her mind the action of the workmen. Bessy was not so cool. Something oppressed her here, and she quite lost the happy tranquillity which she had felt five minutes before, in the straggling country road among the peaceful winter gardens. She felt as if in those few minutes she had come out of the happy New England which she knew and loved-a little country which with all its faults is civilized and human enough into the midst of some great workshop of nature outside human ways and human knowledge. Here were the dark rocks And here, at work among them, was a magical instrument, a giant made prisoner, who was fighting the rocks with another natural force even stronger than theirs. And if the workmen she saw were human beings, which her foolish fancy disposed her to doubt, was it human work which they were doing, the ancient healthful business for which Adam was set in the garden? "I don't know what you mean in the least," said Anastasia, "but I have always heard that what we were put here for was to subdue the earth. There are different ways, no doubt; and it's possible that you and I shouldn't like managing a drill. But these people are subduing the earth more than either of us is likely to do. To me there is something inspiring in the atmosphere of hard work; it helps me about my own business; and many's the laboring-man I have envied, who I knew was gaining his bread, when I had not the skill to gain mine." "It's all very well for you to talk," was Bessy's feminine answer. "You don't have to drill rocks yourself. I don't either. And it doesn't seem fair or right that other people should have to bend their backs and smash their hands over this rough business so that we can have the fine granite buildings we're so proud of." "I can't pretend to answer your hard questions," said Nancy; "but this I will say, that this business has improved since Christianity came, like most other things. Do you know how the old Egyptians used to transport their great blocks of stone? They used oxen sometimes, just as the Rockport company do, but sometimes they used men. There are a hundred and seventy-two of them in one picture dragging an enormous statue. Imagine bringing a block down in that way from Assouan to Thebes, a hundred and thirty miles! That isn't a satisfactory way to use a man, it seems to me. I think it's better to make steam and oxen do the heavy work, as they are doing here, and as they are beginning to do all the world over. The granite comes down to the shore on a steam railway at Bay View, I'm told." Their kind guide told them that the blocks of stone which the oxen hauled down from the Rockport quarry were either sent by rail from the Rockport station or shipped from the company's pier in their five vessels. "Some of them are lying on the dock now," he said, and turned away from the cliffs to point seaward. Whereupon our sight-seers turned too, and beheld the arch for which they had been looking, supporting the road they had just now followed, and framing a charming picture of tall masts and blue sea, with a fortunately placed team of oxen for its foreground. Anastasia now sat down on a rock and began to sketch, while Bessy asked questions. Some of the granite, she was told, was going as far as New Orleans, some of it to the nearer cities. Had she ever noticed the differences which exist in the paving-stones which are used in different places? The Philadelphians, it seems, insist upon having especially long and fair stones; the New-Yorkers are not so exacting, though they share the same general ideas; and the Bostonians are discontented with any paving-stone which is not small and square, and cut with great accuracy. Much more Bessy heard, and many facts more important than these, about much larger blocks of stone, but the individuality of paving-stones was a new idea to her, and remained firmly fixed in her memory. She remembered having seen in a Mississippi River town all the paving-stones of the lower levee taken up |