Emma Carried Off by the Sea-King.
DEEP-SEA VIOLETS.
IN a modest hut upon the sea-shore, half-hidden from sight by an enormous bank of drifted sand, lived a fisherman and his wife, with their twin-children, John and Emma. Theirs was a hard life, and full of privations; but the husband and wife loved each other tenderly and did everything they could to provide for the little ones, who grew up, spite of their poverty, tall and beautiful, and happy as the day was long. Emma and John had a thousand pleasures that town-bred children covet. They chased each other continually up and down the sandy beach, hard as marble and glittering like silver in the beautiful patterns traced on it by the tide. They ran barefoot into the surf, defying the mad onslaught of the merry breakers, and dived fearlessly beneath the crested arch of green waters to seize a bit of floating seaweed. They discovered endless treasures in the rock-pools along the beach, and built with them pretty grottoes, and mysterious caves, that none but themselves knew where to find. Often their father would take them out in the fishing-boat; for John had learned to manage the sail and the nets almost as well as the fisherman himself. The two children thought it was grand to feel the little boat answer to the wind, as a horse answers to voice or whip. They liked to bound forward across the great green billows, and to see the spray dash over them like a shower of jewels. They would help their father to set his nets or lines, and wait patiently till it was time to haul in the big shining fish that sometimes lined the bottom of the boat, whiling away the hours by munching bits of brown bread that served for lunch, and by telling each other fanciful stories of the sea.
The ocean did not always smile upon them, for there were days of heavy fog, of raw east wind, when the beautiful water ceased to sparkle, while the surf boomed as if in warning of danger or sorrow to come. Then the children would run inside the cottage, and pile on drift-wood till the fire burnt cheerily. This was their time for taking down from the mantel-shelf their stores of shells, corals, and other sea-wonders. John and Emma had polished these shells until they shone beautifully, and some tiny disks of orange and gold were strung in long garlands, to loop around the brown walls and above the little looking-glass. Their mother kept the inside of the cottage as neat as a ship's cabin, which, in truth, it much resembled, the children's beds being nothing more than broad shelves in a cupboard, with doors to close by day; while every corner of the tidy place was made to do duty for some household implement, tucked away in the oddest fashion, until it should be needed.
So the days passed on until the twins were about sixteen years old, John a fine manly fellow, looking much older, and Emma a slender slip of a girl, with floating locks of purest gold, and a voice in singing like a carol of birds in a Maybush. Oftentimes when her father was steering his boat homeward, after a day of toil, he would hear the piercing strain of Emma's song come floating over the water from the rock where she stood against the western sky, awaiting him. And he rightly thought this the sweetest sound he was likely to hear before the angels should sing for him in Paradise!
One day the fisherman did not come home. A storm arose, and all that evening the wind howled madly above the beating of the angry surf. The sky was pitch-black, and the wife and children walked the shore in silent fear. When darkness fell, they lighted a huge bonfire upon the rocks, and John, begging his mother and Emma to go home to rest, stayed feeding the flames with drift-wood, till morning broke over the sullen waste of waters. Still no sign of his father, and at midday the familiar boat drifted ashore, bottom upward. Then great sorrow darkened this happy little home; and nevermore the sea gave up her dead.