That’s my colored marble; I was playing with it. [To Whetstone and Bluegrass.] Make him give it back to me, won’t you? It has a nick and the first letter of my name on it.
Scythe [surprisedly, re-examining it].
Why, boy, I cannot afford an unscientific controversy with you or your mother. Alas! take it. [Giving marble to the Boy.] And when again you play with it, remember— [Exit Boy, hastily.] Thus do my hopes of a pre-Adamite museum wither. It was a unique specimen of the circular group of crystallization dreamed of by science, but hitherto undiscovered. Major, here comes your seamaid.
Enter Catharine in disguise, with a basket of fish.
Catharine.
Good afternoon, gentlemen landsmen! I have fish in my basket; will you buy? I have your fortunes in my keeping; will you have them?
Bluegrass.
I salute you, by the sea, as a near relative in the fields of romance to the milking-maid of our inland pastures.
Catharine.
I take you to be landsmen, and, therefore, good fresh men. I am a fortune-teller with varied fortunes. Each summer, for a month, to these shores I come to renew and perfect the spirit’s vision, which, even like natural sight, is cleared by good free air and sunshine; and as men with glasses have seen ten hundred living things upon a pin’s point, so I, with spiritual lenses, have seen the past, present, and future, each in proper order, marshalled upon a space no larger than a spectacle glass.