Page:Letters of Life.djvu/325

Rh I had subsequently an opportunity, during a visit at their country seat on Staten Island, to become acquainted with the charming scenery of that region, which occasionally exhibits the wildness and grandeur that mark the cliffs of the Isle of Wight, and then, with sudden contrast, softens into the luxuriance of the vale of Tempe. We also explored the watering-places of Long Island, from Brooklyn to Montauk, from the quiet shades of Greenport to the rock-bound coast of Southampton, battling with unsubdued though not unscathed heroism the terrific surges of the southern Atlantic.

I have been always a devotee of Ocean. In my earliest days I was a stranger to it, but from the time I first looked upon its face its sublimity enchanted and subdued me. I had been introduced by my husband to the wonderfully excavated rocks of Nahant, where the storm-wrought billows sport and reverberate; and the luxuriant scenery of Newport, whose beautiful beaches carpet themselves with the softest, whitest sand for the foot of aristocracy.

We followed the custom of many of the inland dwellers, to resort, during warm weather, to the sea for invigoration. There was a rocky peninsula on the shore of Connecticut, bearing the name of Sachem's Head, from a tragedy once enacted there of decapitating, upon one of its stony scaffolds, a chieftain of our poor forest tribes. This retreat we claimed almost