Market Square, in that Northern city to which Colonel Lauriston had brought his daughter for her year of polish and cultural finish was a busy mart on this delightful August morning when they arrived. The change from the stifling heat of the South to the entrancingly cooling blue New England sky and sunshine had already worked additional wonders in the cheeks and eyes of this flower of the Carolinas. The former were delicately pink tinted and the latter wider opened at the sights unfolding to her in this new world; sights new to her but so common to this staid old University city that they passed unnoted and ignored.
To Lida, however, whose horizon up to this time had been bound by vast fields of growing cotton, corn and wheat, broken here and there by forests of oak and tall pines this was a veritable fairy land from which she could see the wide blue bay with ships coming and going, tugs busily puffing away with their monstrous loads at their sides or trailing along behind, the tugs seeming like and reminding her of ants about her own home who tackled and carted away loads many times larger than their seemingly frail bodies and who, for their strength had always been a source of wonder and marvel to the girl. She was also reminded, as she watched the small tugs with their buffers of plaited rope at their bows steam up to some giant craft, of pictures of buffalos she had seen, with bushily lowered heads charging across the plains.
