noon
The little Pearl of Orr 's Island had wandered many an hour gathering bouquets of all these , to fill the brown house with sweetness when her grandfather and Moses should come in from work . The love of flowers seemed to be one of her earliest characteristics , and the young spring flowers of New England , in their airy delicacy and fragility , were much like herself ; and so strong seemed the affinity between them , that not only Mrs. Pennel 's best India china vases on the keeping-room mantel were filled , but here stood a tumbler of scarlet rock columbine , and there a bowl of blue and white violets , and in another place a saucer of shell-tinted crowfoot , blue liverwort , and white anemone , so that Zephaniah Pennel was wont to say there was n't a drink of water to be got , for Mara 's flowers ; but he always said it with a smile that made his weather-beaten , hard features look like a rock lit up by a sunbeam . Little Mara was the pearl of the old seaman 's life , every finer particle of his nature came out in her concentrated and polished , and he often wondered at a creature so ethereal belonging to him -- as if down on some shaggy sea-green rock an old pearl oyster should muse and marvel on the strange silvery mystery of beauty that was growing in the silence of his heart . But May has passed ; the arbutus and the Linnea are gone from the woods , and the pine tips have grown into young shoots , which wilt at noon under a direct reflection from sun and sea , and the blue sky has that metallic clearness and brilliancy which distinguishes those regions , and the planting is at last over , and this very morning Moses is to set off in the Brilliant for his first voyage to the Banks . Glorious knight he ! the world all before him , and the blood of ten years racing and throbbing in his veins as he talks knowingly of hooks , and sinkers , and bait , and lines , and wears proudly the red flannel shirt which Mara had just finished for him . `` How I do wish I were going with you ! ''