So this was Joppa, a place mighty in its own conceit, and high too in the estimate of others, to whom it was becoming known as the gayest and the prettiest of all dear little summer resorts; and thither strangers were beginning to flock in considerable numbers each year, made warmly welcome by the Joppites as an occasion for breaking out into an unending round of parties and picnics and dinners and lunches and teas, and even breakfasts when there was not room to crowd in any thing else.  The summer was one continual whirl from beginning to end.  There were visitors and visits; there was giving and receiving; there were flirtations and rumors of flirtations; there was everything the human heart could desire in the way of friendly hospitality and liveliest entertainment.  Saratoga might be well enough, and Newport would do in its way; but for solid perfection, said the Joppites, there was no place in the world quite like Joppa.

But unknown to itself, Joppa nursed one apostate in its midst, one unavowed but benighted little heretic, who so far from sharing these sentiments and offering up nightly thanksgiving that despite her great unworthiness she had been suffered to be born in Joppa, made it one of her most fervent and reiterated petitions that she might not always have to live there; that some time, if she were very good and very patient, it might be granted her to go.  She was so weary of it all:  of the busy idleness and the idle business, of the unthinking gayety and the gay thoughtlessness, and of the nothingness that made up its all.  She wanted, she did not exactly know what, only something different; and to go, she did not quite know where, only somewhere else.  But she had been born in Joppa, (quite without her permission,) and in Joppa she had lived for all of twenty-four healthful, tranquil, uneventful years, spending semi-occasional winters in New York, and, unlike all other Joppites, returning always more and more discontented with her native place.  Who could ever have expected such treason in the heart of dear little Phebe Lane?  Of course it would not have mattered much had it been suspected, since it was only Phebe Lane after all who entertained it,—­little Phebe Lane, whose ancestors, though good and well-born enough, did not hail from Morocco, and who lived, not in the West End proper, but only on the borders of it, in a street where one could not get so much as a side peep at the lake.  It was not a pretty house either where she lived.  It was square and clumsy and without any originality, and, moreover, faced plump on the street, so that one could look right into its parlor and sitting-room windows as one strolled along the wooden sidewalks.  And people were in the habit of looking in that way a good deal.  Nothing was ever going on in there that could not bear this sudden outside inspection, and it was the shortest way to call Phebe when she was wanted for any thing of a sudden,—­to bear a fourth hand at whist, or to stone raisins for Mrs.