The boat lingered for the further disembarkation of a number of horses and carriages, with a piano and a cow.  There was a farmer’s lodge at the landing, and over the rocks and amid the trees the picturesque roof of the villa of the sole proprietor of the island appeared, and gave a feudal aspect to the domain.  The sweet grass affords good picking for sheep, and besides the sheep the owner raises deer, which are destined to be chased and shot in the autumn.

The artist noted that there were several distinct types of women on board, besides the common, straight-waisted, flat-chested variety.  One girl who was alone, with a city air, a neat, firm figure, in a traveling suit of elegant simplicity, was fond of taking attitudes about the rails, and watching the effect produced on the spectators.  There was a blue-eyed, sharp-faced, rather loose-jointed young girl, who had the manner of being familiar with the boat, and talked readily and freely with anybody, keeping an eye occasionally on her sister of eight years, a child with a serious little face in a poke-bonnet, who used the language of a young lady of sixteen, and seemed also abundantly able to take care of herself.  What this mite of a child wants of all things, she confesses, is a pug-faced dog.  Presently she sees one come on board in the arms of a young lady at Wood’s Holl.  “No,” she says, “I won’t ask her for it; the lady wouldn’t give it to me, and I wouldn’t waste my breath;” but she draws near to the dog, and regards it with rapt attention.  The owner of the dog is a very pretty black-eyed girl with banged hair, who prattles about herself and her dog with perfect freedom.  She is staying at Cottage City, lives at Worcester, has been up to Boston to meet and bring down her dog, without which she couldn’t live another minute.  “Perhaps,” she says, “you know Dr. Ridgerton, in Worcester; he’s my brother.  Don’t you know him?  He’s a chiropodist.”

These girls are all types of the skating-rink—­an institution which is beginning to express itself in American manners.

The band was playing on the pier when the steamer landed at Cottage City (or Oak Bluff, as it was formerly called), and the pier and the gallery leading to it were crowded with spectators, mostly women a pleasing mingling of the skating-rink and sewing-circle varieties—­and gayety was apparently about setting in with the dusk.  The rink and the, ground opposite the hotel were in full tilt.  After supper King and Forbes took a cursory view of this strange encampment, walking through the streets of fantastic tiny cottages among the scrub oaks, and saw something of family life in the painted little boxes, whose wide-open front doors gave to view the whole domestic economy, including the bed, centre-table, and melodeon.  They strolled also on the elevated plank promenade by the beach, encountering now and then a couple enjoying the lovely night.  Music abounded.  The circus-pumping strains burst out of the rink, calling to a gay and