The Bar-Harborers made a mistake in killing—­if they did kill—­the stranger who arrived at this resort from the mainland, and said it would be an excellent sea-and-mountain place if there were any mountains or any sea in sight.  Instead, if they had taken him in a row-boat and pulled him out through the islands, far enough, he would have had a glimpse of the ocean, and if then he had been taken by the cog-railway seventeen hundred feet to the top of Green Mountain, he would not only have found himself on firm, rising ground, but he would have been obliged to confess that, with his feet upon a solid mountain of granite, he saw innumerable islands and, at a distance, a considerable quantity of ocean.  He would have repented his hasty speech.  In two days he would have been a partisan of the place, and in a week he would have been an owner of real estate there.

There is undeniably a public opinion in Bar Harbor in favor of it, and the visitor would better coincide with it.  He is anxiously asked at every turn how he likes it, and if he does not like it he is an object of compassion.  Countless numbers of people who do not own a foot of land there are devotees of the place.  Any number of certificates to its qualities could be obtained, as to a patent medicine, and they would all read pretty much alike, after the well-known formula:  “The first bottle I took did, me no good, after the second I was worse, after the third I improved, after the twelfth I walked fifty miles in one day; and now I never do without it, I take never less than fifty bottles a year.”  So it would be:  “At first I felt just as you do, shut-in place, foggy, stayed only two days.  Only came back again to accompany friends, stayed a week, foggy, didn’t like it.  Can’t tell how I happened to come back again, stayed a month, and I tell you, there is no place like it in America.  Spend all my summers here.”

The genesis of Bar Harbor is curious and instructive.  For many years, like other settlements on Mount Desert Island; it had been frequented by people who have more fondness for nature than they have money, and who were willing to put up with wretched accommodations, and enjoyed a mild sort of “roughing it.”  But some society people in New York, who have the reputation of setting the mode, chanced to go there; they declared in favor of it; and instantly, by an occult law which governs fashionable life, Bar Harbor became the fashion.  Everybody could see its preeminent attractions.  The word was passed along by the Boudoir Telephone from Boston to New Orleans, and soon it was a matter of necessity for a debutante, or a woman of fashion, or a man of the world, or a blase boy, to show themselves there during the season.  It became the scene of summer romances; the student of manners went there to study the “American girl.”  The notion spread that it was the finest sanitarium on the continent for flirtations; and as trade is said to follow the flag, so in this case real-estate speculation rioted in the wake of beauty and fashion.