Bar Harbor was indeed an interesting society study.  Except in some of the cottages, it might be said that society was on a lark.  With all the manners of the world and the freemasonry of fashionable life, it had elected to be unconventional.  The young ladies liked to appear in nautical and lawn-tennis toilet, carried so far that one might refer to the “cut of their jib,” and their minds were not much given to any elaborate dressing for evening.  As to the young gentlemen, if there were any dress-coats on the island, they took pains not to display them, but delighted in appearing in the evening promenade, and even in the ballroom, in the nondescript suits that made them so conspicuous in the morning, the favorite being a dress of stripes, with striped jockey cap to match, that did not suggest the penitentiary uniform, because in state-prisons the stripes run round.  This neglige costume was adhered to even in the ballroom.  To be sure, the ballroom was little frequented, only an adventurous couple now and then gliding over the floor, and affording scant amusement to the throng gathered on the piazza and about the open windows.  Mrs. Montrose, a stately dame of the old school, whose standard was the court in the days of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, disapproved of this laxity, and when a couple of young fellows in striped array one evening whirled round the room together, with brier-wood pipes in their mouths, she was scandalized.  If the young ladies shared her sentiments they made no resolute protests, remembering perhaps the scarcity of young men elsewhere, and thinking that it is better to be loved by a lawn-tennis suit than not to be loved at all.  The daughters of Mrs. Montrose thought they should draw the line on the brier-wood pipe.

Dancing, however, is not the leading occupation at Bar Harbor, it is rather neglected.  A cynic said that the chief occupation was to wait at the “fishpond” for new arrivals—­the young ladies angling while their mothers and chaperons—­how shall we say it to complete the figure?—­held the bait.  It is true that they did talk in fisherman’s lingo about this, asked each other if they had a nibble or a bite, or boasted that they had hauled one in, or complained that it was a poor day for fishing.  But this was all chaff, born of youthful spirits and the air of the place.  If the young men took airs upon themselves under the impression they were in much demand, they might have had their combs cut if they had heard how they were weighed and dissected and imitated, and taken off as to their peculiarities, and known, most of them, by sobriquets characteristic of their appearance or pretentions.  There was one young man from the West, who would have been flattered with the appellation of “dude,” so attractive in the fit of his clothes, the manner in which he walked and used his cane and his eyeglass, that Mr. King wanted very much to get him and bring him away in a cage.  He had no doubt that he was a favorite with every circle and wanted in every group, and the young ladies did seem to get a great deal of entertainment out of him.  He was not like the young man in the Scriptures except that he was credited with having great possessions.