The party indulged this feeling when they landed, still early, at the Newport wharf, and decided to walk through the old town up to the hotel, perfectly well aware that after this no money would hire them to leave their beds and enjoy this novel sensation at such an hour.  They had the street to themselves, and the promenade was one of discovery, and had much the interest of a landing in a foreign city.

“It is so English,” said the artist.

“It is so colonial,” said Mr. King, “though I’ve no doubt that any one of the sleeping occupants of these houses would be wide-awake instantly, and come out and ask you to breakfast, if they heard you say it is so English.”

“If they were not restrained,” Marion suggested, “by the feeling that that would not be English.  How fine the shade trees, and what brilliant banks of flowers!”

“And such lawns!  We cannot make this turf in Virginia,” was the reflection of Mr. De Long.

“Well, colonial if you like,” the artist replied to Mr. King.  “What is best is in the colonial style; but you notice that all the new houses are built to look old, and that they have had Queen Anne pretty bad, though the colors are good.”

“That’s the way with some towns.  Queen Anne seems to strike them all of a sudden, and become epidemic.  The only way to prevent it is to vaccinate, so to speak, with two or three houses, and wait; then it is not so likely to spread.”

Laughing and criticising and admiring, the party strolled along the shaded avenue to the Ocean House.  There were as yet no signs of life at the Club, or the Library, or the Casino; but the shops were getting open, and the richness and elegance of the goods displayed in the windows were the best evidence of the wealth and refinement of the expected customers —­culture and taste always show themselves in the shops of a town.  The long gray-brown front of the Casino, with its shingled sides and hooded balconies and galleries, added to the already strong foreign impression of the place.  But the artist was dissatisfied.  It was not at all his idea of Independence Day; it was like Sunday, and Sunday without any foreign gayety.  He had expected firing of cannon and ringing of bells—­there was not even a flag out anywhere; the celebration of the Fourth seemed to have shrunk into a dull and decorous avoidance of all excitement.  “Perhaps,” suggested Miss Lamont, “if the New-Englanders keep the Fourth of July like Sunday, they will by and by keep Sunday like the Fourth of July.  I hear it is the day for excursions on this coast.”