In a calm summer morning, such as our party of pilgrims chose for an excursion to the Pier, there is no prettier sail in the world than that out of the harbor, by Conanicut Island and Beaver-tail Light.  It is a holiday harbor, all these seas are holiday seas—­the yachts, the sail vessels, the puffing steamers, moving swiftly from one headland to another, or loafing about the blue, smiling sea, are all on pleasure bent.  The vagrant vessels that are idly watched from the rocks at the Pier may be coasters and freight schooners engaged seriously in trade, but they do not seem so.  They are a part of the picture, always to be seen slowly dipping along in the horizon, and the impression is that they are manoeuvred for show, arranged for picturesque effect, and that they are all taken in at night.

The visitors confessed when they landed that the Pier was a contrast to Newport.  The shore below the landing is a line of broken, ragged, slimy rocks, as if they had been dumped there for a riprap wall.  Fronting this unkempt shore is a line of barrack-like hotels, with a few cottages of the cheap sort.  At the end of this row of hotels is a fine granite Casino, spacious, solid, with wide verandas, and a tennis-court—­such a building as even Newport might envy.  Then come more hotels, a cluster of cheap shops, and a long line of bath-houses facing a lovely curving beach.  Bathing is the fashion at the Pier, and everybody goes to the beach at noon.  The spectators occupy chairs on the platform in front of the bath-houses, or sit under tents erected on the smooth sand.  At high noon the scene is very lively, and even picturesque, for the ladies here dress for bathing with an intention of pleasing.  It is generally supposed that the angels in heaven are not edified by this promiscuous bathing, and by the spectacle of a crowd of women tossing about in the surf, but an impartial angel would admit that many of the costumes here are becoming, and that the effect of the red and yellow caps, making a color line in the flashing rollers, is charming.  It is true that there are odd figures in the shifting melee—­one solitary old gentleman, who had contrived to get his bathing-suit on hind-side before, wandered along the ocean margin like a lost Ulysses; and that fat woman and fat man were never intended for this sort of exhibition; but taken altogether, with its colors, and the silver flash of the breaking waves, the scene was exceedingly pretty.  Not the least pretty part of it was the fringe of children tumbling on the beach, following the retreating waves, and flying from the incoming rollers with screams of delight.  Children, indeed, are a characteristic of Narragansett Pier—­children and mothers.  It might be said to be a family place; it is a good deal so on Sundays, and occasionally when the “business men” come down from the cities to see how their wives and children get on at the hotels.