on an inland lake at a low figure, and they took the first train for it.  There they decided next morning to push on to the mountains, and sent their baggage to the station, but before it was checked they changed their minds, and remained two weeks where they were.  Then they took train for a place on the coast, but in the cars a friend told them they ought to go to another place; they decided to go there, but before arriving at the junction they decided again to keep on.  They arrived at their original destination, and the following day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel farther down the coast.  The answer came that there were no rooms, and being by this time ready to start, they started, and in due time reported themselves at the hotel.  The landlord saw that something must be done, and he got them rooms, at a smaller house, and ‘mealed’ them (as it used to be called at Mt.  Desert) in his own.  But upon experiment of the fare at the smaller house they liked it so well that they resolved to live there altogether, and they spent a summer of the greatest comfort there, so that they would hardly come away when the house closed in the fall.

This was an extreme case, and perhaps such a venture might not always turn out so happily; but I think that people might oftener trust themselves to Providence in these matters than they do.  There is really an infinite variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, and one could quite safely leave it to the man in the ticket-office where one should go, and check one’s baggage accordingly.  I think the chances of an agreeable summer would be as good in that way as in making a hard-and-fast choice of a certain place and sticking to it.  My own experience is that in these things chance makes a very good choice for one, as it does in most non-moral things.

II.

A joke dies hard, and I am not sure that the life is yet quite out of the kindly ridicule that was cast for a whole generation upon the people who left their comfortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board or stifle in the narrow rooms of mountain and seaside hotels.  Yet such people were in the right, and their mockers were in the wrong, and their patient persistence in going out of town for the summer in the face of severe discouragements has multiplied indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts, and reformed them altogether.  I believe the city boarding-house remains very much what it used to be; but I am bound to say that the country boarding-house has vastly improved since I began to know it.  As for the summer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be complained of except the prices.  I take it for granted, therefore, that the out-of-town summer has come to stay, for all who can afford it, and that the chief sorrow attending it is that curse of choice, which I have already spoken of.