The native compliance with any summer-visiting request is commonly in some such form as, “Well, I don’t know but what I can,” or, “I guess there ain’t anything to hinder me.”  This compliance is so rarely, if ever, carried to the point of domestic service that it may fairly be said that all the domestic service, at least of the cottagers, is imported.  The natives will wait at the hotel tables; they will come in “to accommodate”; but they will not “live out.”  I was one day witness of the extreme failure of a friend whose city cook had suddenly abandoned him, and who applied to a friendly farmer’s wife in the vain hope that she might help him to some one who would help his family out in their strait.  “Why, there ain’t a girl in the Hollow that lives out!  Why, if you was sick abed, I don’t know as I know anybody ’t you could git to set up with you.”  The natives will not live out because they cannot keep their self-respect in the conditions of domestic service.  Some people laugh at this self-respect, but most summer folks like it, as I own I do.

In our partly mythical estimate of the native and his relation to us, he is imagined as holding a kind of carnival when we leave him at the end of the season, and it is believed that he likes us to go early.  We have had his good offices at a fair price all summer, but as it draws to a close they are rendered more and more fitfully.  From some, perhaps flattered, reports of the happiness of the natives at the departure of the sojourners, I have pictured them dancing a sort of farandole, and stretching with linked hands from the farthest summer cottage up the river to the last on the wooded point.  It is certain that they get tired, and I could not blame them if they were glad to be rid of their guests, and to go back to their own social life.  This includes church festivals of divers kinds, lectures and shows, sleigh-rides, theatricals, and reading-clubs, and a plentiful use of books from the excellently chosen free village library.  They say frankly that the summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone, and I am sure that the gayeties to which we leave them must be more tolerable than those which we go back to in the city.  It may be, however, that I am too confident, and that their gayeties are only different.  I should really like to know just what the entertainments are which are given in a building devoted to them in a country neighborhood three or four miles from the village.  It was once a church, but is now used solely for social amusements.

IV