of herring sardines. The waters that wrap the
island in morning and evening fog temper the air of
the latitude to a Newport softness in summer, with
a sort of inner coolness that is peculiarly delicious,
lulling the day with long calms and light breezes,
and after nightfall commonly sending a stiff gale
to try the stops of the hotel’s gables and casements,
and to make the cheerful blaze on its public hearths
acceptable. Once or twice a day the Eastport ferry-boat
arrives, with passengers from the southward, at a
floating wharf that sinks or swims half a hundred
feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but all
night long the island is shut up to its own memories
and devices. The pretty romance of the old sailor
who left England to become a sort of feudal seigneur
here, with a holding of the entire island, and its
fisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque
background for the aesthetic leisure and society in
the three hotels remembering him and his language
in their names, and housing with a few cottages all
the sojourners on the island. By day the broad
hotel piazzas shelter such of the guests as prefer
to let others make their excursions into the heart
of the island, and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders;
and at night, when the falling mists have brought
the early dark, and from lighthouse to lighthouse the
fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzas
cede to the corridors and the parlours and smoking-rooms.
The life does not greatly differ from other seaside
hotel life on the surface, and if one were to make
distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying that
hotel society there has much of the tone of cottage
society elsewhere, with a little more accessibility.
As the reader doubtless knows, the great mass of Boston
society, thoughtful of its own weight and bulk, transports
itself down the North Shore scarcely further than
Manchester at the furthest; but there are more courageous
or more detachable spirits who venture into more distant
regions. These contribute somewhat toward peopling
Bar Harbour in the summer, but they scarcely characterise
it in any degree; while at Campobello they settle
in little daring colonies, whose self-reliance will
enlist the admiration of the sympathetic observer.
They do not refuse the knowledge of other colonies
of other stirps and origins, and they even combine
in temporary alliance with them. But, after all,
Boston speaks one language, and New York another, and
Washington a third, and though the several dialects
have only slight differences of inflection, their
moral accents render each a little difficult for the
others. In fact every society is repellant of
strangers in the degree that it is sufficient to itself,
and is incurious concerning the rest of the world.
If it has not the elements of self-satisfaction in
it, if it is uninformed and new and restless, it is
more hospitable than an older society which has a sense
of merit founded upon historical documents, and need
no longer go out of itself for comparisons of any
sort, knowing that if it seeks anything better it will
probably be disappointed. The natural man, the
savage, is as indifferent to others as the exclusive,
and those who accuse the coldness of the Bostonians,
and their reluctant or repellant behaviour toward unknown
people, accuse not only civilisation, but nature itself.