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

The amusements of the summer colony I have already hinted at.  Besides suppers, there are also teas, of larger scope, both afternoon and evening.  There are hops every week at the two largest hotels, which are practically free to all; and the bathing-beach is, of course, a supreme attraction.  The bath-houses, which are very clean and well equipped, are not very cheap, either for the season or for a single bath, and there is a pretty pavilion at the edge of the sands.  This is always full of gossiping spectators of the hardy adventurers who brave tides too remote from the Gulf Stream to be ever much warmer than sixty or sixty-five degrees.  The bathers are mostly young people, who have the courage of their pretty bathing-costumes or the inextinguishable ardor of their years.  If it is not rather serious business with them all, still I admire the fortitude with which some of them remain in fifteen minutes.  Beyond our colony, which calls itself the Port, there is a