When, however, you turned your thoughts and eyes away
from this aspect of it, and looked out upon the water,
the neighborhood gloriously retrieved itself.
There its poverty and vulgarity ceased; there its beauty
and grace abounded. A light breeze ruffled the
face of the bay, and the innumerable little sail-boats
that dotted it took the sun and wind upon their wings,
which they dipped almost into the sparkle of the water,
and flew lightly hither and thither like gulls that
loved the brine too well to rise wholly from it; larger
ships, farther or nearer, puffed or shrank their sails
as they came and went on the errands of commerce,
but always moved as if bent upon some dreamy affair
of pleasure; the steamboats that shot vehemently across
their tranquil courses seemed only gayer and vivider
visions, but not more substantial; yonder, a black
sea-going steamer passed out between the far-off islands,
and at last left in the sky above those reveries of
fortification, a whiff of sombre smoke, dark and unreal
as a memory of battle; to the right, on some line
of railroad, long-plumed trains arrived and departed
like pictures passed through the slide of a magic-lantern;
even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction,
seemed to have no malice in the blows which, after
a loud clucking, it dealt the pile, and one understood
that it was mere conventional violence like that of
a Punch to his baby.
“Why, what a lotus-eating life this is!”
said Frank, at last. “Aunt Melissa, I don’t
wonder you think it’s like the seaside.
It’s a great deal better than the seaside.
And now, just as we’ve entered into the spirit
of it, the time’s up for the ‘Rose Standish’
to come and bear us from its delights. When will
the boat be in?” he asked of the Autobiographer,
whom Lucy had pointed out to him.
“Well, she’s ben in half an hour,
now. There she lays, just outside the ‘John
Romer.’”
There, to be sure, she lay, and those pleasure-takers
had been so lost in the rapture of waiting and the
beauty of the scene as never to have noticed her arrival.
II—THE AFTERNOON
It is noticeable how many people there are in the
world that seem bent always upon the same purpose
of amusement or business as one’s self.
If you keep quietly about your accustomed affairs,
there are all your neighbors and acquaintance hard
at it too; if you go on a journey, choose what train
you will, the cars are filled with travellers in your
direction. You take a day’s pleasure, and
everybody abandons his usual occupation to crowd upon
your boat, whether it is to Gloucester, or Nahant,
or to Nantasket Beach you go. It is very hard
to believe that, from whatever channel of life you
abstract yourself, still the great sum of it presses
forward as before: that business is carried on
though you are idle, that men amuse themselves though
you toil, that every train is as crowded as that you
travel on, that the theatre or the church fills its
Copyrights
Suburban Sketches from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
