although it is a home rather than a public life.  Nowhere else at dinner and at the chance evening musicale is the foreigner more likely to meet sensible men who are good talkers, brilliant and witty women who have the gift of being entertaining, and to have the events of the day and the social and political problems more cleverly discussed.  What is the good of wealth if it does not bring one back to freedom, and the ability to live naturally and to indulge the finer tastes in vacation-time?

After all, King reflected, as the party were on their way to the Isles of Shoals, what was it that had most impressed him at Manchester?  Was it not an evening spent in a cottage amid the rocks, close by the water, in the company of charming people?  To be sure, there were the magical reflection of the moonlight and the bay, the points of light from the cottages on the rocky shore, the hum and swell of the sea, and all the mystery of the shadowy headlands; but this was only a congenial setting for the music, the witty talk, the free play of intellectual badinage, and seriousness, and the simple human cordiality that were worth all the rest.

What a kaleidoscope it is, this summer travel, and what an entertainment, if the tourist can only keep his “impression plates” fresh to take the new scenes, and not sink into the state of chronic grumbling at hotels and minor discomforts!  An interview at a ticket-office, a whirl of an hour on the rails, and to Portsmouth, anchored yet to the colonial times by a few old houses, and resisting with its respectable provincialism the encroachments of modern smartness, and the sleepy wharf in the sleepy harbor, where the little steamer is obligingly waiting for the last passenger, for the very last woman, running with a bandbox in one hand, and dragging a jerked, fretting child by the other hand, to make the hour’s voyage to the Isles of Shoals.

(The shrewd reader objects to the bandbox as an anachronism:  it is no longer used.  If I were writing a novel, instead of a veracious chronicle, I should not have introduced it, for it is an anachronism.  But I was powerless, as a mere narrator, to prevent the woman coming aboard with her bandbox.  No one but a trained novelist can make a long-striding, resolute, down-East woman conform to his notions of conduct and fashion.)

If a young gentleman were in love, and the object of his adoration were beside him, he could not have chosen a lovelier day nor a prettier scene than this in which to indulge his happiness; and if he were in love, and the object absent, he could scarcely find a situation fitter to nurse his tender sentiment.  Doubtless there is a stage in love when scenery of the very best quality becomes inoperative.  There was a couple on board seated in front of the pilot-house, who let the steamer float along the pretty, long, landlocked harbor, past the Kittery Navy-yard, and out upon the blue sea, without taking the least notice