“Fetish” is, perhaps, rather too strong a word, but I should not mind saying that informality was the tutelary genius of the place.  American men are everywhere impatient of form.  It burdens and bothers them, and they like to throw it off whenever they can.  We may not be so very democratic at heart as we seem, but we are impatient of ceremonies that separate us when it is our business or our pleasure to get at one another; and it is part of our splendor to ignore the ceremonies, as we do the expenses.  We have all the decent grades of riches and poverty in our colony, but our informality is not more the treasure of the humble than of the great.  In the nature of things it cannot last, however, and the only question is how long it will last.  I think, myself, until some one imagines giving an eight-o’clock dinner; then all the informalities will go, and the whole train of evils which such a dinner connotes will rush in.

II.

The cottages themselves are of several sorts, and some still exist in the earlier stages of mutation from the fishermen’s and farmers’ houses which formed their germ.  But these are now mostly let as lodgings to bachelors and other single or semi-detached folks who go for their meals to the neighboring hotels or boarding-houses.  The hotels are each the centre of this sort of centripetal life, as well as the homes of their own scores or hundreds of inmates.  A single boarding-house gathers about it half a dozen dependent cottages which it cares for, and feeds at its table; and even where the cottages have kitchens and all the housekeeping facilities, their inmates sometimes prefer to dine at the hotels.  By far the greater number of cottagers, however, keep house, bringing their service with them from the cities, and settling in their summer homes for three or four or five months.

The houses conform more or less to one type:  a picturesque structure of colonial pattern, shingled to the ground, and stained or left to take a weather-stain of grayish brown, with cavernous verandas, and dormer-windowed roofs covering ten or twelve rooms.  Within they are, if not elaborately finished, elaborately fitted up, with a constant regard to health in the plumbing and drainage.  The water is brought in a system of pipes from a lake five miles away, and as it is only for summer use the pipes are not buried from the frost, but wander along the surface, through the ferns and brambles of the tough little sea-side knolls on which the cottages are perched, and climb the old tumbling stone walls of the original pastures before diving into the cemented basements.