The old fishing and seafaring village, which has now almost lost the recollection of its first estate in its absorption with the care of the summer colony, was sparsely dropped along the highway bordering the harbor, and the shores of the river, where the piles of the time-worn wharves are still rotting.  A few houses of the past remain, but the type of the summer cottage has impressed itself upon all the later building, and the native is passing architecturally, if not personally, into abeyance.  He takes the situation philosophically, and in the season he caters to the summer colony not only as the landlord of the rented cottages, and the keeper of the hotels and boarding-houses, but as livery-stableman, grocer, butcher, marketman, apothecary, and doctor; there is not one foreign accent in any of these callings.  If the native is a farmer, he devotes himself to vegetables, poultry, eggs, and fruit for the summer folks, and brings these supplies to their doors; his children appear with flowers; and there are many proofs that he has accurately sized the cottagers up in their tastes and fancies as well as their needs.  I doubt if we have sized him up so well, or if our somewhat conventionalized ideal of him is perfectly representative.  He is, perhaps, more complex than he seems; he is certainly much more self-sufficing than might have been expected.  The summer folks are the material from which his prosperity is wrought, but he is not dependent, and is very far from submissive.  As in all right conditions, it is here the employer who asks for work, not the employee; and the work must be respectfully asked for.  There are many fables to this effect, as, for instance, that of the lady who said to a summer visitor, critical of the week’s wash she had brought home, “I’ll wash you and I’ll iron you, but I won’t take none of your jaw.”  A primitive independence is the keynote of the native character, and it suffers no infringement, but rather boasts itself.  “We’re independent here, I tell you,” said the friendly person who consented to take off the wire door.  “I was down Bangor way doin’ a piece of work, and a fellow come along, and says he, ’I want you should hurry up on that job.’  ‘Hello!’ says I, ‘I guess I’ll pull out.’  Well, we calculate to do our work,” he added, with an accent which sufficiently implied that their consciences needed no bossing in the performance.

The native compliance with any summer-visiting request is commonly in some such form as, “Well, I don’t know but what I can,” or, “I guess there ain’t anything to hinder me.”  This compliance is so rarely, if ever, carried to the point of domestic service that it may fairly be said that all the domestic service, at least of the cottagers, is imported.  The natives will wait at the hotel tables; they will come in “to accommodate”; but they will not “live out.”  I was one day witness of the extreme failure of a friend whose city cook had suddenly abandoned him, and who