I.

One says of every summer, when it is drawing near its end, "There never
was such a summer"; but if the summer is one of those which slip from the
feeble hold of elderly hands, when the days of the years may be reckoned
with the scientific logic of the insurance tables and the sad conviction
of the psalmist, one sees it go with a passionate prescience of never
seeing its like again such as the younger witness cannot know. Each new
summer of the few left must be shorter and swifter than the last: its
Junes will be thirty days long, and its Julys and Augusts thirty-one, in
compliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so small a compass
that fourteen of them will rattle round in a week of the old size like
shrivelled peas in a pod.

To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas put
to soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we first
spent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four hours
long. Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where there
is nothing to hurry them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and muse
beside the sea and shore, which are so netted together at Kittery Point
that they hardly know themselves apart. The days, whatever their length,
are divided, not into hours, but into mails. They begin, without regard
to the sun, at eight o'clock, when the first mail comes with a few
letters and papers which had forgotten themselves the night before. At
half-past eleven the great mid-day mail arrives; at four o'clock there is
another indifferent and scattering post, much like that at eight in the