passengers from the southward, at a floating wharf that sinks or swims
half a hundred feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but all night
long the island is shut up to its own memories and devices. The pretty
romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sort of feudal
seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and its fisher-folk
for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for the aesthetic
leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him and his language
in their names, and housing with a few cottages all the sojourners on the
island. By day the broad hotel piazzas shelter such of the guests as
prefer to let others make their excursions into the heart of the island,
and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders; and at night, when the falling
mists have brought the early dark, and from lighthouse to lighthouse the
fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzas cede to the corridors
and the parlours and smoking-rooms. The life does not greatly differ from
other seaside hotel life on the surface, and if one were to make
distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying that hotel society there
has much of the tone of cottage society elsewhere, with a little more
accessibility. As the reader doubtless knows, the great mass of Boston
society, thoughtful of its own weight and bulk, transports itself down
the North Shore scarcely further than Manchester at the furthest; but
there are more courageous or more detachable spirits who venture into
more distant regions. These contribute somewhat toward peopling Bar
Harbour in the summer, but they scarcely characterise it in any degree;
while at Campobello they settle in little daring colonies, whose
self-reliance will enlist the admiration of the sympathetic observer.
They do not refuse the knowledge of other colonies of other stirps and
origins, and they even combine in temporary alliance with them. But,
after all, Boston speaks one language, and New York another, and
Washington a third, and though the several dialects have only slight
differences of inflection, their moral accents render each a little