Cousin Frank never felt how strange was a lonely transgression till that
day, when in the silence of the little cabin he took the bottle of claret
from the handbag, and prepared to moisten the family lunch with it. "I
think, Aunt Melissa," he said, "we had better lunch now, for it's a
quarter past two, and we shall not get to the beach before four. Let's
improvise a beach of these chairs, and that water-urn yonder can stand for
the breakers. Now, this is truly like Newport and Nahant," he added, after
the little arrangement was complete; and he was about to strip away the
bottle's jacket of brown paper, when a lady much wrapped up came in, and,
reclining upon one of the opposite seats, began to take them all in with a
severe serenity of gaze that made them feel for a moment like a party of
low foreigners,--like a set of German atheists, say. Frank kept on the
bottle's paper jacket, and as the single tumbler of the party circled from
mouth to mouth, each of them tried to give the honest drink the false air
of a medicinal potion of some sort; and to see Aunt Melissa sipping it, no
one could have put his hand on his heart and sworn it was not elderberry
wine, at the worst. In spite of these efforts, they all knew that they had
suffered a hopeless loss of repute; yet after the loss was confessed, I am
not sure that they were not the gayer and happier through this "freedom of
a broken law." At any rate, the lunch passed off very merrily, and when
they had put back the fragments of the feast into the bags, they went
forward to the bow of the boat, to get good places for seeing the various
people as they came aboard, and for an outlook upon the bay when the boat
should start.

I suppose that these were not very remarkable people, and that nothing but
the indomitable interest our friends took in the human race could have
enabled them to feel any concern in their companions. It was, no doubt,
just such a company as goes down to Nantasket Beach every pleasant day in
summer. Certain ones among them were distinguishable as sojourners at the