Mrs.
Brinkley. "Perhaps because their digestions are strong."

"Don't you wish that something could be substituted for it?" asked Miss.
Cotton.

"There have been efforts to replace it with chicken and tongue in
sandwiches;" said Mrs. Brinkley; "but I think they've only measurably
succeeded--about as temperance drinks have in place of the real strong
waters."

"On the boat coming up," said Mavering, "we had a troupe of genuine
darky minstrels. One of them sang a song about ham that rather took me--

"'Ham, good old ham! Ham is de best ob meat; It's always good and sweet;
You can bake it, you can boil it, You can fry it, you can broil it--Ham,
good old ham!'"

"Oh, how good!" sighed Mrs. Brinkley. "How sincere! How native! Go on,
Mr. Mavering, for ever."

"I haven't the materials," said Mavering, with his laugh. "The rest was
da capo. But there was another song, about a coloured lady--"

"'Six foot high and eight foot round, Holler ob her foot made a hole in
de ground.'"

"Ah, that's an old friend," said Mrs. Brinkley. "I remember hearing
of that coloured lady when I was a girl. But it's a fine flight of the
imagination. What else did they sing?"

"I can't remember. But there was something they danced--to show how a
rheumatic old coloured uncle dances."

He jumped nimbly up, and sketched the stiff and limping figure he had
seen. It was over in a flash. He dropped down again, laughing.

"Oh, how wonderfully good!" cried Mrs. Brinkley, with frank joy. "Do it
again."

"Encore! Oh, encore!" came from the people on the beach.

Mavering jumped to his feet, and burlesqued the profuse bows of an actor
who refuses to repeat; he was about to drop down again amidst their
wails of protest.

"No, don't sit down, Mr. Mavering," said the lady who had introduced the
subject of ham. "Get some of the young ladies, and go and gather some
blueberries for the dessert. There are all the necessaries of life here,
but none of the luxuries."

"I'm at the service of the young ladies as an escort," said Mavering
gallantly, with an infusion of joke. "Will you come and pick blueberries
under my watchful eyes, Miss Pasmer?"

"They've gone to pick blueberries," called the lady through her tubed
hand to the people on the beach, and the younger among them scrambled up
the rocks for cups and bowls to follow them.

Mrs. Pasmer had an impulse to call her daughter back, and to make
some excuse to keep her from going. She was in an acc