girls and their summer young men would think of the
charming, glorified cottages with their awnings and verandas and lovely
lawns and masses of blue and pink hydrangeas; also of the big and jolly
hotel where we are staying to-night. (The Hamptons wouldn't have done
for _them_ in old days when men and maids--"persons of the younger
sort"--were hauled up before the courts if they were out after nine
o'clock!) While the picture for children would be of a shining beach
smooth as silk, and immense lengths of white waves, marching rank after
rank in an endless army, with deep rolling music of unseen drums.

You may take your choice of these Hamptons, or like me you may say,
"I'll have them all, please!"

Anyhow, you enter beside the Great Pond I told you of, which is so
charming in itself and in its flat frame of village green that it
deserves the capital G and P it's always spelt with. I do believe if you
dared begin it with little letters you'd be driven out of town, and not
with "'Fruites,' and corn, and coates," as the Indians were invited to
leave in their day. _They_ had a nice well, in a green plain, perhaps
where the Great Pond is now, for all I know. There's an old Indian Bible
which tells about it, when the Montauks--a fine brave tribe who sold out
_dirt_ cheap to the Puritans--lived in their village, which is still
commemorated by the name Amagansett. (By the way, I promised Jack to
tell Monty that "sett" means meeting-place, which explains why "sett" is
the tag end of so many village names here.)

As I said, you come to the Great Pond, and you feel ashamed of being in
a motor car, though hundreds of other people are equally guilty. It's
all so green and sweet and peaceful, that speed seems a crime. The
street, if you can call it a street, is as broad as a generous mind.
Never was an English village-green as perfect as this, I suppose because
the self-banished English folk who created it worked from an idealized
picture treasured in their hearts. And there are old gray and white
houses as beautiful as houses in dreams, and pretty new houses which
carefully contrive not to look out of keeping with the old ones. Also
there are windmills, sketched on clear open backgrounds--windmills which
the English settlers didn't mind copying from the Dutch on the other
side of the Island.

Now can you fancy what Easthampton is like? But even if you can, you'll
never, never smell (unless you pack up and come here) the wonderfu