TY FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE.]

The New Year's debts are paid, the May-day moving is over and settled,
and still a remnant of money is found sticking to the bottom of the
old marmalade pot. Where shall we go?

There is nothing like the sea. Shall it be Newport?

But Newport is no longer the ocean pure and deep, in the rich severity
of its _sangre azul_. We want to admire the waves, and they drag us
off to inspect the last new villa: we like the beach, and they bid
us enjoy the gardens, brought every spring in lace-paper out of the
florist's shop. We like to stroll on the shore, barefooted if we
choose, and Newport is become an affair of toilette and gold-mounted
harness, a bathing-place where people do everything but bathe.

[Illustration: UP THE INLET.]

Well, Nahant, then, or Long Branch?

Too slow and too fast. Besides, we have seen them.

Suppose we try the Isles of Shoals? Appledore and Duck Island and
White Island, now? Or Nantucket, or Marblehead?

Too stony, and nothing in particular to eat. You ask for fish, and
they give you a rock.

In truth, under that moral and physical dyspepsia to which we bring
ourselves regularly every summer, the fine crags of the north become
just the least bit of a bore. They necessitate an amount of heroic
climbing under the command of a sort of romantic and do-nothing Girls
of the Period, who sit about on soft shawls in the lee of the rocks,
and gather their shells and anemones vicariously at the expense of
your tendon achilles. We know it, for we have suffered. We calculate,
and are prepared to prove, that the successful collection of a single
ribbon of ruffled seaweed, procured in a slimy haystack of red dulse
at the beck of one inconsiderate girl, who is keeping her brass heels
dry on a safe and sunny ledge of the Purgatory at Newport, may require
more mental calculation, involve more anguish of equilibrium, and
encourage more heartfelt secret profanity than the making of a
steam-engine or the writing of a proposal.

No, no, we would admire nothing, dare nothing, do nothing, but only
suck in rosy health at every pore, pin our souls out on the holly
hedge to sweeten, and forget what we had for breakfast. Uneasy daemons
that we are all winter, toiling gnomes of the mine and the forge--"O
spent ones of a workday age"--can we not for one brief month in our
year be Turks?

[Illustration: LANDING-PLACE ON THE INLET.]

Our doctors, slowly acquiring a little sense, are changing