ttle summer resorts; and thither strangers were
beginning to flock in considerable numbers each year, made warmly welcome
by the Joppites as an occasion for breaking out into an unending round of
parties and picnics and dinners and lunches and teas, and even breakfasts
when there was not room to crowd in any thing else. The summer was one
continual whirl from beginning to end. There were visitors and visits;
there was giving and receiving; there were flirtations and rumors of
flirtations; there was everything the human heart could desire in the way
of friendly hospitality and liveliest entertainment. Saratoga might be
well enough, and Newport would do in its way; but for solid perfection,
said the Joppites, there was no place in the world quite like Joppa.

But unknown to itself, Joppa nursed one apostate in its midst, one
unavowed but benighted little heretic, who so far from sharing these
sentiments and offering up nightly thanksgiving that despite her great
unworthiness she had been suffered to be born in Joppa, made it one of
her most fervent and reiterated petitions that she might not always have
to live there; that some time, if she were very good and very patient, it
might be granted her to go. She was so weary of it all: of the busy
idleness and the idle business, of the unthinking gayety and the gay
thoughtlessness, and of the nothingness that made up its all. She wanted,
she did not exactly know what, only something different; and to go, she
did not quite know where, only somewhere else. But she had been born in
Joppa, (quite without her permission,) and in Joppa she had lived for all
of twenty-four healthful, tranquil, uneventful years, spending
semi-occasional winters in New York, and, unlike all other Joppites,
returning always more and more discontented with her native place. Who
could ever have expected such treason in the heart of dear little Phebe
Lane? Of course it would not have mattered much had it been suspected,
since it was only Phebe Lane after all who entertained it,--little Phebe
Lane, whose ancestors, though good and well-born enough, did not hail
from Morocco, and who lived, not in the West End proper, but only on the
borders of it, in a street where one could not get so much as a side peep
at the lake. It was not a pretty house either where she lived. It was
square and clumsy and without any originality, and, moreover, faced plump
on the street, so that one could look right into its parlor and