w. The business of the day, be
it what it may, housekeeping, study, teaching, authorship, or charity,
will occupy you till dinner at two. You have your dessert carried into
the piazza, where, catching glimpses of the mere through the wood on the
banks, your watermelon tastes cooler than within, and you have a better
chance of a visit from a pair of humming-birds.

You retire to your room, all shaded with green blinds, lie down with a
book in your hands, and sleep soundly for two hours at least. When you
wake and look out, the shadows are lengthening on the lawn, and the hot
haze has melted away. You hear a carriage behind the fence, and conclude
that friends from the city are coming to spend the evening with you.
They sit within till after tea, telling you that you are living in
the sweetest place in the world. When the sun sets you all walk out,
dispersing in the shrubbery or on the banks. When the moon shows herself
above the opposite woods, the merry voices of the young people are heard
from the cove, where the boys are getting out the boat. You stand, with
a companion or two, under the pines, watching the progress of the skiff
and the receding splash of the oars. If you have any one, as I had, to
sing German popular songs to you, the enchantment is all the greater.
You are capriciously lighted home by fireflies, and there is your table
covered with fruit and iced lemonade. When your friends have left you
you would fain forget it is time to rest, and your last act before you
sleep is to look out once more from your balcony upon the silvery mere
and moonlit lawn.

The only times when I felt disposed to quarrel with the inexhaustible
American mirth was on the hottest days of summer. I liked it as well as
ever; but European strength will not stand more than an hour or two of
laughter in such seasons. I remember one day when the American part of
the company was as much exhausted as the English. We had gone, a party
of six, to spend a long day with a merry household in a country village,
and, to avoid the heat, had performed the journey of sixteen miles
before ten o'clock. For three hours after our arrival the wit was in
full flow; by which time we were all begging for mercy, for we could
laugh no longer with any safety. Still, a little more fun was dropped
all round, till we found that the only way was to separate, and we all
turned out of doors. I cannot conceive how it is that so little has been
heard in England of th