of the French officer's verdict on the garrison town where he
was quartered, that the good society was no better than the good
society anywhere else, but the bad society was capital. I like, for
instance, to watch the shoals of fishermen that throng our streets in
the early spring, inappropriate as porpoises on land, or as Scott's
pirates in peaceful Kirkwall,--unwieldy, bearded creatures in oil-skin
suits,--men who have never before seen a basket-wagon or a liveried
groom and, whose first comments on the daintinesses of fashion are far
more racy than anything which fashion can say for itself.

The life of our own fishermen and pilots remains active, in its way,
all winter; and coasting vessels come and go in the open harbor every
day. The only schooner that is not so employed is, to my eye, more
attractive than any of them; it is our sole winter guest, this year, of
all the graceful flotilla of yachts that helped to make our summer
moonlights so charming. While Europe seems in such ecstasy over the
ocean yacht-race, there lies at anchor, stripped and dismantled, a
vessel which was excluded from the match, it is said, simply because
neither of the three competitors would have had a chance against her. I
like to look across the harbor at the graceful proportions of this
uncrowned victor in the race she never ran; and to my eye her laurels
are the most attractive. She seems a fit emblem of the genius that
waits, while talent merely wins. "Let me know," said that fine, but
unappreciated thinker, Brownlee Brown,--"let me know what chances a man
has passed in contempt; not what he has made, but what he has refused
to make, reserving himself for higher ends."

All out-door work in winter has a cheerful look, from the triumph of
caloric it implies; but I know none in which man seems to revert more
to the lower modes of being than in searching for seaclams. One may
sometimes observe a dozen men employed in this way, on one of our
beaches, while the cold wind blows keenly off shore, and the spray
drifts back like snow over the green and sluggish surge. The men pace
in and out with the wave, going steadily to and fro like a pendulum,
ankle-deep in the chilly brine, their steps quickened by hope or
slackening with despair. Where the maidens and children sport and shout
in summer, there in winter these heavy figures succeed. To them the
lovely crest of the emerald billow is but a chariot for clams, and is
valueless if it comes in