nd fresh sparkle on the waves of the
incoming tide; an indescribable freshness and life in the air and in
the light; a delicious invigoration in the salt breath of the ocean.
Mrs. Barclay sat drinking it all in, like one who had been long
athirst. Mrs. Lenox stood looking, half cognizant of what was before
her, more than half impatient and scornful of it; yet even on her the
witchery of the place and the scene was not without its effect.

"Do you come here often?" she asked Mrs. Barclay. .

"Never so often as I would like."

"I should think you would be tired to death!"

Then, as Mrs. Barclay made no answer, she looked at her watch.

"Our train is not till ten o'clock," she remarked.

"Plenty of time," said the other. And then there was silence; and the
sun's light grew more westering, and the sparkle on earth and water
more fresh, and the air only more and more sweet; till two figures were
discerned approaching the bathing-house, carrying hoes slung over their
shoulders, and baskets, evidently filled, in their hands. They went
round the house towards the cook-house; and Mrs. Barclay came down from
her seat and went to meet them there, Mrs. Lenox following.

Two such figures! Sun-bonnets shading merry faces, flushed with
business; blue flannel bathing-suits draping very unpicturesquely the
persons, bare feet stained with mud,--baskets full of the delicate fish
they had been catching.

"What a quantity!" exclaimed Mrs. Barclay.

"Yes, because I had aunt Anne to help. We cannot boil them all at once,
but that is all the better. They will come hot and hot."

"You don't mean that you are going to cook all those?" said Mrs. Lenox
incredulously.

"There will not be one too many," said Lois. "You do not know long
clams yet."

"They are ugly things!" said the other, with a look of great disgust
into the basket. "I don't think I could touch them."

"There's no obligation," responded here Mrs. Marx. She had thrown one
basketful into a huge pan, and was washing them free from the mud and
sand of their original sphere. "It's a free country. But looks don't
prove much--neither at the shore nor anywhere else. An ugly shell often
covers a good fish. So I find it; and t'other way."

"How do you get them?" inquired Mr. Lenox, who also came now to the
door of the cook-house. Lois made her escape. "I see you make use of
hoes."

"Yes," said Mrs. Marx, throwing her clams about in the water with great
energy; "we dig for '