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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of a Summer Colonist
+#34 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Confessions of a Summer Colonist
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
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+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Confessions of a Summer Colonist
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST
+
+
+The season is ending in the little summer settlement on the Down East
+coast where I have been passing the last three months, and with each
+loath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant.
+A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go already
+begins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form of
+words which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; some
+shadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or change
+should destroy or transform it, or, what is more likely, if I should
+never come back to it.  Perhaps others in the distant future may turn to
+it for a glimpse of our actual life in one of its most characteristic
+phases; I am sure that in the distant present there are many millions of
+our own inlanders to whom it would be altogether strange.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+In a certain sort fragile is written all over our colony; as far as the
+visible body of it is concerned it is inexpressibly perishable; a fire
+and a high wind could sweep it all away; and one of the most American of
+all American things is the least fitted among them to survive from the
+present to the future, and impart to it the significance of what may soon
+be a "portion and parcel" of our extremely forgetful past.
+
+It is also in a supremely transitional moment: one might say that last
+year it was not quite what it is now, and next year it may be altogether
+different.  In fact, our summer colony is in that happy hour when the
+rudeness of the first summer conditions has been left far behind, and
+vulgar luxury has not yet cumbrously succeeded to a sort of sylvan
+distinction.
+
+The type of its simple and sufficing hospitalities is the seven-o'clock
+supper.  Every one, in hotel or in cottage, dines between one and two,
+and no less scrupulously sups at seven, unless it is a few extremists who
+sup at half-past seven.  At this function, which is our chief social
+event, it is 'de rigueur' for the men not to dress, and they come in any
+sort of sack or jacket or cutaway, letting the ladies make up the pomps
+which they forego.  From this fact may be inferred the informality of the
+men's day-time attire; and the same note is sounded in the whole range of
+the cottage life, so that once a visitor from the world outside, who had
+been exasperated beyond endurance by the absence of form among us (if
+such an effect could be from a cause so negative), burst out with the
+reproach, "Oh, you make a fetish of your informality!"
+
+"Fetish" is, perhaps, rather too strong a word, but I should not mind
+saying that informality was the tutelary genius of the place.  American
+men are everywhere impatient of form.  It burdens and bothers them, and
+they like to throw it off whenever they can.  We may not be so very
+democratic at heart as we seem, but we are impatient of ceremonies that
+separate us when it is our business or our pleasure to get at one
+another; and it is part of our splendor to ignore the ceremonies, as we
+do the expenses.  We have all the decent grades of riches and poverty in
+our colony, but our informality is not more the treasure of the humble
+than of the great.  In the nature of things it cannot last, however, and
+the only question is how long it will last.  I think, myself, until some
+one imagines giving an eight-o'clock dinner; then all the informalities
+will go, and the whole train of evils which such a dinner connotes will
+rush in.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The cottages themselves are of several sorts, and some still exist in the
+earlier stages of mutation from the fishermen's and farmers' houses which
+formed their germ.  But these are now mostly let as lodgings to bachelors
+and other single or semi-detached folks who go for their meals to the
+neighboring hotels or boarding-houses.  The hotels are each the centre of
+this sort of centripetal life, as well as the homes of their own scores
+or hundreds of inmates.  A single boarding-house gathers about it half a
+dozen dependent cottages which it cares for, and feeds at its table; and
+even where the cottages have kitchens and all the housekeeping
+facilities, their inmates sometimes prefer to dine at the hotels.
+By far the greater number of cottagers, however, keep house, bringing
+their service with them from the cities, and settling in their summer
+homes for three or four or five months.
+
+The houses conform more or less to one type: a picturesque structure of
+colonial pattern, shingled to the ground, and stained or left to take a
+weather-stain of grayish brown, with cavernous verandas, and dormer-
+windowed roofs covering ten or twelve rooms.  Within they are, if not
+elaborately finished, elaborately fitted up, with a constant regard to
+health in the plumbing and drainage.  The water is brought in a system of
+pipes from a lake five miles away, and as it is only for summer use the
+pipes are not buried from the frost, but wander along the surface,
+through the ferns and brambles of the tough little sea-side knolls on
+which the cottages are perched, and climb the old tumbling stone walls of
+the original pastures before diving into the cemented basements.
+
+Most of the cottages are owned by their occupants, and furnished by them;
+the rest, not less attractive and hardly less tastefully furnished,
+belong to natives, who have caught on to the architectural and domestic
+preferences of the summer people, and have built them to let.  The
+rugosities of the stony pasture land end in a wooded point seaward, and
+curve east and north in a succession of beaches.  It is on the point, and
+mainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages of our settlement
+are dropped, as near the ocean as may be, and with as little order as
+birds' nests in the grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wild
+raspberries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave as untouched
+as possible.  Wheel-worn lanes that twist about among the hollows find
+the cottages from the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage from
+another, and people walk rather than drive to each other's doors.
+From the deep-bosomed, well-sheltered little harbor the tides swim
+inland, half a score of winding miles, up the channel of a river which
+without them would be a trickling rivulet.  An irregular line of cottages
+follows the shore a little way, and then leaves the river to the
+schooners and barges which navigate it as far as the oldest pile-built
+wooden bridge in New England, and these in their turn abandon it to the
+fleets of row-boats and canoes in which summer youth of both sexes
+explore it to its source over depths as clear as glass, past wooded
+headlands and low, rush-bordered meadows, through reaches and openings of
+pastoral fields, and under the shadow of dreaming groves.
+
+If there is anything lovelier than the scenery of this gentle river I do
+not know it; and I doubt if the sky is purer and bluer in paradise.  This
+seems to be the consensus, tacit or explicit, of the youth who visit it,
+and employ the landscape for their picnics and their water parties from
+the beginning to the end of summer.
+
+The river is very much used for sunsets by the cottagers who live on it,
+and who claim a superiority through them to the cottagers on the point.
+An impartial mind obliges me to say that the sunsets are all good in our
+colony; there is no place from which they are bad; and yet for a certain
+tragical sunset, where the dying day bleeds slowly into the channel till
+it is filled from shore to shore with red as far as the eye can reach,
+the river is unmatched.
+
+For my own purposes, it is not less acceptable, however, when the fog has
+come in from the sea like a visible reverie, and blurred the whole valley
+with its whiteness.  I find that particularly good to look at from the
+trolley-car which visits and revisits the river before finally leaving
+it, with a sort of desperation, and hiding its passion with a sudden
+plunge into the woods.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The old fishing and seafaring village, which has now almost lost the
+recollection of its first estate in its absorption with the care of the
+summer colony, was sparsely dropped along the highway bordering the
+harbor, and the shores of the river, where the piles of the time-worn
+wharves are still rotting.  A few houses of the past remain, but the type
+of the summer cottage has impressed itself upon all the later building,
+and the native is passing architecturally, if not personally, into
+abeyance.  He takes the situation philosophically, and in the season he
+caters to the summer colony not only as the landlord of the rented
+cottages, and the keeper of the hotels and boarding-houses, but as
+livery-stableman, grocer, butcher, marketman, apothecary, and doctor;
+there is not one foreign accent in any of these callings.  If the native
+is a farmer, he devotes himself to vegetables, poultry, eggs, and fruit
+for the summer folks, and brings these supplies to their doors; his
+children appear with flowers; and there are many proofs that he has
+accurately sized the cottagers up in their tastes and fancies as well as
+their needs.  I doubt if we have sized him up so well, or if our somewhat
+conventionalized ideal of him is perfectly representative.  He is,
+perhaps, more complex than he seems; he is certainly much more self-
+sufficing than might have been expected.  The summer folks are the
+material from which his prosperity is wrought, but he is not dependent,
+and is very far from submissive.  As in all right conditions, it is here
+the employer who asks for work, not the employee; and the work must be
+respectfully asked for.  There are many fables to this effect, as, for
+instance, that of the lady who said to a summer visitor, critical of the
+week's wash she had brought home, "I'll wash you and I'll iron you, but I
+won't take none of your jaw."  A primitive independence is the keynote of
+the native character, and it suffers no infringement, but rather boasts
+itself.  "We're independent here, I tell you," said the friendly person
+who consented to take off the wire door.  "I was down Bangor way doin' a
+piece of work, and a fellow come along, and says he, 'I want you should
+hurry up on that job.' 'Hello!' says I, 'I guess I'll pull out.'  Well,
+we calculate to do our work," he added, with an accent which sufficiently
+implied that their consciences needed no bossing in the performance.
+
+The native compliance with any summer-visiting request is commonly in
+some such form as, "Well, I don't know but what I can," or, "I guess
+there ain't anything to hinder me."  This compliance is so rarely, if
+ever, carried to the point of domestic service that it may fairly be said
+that all the domestic service, at least of the cottagers, is imported.
+The natives will wait at the hotel tables; they will come in "to
+accommodate"; but they will not "live out."  I was one day witness of the
+extreme failure of a friend whose city cook had suddenly abandoned him,
+and who applied to a friendly farmer's wife in the vain hope that she
+might help him to some one who would help his family out in their strait.
+"Why, there ain't a girl in the Hollow that lives out!  Why, if you was
+sick abed, I don't know as I know anybody 't you could git to set up with
+you."  The natives will not live out because they cannot keep their self-
+respect in the conditions of domestic service.  Some people laugh at this
+self-respect, but most summer folks like it, as I own I do.
+
+In our partly mythical estimate of the native and his relation to us, he
+is imagined as holding a kind of carnival when we leave him at the end of
+the season, and it is believed that he likes us to go early.  We have had
+his good offices at a fair price all summer, but as it draws to a close
+they are rendered more and more fitfully.  From some, perhaps flattered,
+reports of the happiness of the natives at the departure of the
+sojourners, I have pictured them dancing a sort of farandole, and
+stretching with linked hands from the farthest summer cottage up the
+river to the last on the wooded point.  It is certain that they get
+tired, and I could not blame them if they were glad to be rid of their
+guests, and to go back to their own social life.  This includes church
+festivals of divers kinds, lectures and shows, sleigh-rides, theatricals,
+and reading-clubs, and a plentiful use of books from the excellently
+chosen free village library.  They say frankly that the summer folks have
+no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone, and I am sure that the
+gayeties to which we leave them must be more tolerable than those which
+we go back to in the city.  It may be, however, that I am too confident,
+and that their gayeties are only different.  I should really like to know
+just what the entertainments are which are given in a building devoted to
+them in a country neighborhood three or four miles from the village.  It
+was once a church, but is now used solely for social amusements.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The amusements of the summer colony I have already hinted at.  Besides
+suppers, there are also teas, of larger scope, both afternoon and
+evening.  There are hops every week at the two largest hotels, which are
+practically free to all; and the bathing-beach is, of course, a supreme
+attraction.  The bath-houses, which are very clean and well equipped,
+are not very cheap, either for the season or for a single bath, and there
+is a pretty pavilion at the edge of the sands.  This is always full of
+gossiping spectators of the hardy adventurers who brave tides too remote
+from the Gulf Stream to be ever much warmer than sixty or sixty-five
+degrees.  The bathers are mostly young people, who have the courage of
+their pretty bathing-costumes or the inextinguishable ardor of their
+years.  If it is not rather serious business with them all, still I
+admire the fortitude with which some of them remain in fifteen minutes.
+Beyond our colony, which calls itself the Port, there is a far more
+populous watering-place, east of the Point, known as the Beach, which is
+the resort of people several grades of gentility lower than ours: so
+many, in fact, that we never can speak of the Beach without averting our
+faces, or, at the best, with a tolerant smile.  It is really a succession
+of beaches, all much longer and, I am bound to say, more beautiful than
+ours, lined with rows of the humbler sort of summer cottages known as
+shells, and with many hotels of corresponding degree.  The cottages may
+be hired by the week or month at about two dollars a day, and they are
+supposed to be taken by inland people of little social importance.  Very
+likely this is true; but they seemed to be very nice, quiet people, and I
+commonly saw the ladies reading, on their verandas, books and magazines,
+while the gentlemen sprayed the dusty road before them with the garden
+hose.  The place had also for me an agreeable alien suggestion, and in
+passing the long row of cottages I was slightly reminded of Scheveningen.
+Beyond the cottage settlements is a struggling little park, dedicated to
+the only Indian saint I ever heard of, though there may be others.  His
+statue, colossal in sheet-lead, and painted the copper color of his race,
+offers any heathen comer the choice between a Bible in one of his hands
+and a tomahawk in the other, at the entrance of the park; and there are
+other sheet-lead groups and figures in the white of allegory at different
+points.  It promises to be a pretty enough little place in future years,
+but as yet it is not much resorted to by the excursions which largely
+form the prosperity of the Beach.  The concerts and the "high-class
+vaudeville" promised have not flourished in the pavilion provided for
+them, and one of two monkeys in the zoological department has perished of
+the public inattention.  This has not fatally affected the captive bear,
+who rises to his hind legs, and eats peanuts and doughnuts in that
+position like a fellow-citizen.  With the cockatoos and parrots, and the
+dozen deer in an inclosure of wire netting, he is no mean attraction; but
+he does not charm the excursionists away from the summer village at the
+shore, where they spend long afternoons splashing among the waves, or in
+lolling groups of men, women, and children on the sand.  In the more
+active gayeties, I have seen nothing so decided during the whole season
+as the behavior of three young girls who once came up out of the sea, and
+obliged me by dancing a measure on the smooth, hard beach in their
+bathing-dresses.
+
+I thought it very pretty, but I do not believe such a thing could have
+been seen on OUR beach, which is safe from all excursionists, and sacred
+to the cottage and hotel life of the Port.
+
+Besides our beach and its bathing, we have a reading-club for the men,
+evolved from one of the old native houses, and verandaed round for summer
+use; and we have golf-links and a golf club-house within easy trolley
+reach.  The links are as energetically, if not as generally, frequented
+as the sands, and the sport finds the favor which attends it everywhere
+in the decay of tennis.  The tennis-courts which I saw thronged about by
+eager girl-crowds, here, seven years ago, are now almost wholly abandoned
+to the lovers of the game, who are nearly always men.
+
+Perhaps the only thing (besides, of course, our common mortality) which
+we have in common with the excursionists is our love of the trolley-line.
+This, by its admirable equipment, and by the terror it inspires in
+horses, has well-nigh abolished driving; and following the old country
+roads, as it does, with an occasional short-cut though the deep, green-
+lighted woods or across the prismatic salt meadows, it is of a
+picturesque variety entirely satisfying.  After a year of fervent
+opposition and protest, the whole community--whether of summer or of
+winter folks--now gladly accepts the trolley, and the grandest cottager
+and the lowliest hotel dweller meet in a grateful appreciation of its
+beauty and comfort.
+
+Some pass a great part of every afternoon on the trolley, and one lady
+has achieved celebrity by spending four dollars a week in trolley-rides.
+The exhilaration of these is varied with an occasional apprehension when
+the car pitches down a sharp incline, and twists almost at right angles
+on a sudden curve at the bottom without slacking its speed.  A lady who
+ventured an appeal to the conductor at one such crisis was reassured, and
+at the same time taught her place, by his reply: "That motorman's life,
+ma'am, is just as precious to him as what yours is to you."
+
+She had, perhaps, really ventured too far, for ordinarily the employees
+of the trolley do not find occasion to use so much severity with their
+passengers.  They look after their comfort as far as possible, and seek
+even to anticipate their wants in unexpected cases, if I may believe a
+story which was told by a witness.  She had long expected to see some one
+thrown out of the open car at one of the sharp curves, and one day she
+actually saw a woman hurled from the seat into the road.  Luckily the
+woman slighted on her feet, and stood looking round in a daze.
+
+"Oh! oh!" exclaimed another woman in the seat behind, "she's left her
+umbrella!"
+
+The conductor promptly threw it out to her.
+
+"Why," demanded the witness, "did that lady wish to get out here?"
+
+The conductor hesitated before he jerked the bellpull to go on: Then he
+said, "Well, she'll want her umbrella, anyway."
+
+The conductors are, in fact, very civil as well as kind.  If they see a
+horse in anxiety at the approach of the car, they considerately stop, and
+let him get by with his driver in safety.  By such means, with their
+frequent trips and low fares, and with the ease and comfort of their
+cars, they have conciliated public favor, and the trolley has drawn
+travel away from the steam railroad in such measure that it ran no trains
+last winter.
+
+The trolley, in fact, is a fad of the summer folks this year; but what it
+will be another no one knows; it may be their hissing and by-word.  In
+the mean time, as I have already suggested, they have other amusements.
+These are not always of a nature so general as the trolley, or so
+particular as the tea.  But each of the larger hotels has been fully
+supplied with entertainments for the benefit of their projectors, though
+nearly everything of the sort had some sort of charitable slant.  I
+assisted at a stereopticon lecture on Alaska for the aid of some youthful
+Alaskans of both sexes, who were shown first in their savage state, and
+then as they appeared after a merely rudimental education, in the
+costumes and profiles of our own civilization.  I never would have
+supposed that education could do so much in so short a time; and I gladly
+gave my mite for their further development in classic beauty and a final
+elegance.  My mite was taken up in a hat, which, passed round among the
+audience, is a common means of collecting the spectators' expressions of
+appreciation.  Other entertainments, of a prouder frame, exact an
+admission fee, but I am not sure that these are better than some of the
+hat-shows, as they are called.
+
+The tale of our summer amusements would be sadly incomplete without some
+record of the bull-fights given by the Spanish prisoners of war on the
+neighboring island, where they were confined the year of the war.
+Admission to these could be had only by favor of the officers in charge,
+and even among the Elite of the colony those who went were a more elect
+few.  Still, the day I went, there were some fifty or seventy-five
+spectators, who arrived by trolley near the island, and walked to the
+stockade which confined the captives.  A real bull-fight, I believe, is
+always given on Sunday, and Puritan prejudice yielded to usage even in
+the case of a burlesque bull-fight; at any rate, it was on a Sunday that
+we crouched in an irregular semicircle on a rising ground within the
+prison pale, and faced the captive audience in another semicircle, across
+a little alley for the entrances and exits of the performers.  The
+president of the bull-fight was first brought to the place of honor in a
+hand-cart, and then came the banderilleros, the picadores, and the
+espada, wonderfully effective and correct in white muslin and colored
+tissue-paper.  Much may be done in personal decoration with advertising
+placards; and the lofty mural crown of the president urged the public on
+both sides to Use Plug Cut.  The picador's pasteboard horse was attached
+to his middle, fore and aft, and looked quite the sort of hapless jade
+which is ordinarily sacrificed to the bulls.  The toro himself was
+composed of two prisoners, whose horizontal backs were covered with a
+brown blanket; and his feet, sometimes bare and sometimes shod with
+india-rubber boots, were of the human pattern.  Practicable horns, of a
+somewhat too yielding substance, branched from a front of pasteboard, and
+a cloth tail, apt to come off in the charge, swung from his rear.  I have
+never seen a genuine corrida, but a lady present, who had, told me that
+this was conducted with all the right circumstance; and it is certain
+that the performers entered into their parts with the artistic gust of
+their race.  The picador sustained some terrific falls, and in his
+quality of horse had to be taken out repeatedly and sewed up; the
+banderilleros tormented and eluded the toro with table-covers, one red
+and two drab, till the espada took him from them, and with due ceremony,
+after a speech to the president, drove his blade home to the bull's
+heart.  I stayed to see three bulls killed; the last was uncommonly
+fierce, and when his hindquarters came off or out, his forequarters
+charged joyously among the aficionados on the prisoners' side, and made
+havoc in their thickly packed ranks.  The espada who killed this bull was
+showered with cigars and cigarettes from our side.
+
+I do not know what the Sabbath-keeping shades of the old Puritans made of
+our presence at such a fete on Sunday; but possibly they had got on so
+far in a better life as to be less shocked at the decay of piety among us
+than pleased at the rise of such Christianity as had brought us, like
+friends and comrades, together with our public enemies in this harmless
+fun.  I wish to say that the tobacco lavished upon the espada was
+collected for the behoof of all the prisoners.
+
+Our fiction has made so much of our summer places as the mise en scene of
+its love stories that I suppose I ought to say something of this side of
+our colonial life.  But after sixty I suspect that one's eyes are poor
+for that sort of thing, and I can only say that in its earliest and
+simplest epoch the Port was particularly famous for the good times that
+the young people had.  They still have good times, though whether on just
+the old terms I do not know.  I know that the river is still here with
+its canoes and rowboats, its meadowy reaches apt for dual solitude, and
+its groves for picnics.  There is not much bicycling--the roads are rough
+and hilly--but there is something of it, and it is mighty pretty to see
+the youth of both sexes bicycling with their heads bare.  They go about
+bareheaded on foot and in buggies, too, and the young girls seek the tan
+which their mothers used so anxiously to shun.
+
+The sail-boats, manned by weather-worn and weatherwise skippers, are
+rather for the pleasure of such older summer folks as have a taste for
+cod-fishing, which is here very good.  But at every age, and in whatever
+sort our colonists amuse themselves, it is with the least possible
+ceremony.  It is as if, Nature having taken them so hospitably to her
+heart, they felt convention an affront to her.  Around their cottages, as
+I have said, they prefer to leave her primitive beauty untouched, and she
+rewards their forbearance with such a profusion of wild flowers as I have
+seen nowhere else.  The low, pink laurel flushed all the stony fields to
+the edges of their verandas when we first came; the meadows were milk-
+white with daisies; in the swampy places delicate orchids grew, in the
+pools the flags and flowering rushes; all the paths and way-sides were
+set with dog-roses; the hollows and stony tops were broadly matted with
+ground juniper.  Since then the goldenrod has passed from glory to glory,
+first mixing its yellow-powdered plumes with the red-purple tufts of the
+iron-weed, and then with the wild asters everywhere.  There has come
+later a dwarf sort, six or ten inches high, wonderfully rich and fine,
+which, with a low, white aster, seems to hold the field against
+everything else, though the taller golden-rod and the masses of the high,
+blue asters nod less thickly above it.  But these smaller blooms deck the
+ground in incredible profusion, and have an innocent air of being stuck
+in, as if they had been fancifully used for ornament by children or
+Indians.
+
+In a little while now, as it is almost the end of September, all the
+feathery gold will have faded to the soft, pale ghosts of that
+loveliness.  The summer birds have long been silent; the crows, as if
+they were so many exultant natives, are shouting in the blue sky above
+the windrows of the rowan, in jubilant prescience of the depopulation of
+our colony, which fled the hotels a fortnight ago.  The days are growing
+shorter, and the red evenings falling earlier; so that the cottagers'
+husbands who come up every Saturday from town might well be impatient for
+a Monday of final return.  Those who came from remoter distances have
+gone back already; and the lady cottagers, lingering hardily on till
+October, must find the sight of the empty hotels and the windows of the
+neighboring houses, which no longer brighten after the chilly nightfall,
+rather depressing.  Every one says that this is the loveliest time of
+year, and that it will be divine here all through October.  But there are
+sudden and unexpected defections; there is a steady pull of the heart
+cityward, which it is hard to resist.  The first great exodus was on the
+first of the month, when the hotels were deserted by four-fifths of their
+guests.  The rest followed, half of them within the week, and within a
+fortnight none but an all but inaudible and invisible remnant were left,
+who made no impression of summer sojourn in the deserted trolleys.
+
+The days now go by in moods of rapid succession.  There have been days
+when the sea has lain smiling in placid derision of the recreants who
+have fled the lingering summer; there have been nights when the winds
+have roared round the cottages in wild menace of the faithful few who
+have remained.
+
+We have had a magnificent storm, which came, as an equinoctial storm
+should, exactly at the equinox, and for a day and a night heaped the sea
+upon the shore in thundering surges twenty and thirty feet high.  I
+watched these at their awfulest, from the wide windows of a cottage that
+crouched in the very edge of the surf, with the effect of clutching the
+rocks with one hand and holding its roof on with the other.  The sea was
+such a sight as I have not seen on shipboard, and while I luxuriously
+shuddered at it, I had the advantage of a mellow log-fire at my back,
+purring and softly crackling in a quiet indifference to the storm.
+
+Twenty-four hours more made all serene again.  Bloodcurdling tales of
+lobster-pots carried to sea filled the air; but the air was as blandly
+unconscious of ever having been a fury as a lady who has found her lost
+temper.  Swift alternations of weather are so characteristic of our
+colonial climate that the other afternoon I went out with my umbrella
+against the raw, cold rain of the morning, and had to raise it against
+the broiling sun.  Three days ago I could say that the green of the woods
+had no touch of hectic in it; but already the low trees of the swamp-land
+have flamed into crimson.  Every morning, when I look out, this crimson
+is of a fierier intensity, and the trees on the distant uplands are
+beginning slowly to kindle, with a sort of inner glow which has not yet
+burst into a blaze.  Here and there the golden-rod is rusting; but there
+seems only to be more and more asters sorts; and I have seen ladies
+coming home with sheaves of blue gentians; I have heard that the orchids
+are beginning again to light their tender lamps from the burning
+blackberry vines that stray from the pastures to the edge of the swamps.
+
+After an apparently total evanescence there has been a like resuscitation
+of the spirit of summer society.  In the very last week of September we
+have gone to a supper, which lingered far out of its season like one of
+these late flowers, and there has been an afternoon tea which assembled
+an astonishing number of cottagers, all secretly surprised to find one
+another still here, and professing openly a pity tinged with contempt for
+those who are here no longer.
+
+I blamed those who had gone home, but I myself sniff the asphalt afar;
+the roar of the street calls to me with the magic that the voice of the
+sea is losing.  Just now it shines entreatingly, it shines winningly, in
+the sun which is mellowing to an October tenderness, and it shines under
+a moon of perfect orb, which seems to have the whole heavens to itself in
+"the first watch of the night," except for "the red planet Mars."  This
+begins to burn in the west before the flush of sunset has passed from it;
+and then, later, a few moon-washed stars pierce the vast vault with their
+keen points.  The stars which so powdered the summer sky seem mostly to
+have gone back to town, where no doubt people take them for electric
+lights.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Ladies make up the pomps which they (the men) forego . . . . . . . . . .
+Summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone. . . . .
+Their consciences needed no bossing in the performance . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of a Summer Colonist,
+by William Dean Howells
+