Fancifully but rather neatly painted, and with a stable to match,
it looked like an exotic. As I drew near, its venerable owner was at
work in front of it, shoveling a path through the sand,--just as, at
that moment (February 24), thousands of Yankee householders were
shoveling paths through the snow, which then was reported by the
newspapers to be seventeen inches deep in the streets of Boston. His
reverend air and his long black coat proclaimed him a clergyman past all
possibility of doubt. He seemed to have got to heaven before death, the
place was so attractive; but being still in a body terrestrial, he may
have found the meat market rather distant, and mosquitoes and sand-flies
sometimes a plague. As I walked up the beach, he drove by me in an open
wagon with a hired man. They kept on till they came to a log which had
been cast up by the sea, and evidently had been sighted from the house.
The hired man lifted it into the wagon, and they drove back,--quite a
stirring adventure, I imagined; an event to date from, at the very
least.
The smaller cottages were nearly all empty at that season. At different
times I made use of many of them, when the sun was hot, or I had been
long afoot. Once I was resting thus on a flight of front steps, when a
three-seated carriage came down the beach and pulled up opposite. The
driver wished to ask me a question, I thought; no doubt I looked very
much at home.
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