ose extent he had measured on foot a
couple of hours before, into the ancient town, as it was called in that
part of the world, of Newport. The ancient town was a curious affair--a
collection of fresh-looking little wooden houses, painted white,
scattered over a hillside and clustered about a long straight street
paved with enormous cobblestones. There were plenty of shops--a large
proportion of which appeared to be those of fruit vendors, with piles
of huge watermelons and pumpkins stacked in front of them; and, drawn up
before the shops, or bumping about on the cobblestones, were innumerable
other basket phaetons freighted with ladies of high fashion, who greeted
each other from vehicle to vehicle and conversed on the edge of the
pavement in a manner that struck Lord Lambeth as demonstrative, with a
great many "Oh, my dears," and little quick exclamations and caresses.
His companion went into seventeen shops--he amused himself with counting
them--and accumulated at the bottom of the phaeton a pile of bundles
that hardly left the young Englishman a place for his feet. As she had
no groom nor footman, he sat in the phaeton to hold the ponies, where,
although he was not a particularly acute observer, he saw much to
entertain him--especially the ladies just mentioned, who wandered up
and down with the appearance of a kind of aimless intentness, as if they
were looking for something to buy, and who, tripping in and out of
their vehicles, displayed remarkably pretty feet. It all seemed to Lord
Lambeth very odd, and bright, and gay. Of course, before they got back
to the villa, he had had a great deal of desultory conversation with
Bessie Alden.

The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of
many successive days in what the French call the intimite of their new
friends. They agreed that it was extremely jolly, that they had never
known anything more agreeable. It is not proposed to narrate minutely
the incidents of their sojourn on this charming shore; though if it
were convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless
delectable that they were not exhaustively analyzed. Many of them still
linger in the minds of our travelers, attended by a train of harmonious
images--images of brilliant mornings on lawns and piazzas that
overlooked the sea; of innumerable pretty girls; of infinite lounging
and talking and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of
universal friendliness and frankness;