common, straight-waisted, flat-chested variety. One
girl who was alone, with a city air, a neat, firm figure, in a traveling
suit of elegant simplicity, was fond of taking attitudes about the
rails, and watching the effect produced on the spectators. There was
a blue-eyed, sharp-faced, rather loose-jointed young girl, who had the
manner of being familiar with the boat, and talked readily and freely
with anybody, keeping an eye occasionally on her sister of eight years,
a child with a serious little face in a poke-bonnet, who used the
language of a young lady of sixteen, and seemed also abundantly able to
take care of herself. What this mite of a child wants of all things, she
confesses, is a pug-faced dog. Presently she sees one come on board in
the arms of a young lady at Wood's Holl. "No," she says, "I won't ask
her for it; the lady wouldn't give it to me, and I wouldn't waste
my breath;" but she draws near to the dog, and regards it with rapt
attention. The owner of the dog is a very pretty black-eyed girl
with banged hair, who prattles about herself and her dog with perfect
freedom. She is staying at Cottage City, lives at Worcester, has been
up to Boston to meet and bring down her dog, without which she couldn't
live another minute. "Perhaps," she says, "you know Dr. Ridgerton, in
Worcester; he's my brother. Don't you know him? He's a chiropodist."

These girls are all types of the skating-rink--an institution which is
beginning to express itself in American manners.

The band was playing on the pier when the steamer landed at Cottage City
(or Oak Bluff, as it was formerly called), and the pier and the gallery
leading to it were crowded with spectators, mostly women a pleasing
mingling of the skating-rink and sewing-circle varieties--and gayety
was apparently about setting in with the dusk. The rink and the ground
opposite the hotel were in full tilt. After supper King and Forbes took
a cursory view of this strange encampment, walking through the streets
of fantastic tiny cottages among the scrub oaks, and saw something of
family life in the painted little boxes, whose wide-open front
doors gave to view the whole domestic economy, including the bed,
centre-table, and melodeon. They strolled also on the elevated plank
promenade by the beach, encountering now and then a couple enjoying the
lovely night. Music abounded. The circus-pumping strains burst out of
the rink, calling to a gay and perhaps dissolute life. The