orse, after the third I
improved, after the twelfth I walked fifty miles in one day; and now I
never do without it, I take never less than fifty bottles a year." So it
would be: "At first I felt just as you do, shut-in place, foggy, stayed
only two days. Only came back again to accompany friends, stayed a week,
foggy, didn't like it. Can't tell how I happened to come back again,
stayed a month, and I tell you, there is no place like it in America.
Spend all my summers here."

The genesis of Bar Harbor is curious and instructive. For many years,
like other settlements on Mount Desert Island; it had been frequented by
people who have more fondness for nature than they have money, and who
were willing to put up with wretched accommodations, and enjoyed a mild
sort of "roughing it." But some society people in New York, who have the
reputation of setting the mode, chanced to go there; they declared in
favor of it; and instantly, by an occult law which governs fashionable
life, Bar Harbor became the fashion. Everybody could see its preeminent
attractions. The word was passed along by the Boudoir Telephone from
Boston to New Orleans, and soon it was a matter of necessity for a
debutante, or a woman of fashion, or a man of the world, or a blase
boy, to show themselves there during the season. It became the scene
of summer romances; the student of manners went there to study the
"American girl." The notion spread that it was the finest sanitarium on
the continent for flirtations; and as trade is said to follow the flag,
so in this case real-estate speculation rioted in the wake of beauty and
fashion.

There is no doubt that the "American girl" is there, as she is at
divers other sea-and-land resorts; but the present peculiarity of
this watering-place is that the American young man is there also. Some
philosophers have tried to account for this coincidence by assuming that
the American girl is the attraction to the young man. But this seems to
me a misunderstanding of the spirit of this generation. Why are young
men quoted as "scarce" in other resorts swarming with sweet girls,
maidens who have learned the art of being agreeable, and interesting
widows in the vanishing shades of an attractive and consolable grief?
No. Is it not rather the cold, luminous truth that the American girl
found out that Bar Harbor, without her presence, was for certain
reasons, such as unconventionality, a bracing air, opportunity for
boating, etc., a