ll the
manners of the world and the freemasonry of fashionable life, it had
elected to be unconventional. The young ladies liked to appear in
nautical and lawn-tennis toilet, carried so far that one might refer
to the "cut of their jib," and their minds were not much given to any
elaborate dressing for evening. As to the young gentlemen, if there were
any dress-coats on the island, they took pains not to display them,
but delighted in appearing in the evening promenade, and even in the
ballroom, in the nondescript suits that made them so conspicuous in the
morning, the favorite being a dress of stripes, with striped jockey
cap to match, that did not suggest the penitentiary uniform, because in
state-prisons the stripes run round. This neglige costume was adhered
to even in the ballroom. To be sure, the ballroom was little frequented,
only an adventurous couple now and then gliding over the floor, and
affording scant amusement to the throng gathered on the piazza and about
the open windows. Mrs. Montrose, a stately dame of the old school,
whose standard was the court in the days of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster,
disapproved of this laxity, and when a couple of young fellows in
striped array one evening whirled round the room together, with
brier-wood pipes in their mouths, she was scandalized. If the young
ladies shared her sentiments they made no resolute protests, remembering
perhaps the scarcity of young men elsewhere, and thinking that it is
better to be loved by a lawn-tennis suit than not to be loved at all.
The daughters of Mrs. Montrose thought they should draw the line on the
brier-wood pipe.

Dancing, however, is not the leading occupation at Bar Harbor, it is
rather neglected. A cynic said that the chief occupation was to wait at
the "fishpond" for new arrivals--the young ladies angling while their
mothers and chaperons--how shall we say it to complete the figure?--held
the bait. It is true that they did talk in fisherman's lingo about this,
asked each other if they had a nibble or a bite, or boasted that they
had hauled one in, or complained that it was a poor day for fishing. But
this was all chaff, born of youthful spirits and the air of the place.
If the young men took airs upon themselves under the impression they
were in much demand, they might have had their combs cut if they had
heard how they were weighed and dissected and imitated, and taken off
as to their peculiarities, and known, most of them, by sob