in them
the visit of the young men had fatigued her. In the midst of her yawn
her daughter went out of the room, with an impatient gesture, and she
suspended the yawn long enough to smile, and then finished it.

XI.

After first going to the Owen, at Campobello, the Pasmers took rooms
at the Ty'n-y-Coed, which is so much gayer, even if it is not so
characteristic of the old Welsh Admiral's baronial possession of
the island. It is characteristic enough, and perched on its bluff
overlooking the bay, or whatever the body of water is, it sees a score
of pretty isles and long reaches of mainland coast, with a white marble
effect of white-painted wooden Eastport, nestled in the wide lap of the
shore, in apparent luxury and apparent innocence of smuggling and the
manufacture of herring sardines. The waters that wrap the island in
morning and evening fog temper the air of the latitude to a Newport
softness in summer, with a sort of inner coolness that is peculiarly
delicious, lulling the day with long calms and light breezes, and after
nightfall commonly sending a stiff gale to try the stops of the hotel's
gables and casements, and to make the cheerful blaze on its public
hearths acceptable. Once or twice a day the Eastport ferry-boat arrives,
with passengers from the southward, at a floating wharf that sinks or
swims half a hundred feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but all
night long the island is shut up to its own memories and devices. The
pretty romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sort
of feudal seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and its
fisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for the
aesthetic leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him and
his language in their names, and housing with a few cottages all the
sojourners on the island. By day the broad hotel piazzas shelter such of
the guests as prefer to let others make their excursions into the heart
of the island, and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders; and at night,
when the falling mists have brought the early dark, and from lighthouse
to lighthouse the fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzas
cede to the corridors and the parlours and smoking-rooms. The life does
not greatly differ from other seaside hotel life on the surface, and
if one were to make distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying that
hotel society there has much of the tone of cottage society elsewhere,