t,
and it gave a silvery definition to the gossamer threads running from
one grass spear to another in spacious networks over the open levels of
the old fields that stretch back from the bluff to the woods. At last
it grew thinner, somewhere over the bay; then you could see the smooth
water through it; then it drifted off in ragged fringes before a light
breeze: when you looked landward again it was all gone there, and
seaward it had gathered itself in a low, dun bank along the horizon. It
was the kind of fog that people interested in Campobello admitted as apt
to be common there, but claimed as a kind of local virtue when it began
to break away. They said that it was a very dry fog, not like Newport,
and asked you to notice that it did not wet you at all.

Four or five carriages, driven by the gentlemen of the party, held the
picnic, which was destined for that beautiful cove on the Bay of Fundy
where the red granite ledges, smooth-washed by ages of storm and sun,
lend themselves to such festivities as if they had been artificially
fashioned into shelves and tables. The whole place is yet so new to men
that this haunt has not acquired that air of repulsive custom which the
egg shells and broken bottles and sardine boxes of many seasons give.
Or perhaps the winter tempests heap the tides of the bay over the ledge,
and wash it clean of these vulgar traces of human resort, and enable it
to offer as fresh a welcome to the picnics of each successive summer as
if there had never been a picnic in that place before.

This was the sense that Mavering professed to have received from it,
when he jumped out of the beach wagon in which he had preceded the other
carriages through the weird forest lying between the fringe of farm
fields and fishing-villages on the western shore of the island and
these lonely coasts of the bay. As far as the signs of settled human
habitation last, the road is the good hard country road of New England,
climbing steep little hills, and presently leading through long tracts
of woodland. But at a certain point beyond the furthest cottage
you leave it, and plunge deep into the heart of the forest, vaguely
traversed by the wheel-path carried through since the island was opened
to summer sojourn. Road you can hardly call it, remembering its curious
pauses and hesitations when confronted with stretches of marshy ground,
and its staggering progress over the thick stubble of saplings through
which it is cut. T