red sand-ridge which fringes the shore. Each family builds
a temporary cane-hut, lightly thatched with palm-leaves, and floored
with petates or mats. The whole is wickered together with vines, or
woven together basketwise, and partitioned in the same way, by means
of coloured curtains of cotton cloth. This constitutes the penetralia,
and is sacred to the _bello sexo_ and the babies. The more luxurious
ladies bring down their neatly-curtained beds, and make no mean show
of elegance in the interior arrangements of their impromptu dwellings.
Outside, and something after the fashion of their permanent
residences, is a kind of broad and open shed, which bears a very
distant relation to the corridor. Here hammocks are swung, the
families dine, the ladies receive visitors, and the men sleep.... The
establishments here described pertain only to the wealthier visitors,
the representatives of the upper classes. There is every intermediate
variety, down to those of the _mozo_ and his wife, who spread their
blankets at the foot of a tree, and weave a little bower of branches
above them--an affair of ten or a dozen minutes. And there are yet
others who disdain even this exertion, and nestle in the dry sand.'

This kind of gipsying expedition to the sea in summer would hardly
suit the form of European, or at least British civilisation; but we do
not see why, in the one continent more than in the other, one's
country lodgings should be required to resemble a town-house. In the
Clyde, which we have mentioned as a resort for summer loiterers, there
is one exceptional place--the island of Arran. Here the Marquis of
Douglas has determined, with much good taste, that his property shall
not be vulgarised by the new style of country lodgings, and so far
from feuing the ground, he will not permit even a pier to be built for
the accommodation of visitors. The village, accordingly, is simply a
line of thatched cottages, which, in the fine season, are filled to
overflowing. A few houses of more pretension stand on the other side
of the bay; but, in general, no one sets his foot in Brodick who has
not made up his mind to rough it pretty much in the fashion of the
last generation. Sometimes, on the occasion of a holiday in Glasgow,
which is six hours' steaming distant, the village is flooded with a
moving population that can neither find house-room on the island nor
means of quitting it the same day. Then comes a scene of something
more than Mexic