at all the same extent as in the East.

The experience of Florindo and Lindora is easily parallelable in that of
innumerable other married pairs of American race, who were the primitive
joke of the paragrapher and the caricaturist when the day of
farm-boarding began. Though the sun of that day has long set for
Florindo and Lindora, it seems to be still at the zenith for most young
couples beginning life on their forgotten terms, and the joke holds in
its pristine freshness with the lowlier satirists, who hunt the city
boarder in the country and the seaside boarding-houses. The Florindos
and the Lindoras of a little greater age and better fortune abound in
the summer hotels at the beaches and in the mountains, though at the
more worldly watering-places the cottagers have killed off the hotels,
as the graphic parlance has it. The hotels nowhere, perhaps, flourish in
their old vigor; except for a brief six weeks, when they are fairly
full, they languish along the rivers, among the hills, and even by the
shores of the mournful and misty Atlantic.

The summer cottage, in fine, is what Florindo and Lindora have typically
come to in so many cases that it may be regarded as the typical
experience of the easily circumstanced American of the East, if not of
the West. The slightest relaxation of the pressure of narrow domestic
things seems to indicate it, and the reader would probably be astonished
to find what great numbers of people, who are comparatively poor, have
summer cottages, though the cottage in most cases is perhaps as much
below the dignity of a real cottage as the sumptuous villas of Newport
are above it. Summer cottages with the great average of those who have
them began in the slightest and simplest of shanties, progressing toward
those simulacra of houses aptly called shells, and gradually arriving at
picturesque structures, prettily decorated, with all the modern
conveniences, in which one may spend two-thirds of the year and more of
one's income than one has a quiet conscience in.

It would not be so bad, if one could live in them simply, as Lindora
proposed doing when she made Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces
of life cannot be had for nothing, or anything like nothing, and when
you have a charming cottage, and are living on city terms in it, you
have the wish to have people see you doing it. This ambition leads to
endless and rather aimless hospitality, so that some Lindoras have been
known, after k