Yet your face is one to make people dream kind things of you, and I cannot keep my reveries away from it.

But in the mean time I neglect the momentous history which I have proposed to write, and leave my day's pleasurers to fade into the background of a fantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look without pain upon the discomforts which they suffer at this stage of their joyous enterprise. At the best, the portables of such a party are apt to be grievous embarrassments; a pack age of shawls and parasols and umbrellas and india - rubbers, however neatly made up at first, quickly degenerates into a shapeless mass, which has finally to be carried with as great tenderness as an ailing child; and the lunch is pretty sure to overflow the hand-bags and to eddy about you in paper parcels, while the bottle of claret, that bulges the side of one of the bags, and

"That will show itself without,"

defying your attempts to look as it were cold tea, gives a crushing touch of disreputability to the whole affair. Add to this the fact that but half the party have seats, and that the others have to sway and totter about the car in that sudden contact with all vari eties of fellow-men, to which we are accustomed in the cars, and you must allow that these poor merrymakers have reasons enough to rejoice when this part of their day's pleasure is over. They are so plainly bent upon a sail down the Harbor, that before they leave the car they become objects of public interest, and are at last made to give some account of themselves.

"Going for a sail, I presume?" Says a person Hitherto in conversation with the conductor. “Well, I wouldn't nd a sal myself to-day." -Yes" answers the head of the Pay, going to Gloucester.”

Guess not" says very coldly and decidedly, one of the passengers, who is reading that morning's Advertiser; and when the subject of this surmise locks at him for explanations, be adds,

"The City Council has chartered the boat for to-day."

Upon this the excursionists fall into great dismay and bitterness, and upbraid the City Council, and wonder why last night's Transcript said nothing about its oppressive action, and generally bewail their fate. But at last, being set down near Lewis's Wharf, they resolve to go somewhere, and they make up their warring minds upon Nahant, for the Nahant boat leaves the wharf nearest them; and so they hurry across to India Wharf, amidst barrels and bales and boxes and hacks and trucks, with interminable string-teams passing before them at every crossing.

"At any rate," says the leader of the expedition, "we shall see the Gardens of Maolis, — those enchanted gardens which have fairly been advertised into my dreams, and where I've been told,” he continues, with an effort to make the prospect an attractive one, yet not without a sense of the meagreness of the materials," they have a grotto and a wooden bull.”

Of course, there is no reason in nature why a wooden bull should be more pleasing than a fesh-and-blood bull, but it seems to encourage the company, and they set of again with renewed speed, and at last reach India Wharf in time to see the Nahant steamer packed full of excursionists, with a crowd of people still waiting to go aboard. It does not look inviting, and they hesitate. In a minute or two their spirits sink so low, that if they should see the wooden ball step out of a grot to on the deck of the steamer the spectacle could not revive them. At that instant they think, with a surprising singleness, of Nantasket Beach, and the bright colors in which the Gardens of Maclis but now appeared fade away, and they seem to see themselves sauntering along the beautiful shore, while the white-crested breakers crash upon the sand, and run up

*It ende carving lines of creairy spray," qute to the feet of that lotas-eating party,

"Nahant is all rocks," says the leader to Aunt Melissa, who hears him with a sweet and tranquil patience, and who would enjoy or suffer anything with the same expression; "and as you've never yet seen the open sea, it's fortunate that we go to Nantasket, for, of course, a beach is more characteristic. But now the object is to get there. The boat will be starting in a few moments, and I doubt whether we can walk it. How far is it," he asks, turning towards a respectable-looking man, "to Liverpool Wharf?"

"Well, it's consid'able ways," says the man, smiling.

"Then we must take a hack," says the pleasurer to his party. "Come on." "I've got a hack," observes the man, in a casual way, as if the fact might possibly interest.

“O, you have, have you? Well, then, put us into it, and drive to Liverpool Wharf; and hurry."

Either the distance was less than the hackman fancied, or else he drove thither with unheard-of speed, for two minutes later he set them down on Liverpool Wharf. But swiftly as they had come the steamer had been even more prompt, and she now turned to ward them a beautiful wake, as she pushed farther and farther out into the harbor.

The hackman took his two dollars for his four passengers, and was rapidly mounting his box,- probably to avoid idle reproaches. "Wait!" said "Wait!" said the chief pleasurer. Then, "When does the next boat leave?" he asked of the agent, who had emerged with a compassionate face from the waiting-rooms on the wharf.

say you did n't know that Liverpool Wharf was so near; but I don't think you've earned your money, and you ought to take us on to the Old Colony Depot for half-fares at the most."

The driver looked pained, as if some small tatters and shreds of conscience were flapping uncomfortably about his otherwise dismantled spirit. Then he seemed to think of his wife and family, for he put on the air of a man who had already made great sacrifices, and “I could n't, really, I could n't afford it," said he; and as the victims turned from him in disgust, he chirruped to his horses and drove off.

66 we

"Well," said the pleasurers, won't give it up. We will have our day's pleasure after all. But what can we do to kill five hours and a half? It's miles away from everything, and, besides, there's nothing even if we were there." At this image of their remoteness and the inherent desolation of Boston they could not suppress some sighs, and in the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waitingroom, which opened on the farther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of the benches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed, and thus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there till the boat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to alleviate the situation: he gave

them each the advertisement of his line of boats, neatly printed upon a card, and then he went away.

All this prospect of waiting would do well enough for the ladies of the party, but there is an impatience in the masculine fibre which does not brook the notion of such prolonged repose; and the leader of the excursion presently pretended an important errand up town, -nothing less, in fact, than to buy a tumbler out of which to drink their claret on the beach. A holiday is never like any other day to the man who takes it, and a festive halo seemed to enwrap the excursionist as he pushed on through the busy streets in the cool shadow of the vast granite palaces

wherein the genius of business loves to house itself in this money-making land, and inhaled the odors of great heaps of leather and spices and dry goods as he passed the open doorways, — odors that mixed pleasantly with the smell of the freshly watered streets. When he stepped into a crockery store to make his purchase a sense of pleasure-taking did not fail him, and he fell naturally into talk with the clerk about the weather and such pastoral topics. Even when he reached the establishment where his own business days were passed some glamour seemed to be cast upon familiar objects. To the disenchanted eye all things were as they were on all other dullish days of summer, even to the accustomed bore leaning up against his favorite desk and transfixing his habitual victim with his usual theme. Yet to the gaze of this pleasure-taker all was subtly changed, and he shook hands right and left as he entered, to the marked surprise of the objects of his effusion. He had merely come to get some newspapers to help pass away the long moments on the wharf, and when he had found these, he hurried back thither to hear what had happened during his absence.

It seemed that there had hardly ever been such an eventful period in the lives of the family before, and he listened to a minute account of it from Cousin Lucy. "You know, Frank," says she," that Sallie's one idea in life is to keep the baby from getting the whooping cough, and I declare that these premises have done nothing but re-echo with the most dolorous whoops ever since you've been gone, so that at times, in my fear that Sallie would think I'd been careless about the boy, I've been ready to throw myself into the water, and nothing's prevented me but the doubt whether it would n't be better to throw in the whoopers instead."

At this moment a pale little girl, with a face wan and sad through all its dirt, came and stood in the doorway nearest the baby, and in another in

stant she had burst into a whoop so terrific that, if she had meant to have his scalp next it could not have been more dreadful. Then she subsided into a deep and pathetic quiet, with that air peculiar to the victims of her disorder of having done nothing noticeable. But her outburst had set at work the mysterious machinery of half a dozen other whooping-coughers lurking about the building, and all unseen they wound themselves up with appalling rapidity, and in the utter silence which followed left one to think they had died at the climax.

"Why, it's a perfect whooping-cough factory, this place," cries Cousin Lucy in a desperation. "Go away, do, please, from the baby, you poor little dreadful object, you," she continues, turning upon the only visible operative in the establishment. "Here, take this"; and she bribes her with a bit of sponge-cake, on which the child runs lightly off along the edge of the wharf. "That's been another of their projects for driving me wild," says Cousin Lucy,-"trying to take their own lives in a hundred ways before my face and eyes. Why will their mothers let them come here to play ?”

Really, they were very melancholy little figures, and might have gone near to make one sad, even if they had not been constantly imperilling their lives. Thanks to its being summer-time, it did not much matter about the scantiness of their clothing, but their squalor was depressing, it seemed, even to themselves, for they were a mournfullooking set of children, and in their dangerous sports trifled silently and almost gloomily with death. There were none of them above eight or nine years of age, and most of them had the care of smaller brothers, or even babes in arms, whom they were thus early inuring to the perils of the situation. The boys were dressed in pantaloons and shirts which no excess of rolling up in the legs and arms could make small enough, and the incorrigible toobigness of which rendered the favorite amusements still more hazardous from

their liability to trip and entangle the wearers. The little girls had on each a solitary garment, which hung about their gaunt persons with antique severity of outline; while the babies were multitudinously swathed in whatever fragments of dress could be tied or pinned or plastered on. Their faces were strikingly and almost ingeniously dirty, and their distractions among the coal-heaps and cord-wood constantly added to the variety and advantage of these effects.

"Why do their mothers let them come here?" muses Frank aloud. “Why, because it's so safe, Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, they'd have to be playing upon the sills of fourth-floor windows, and here they're out of the way and can't hurt themselves. Why, Cousin Lucy, this is their park, — their Public Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their Cascine. And look at their gloomy little faces ! Aren't they taking their pleasure in the spirit of the very highest fashion? I was at Newport last summer, and saw the famous driving on the Avenue in those pony phaetons, dog-carts, and tubs, and three-story carriages with a pair of footmen perching like storks upon each gable, and I assure you that all those ornate and costly phantasms (it seems to me now like a sad, sweet vision) had just the expression of these poor children. We're taking a day's pleasure ourselves, cousin, but nobody would know it from our looks. And has nothing but whooping-cough happened since I've been gone?"

"Yes, we seem to be so cut off from every-day associations that I've imagined myself a sort of tourist, and I've been to that Catholic church over yonder, in hopes of seeing the Murillos and Raphaels; but I found it locked up, and so I trudged back without a sight of the masterpieces. But what's the reason that all the shops hereabouts have nothing but luxuries for sale? Their windows are perfect trop ics of oranges, and lemons, and belated bananas, and tobacco, and peanuts."

"Well, the poor really seem to use more of those luxuries than anybody else. I don't blame them. I should n't care for the necessaries of life myself, if I found them so hard to get."

"When I came back here," says Cousin Lucy, without heeding these flippant and heartless words, "I found an old gentleman who has something to do with the boats, and he sat down, as if it were part of his business, and told me nearly the whole history of his life. Isn't it nice of them, keeping an Autobiographer? It makes the time pass so swiftly when you're waiting. This old gentleman was born - who'd ever think it? up there in Pearl Street, where those pitiless big granite stores are now; and, I don't know why, but the idea of any human baby being born in Pearl Street seemed to me one of the saddest things I'd ever heard of."

Here Cousin Lucy went to the rescue of the nurse and the baby, who had got into one of their periodical difficulties, and her interlocutor turned to Aunt Melissa.

"I think, Franklin," says Aunt Melissa, "that it was wrong to let that nurse come and bring the baby.”

"Yes, I know, aunty, you have those old-established ideas, and they're very right," answers her nephew; "but just consider how much she enjoys it, and how vastly the baby adds to the pleasure of this charming excursion!"

Aunt Melissa made no reply, but sat looking thoughtfully out upon the bay. "I presume you think the excursion is a failure," she said, after a while; "but I've been enjoying every minute of the time here. Of course, I 've never seen the open sea, and I don't know about it, but I feel here just as if I were spending a day at the seaside."

"Well," said her nephew, "I should n't call this exactly a watering-place. It lacks the splendor and gayety of Newport, in a certain degree, and it has n't the illustrious seclusion of Nahant. The surf is n't very fine, nor the beach particularly adapted to bathing;

and yet, I must confess, the outlook from here is as lovely as anything one need have."

And to tell the truth, it was very pretty and interesting. The landward environment was as commonplace and mean as it could be: a yardful of dismal sheds for coal and lumber, and shanties for offices, with each office its safe and its desk, its whittled arm-chair and its spittoon, its fly that shooed not, but buzzed desperately against the grimy pane, which, if it had really had that boasted microscopic eye, it never would have mistaken for the unblemished daylight. Outside of this yard was the usual wharfish neighborhood, with its turmoil of trucks and carts and fleet express-wagons, its building up and pulling down, its discomfort and clamor of every sort, and its shops for the sale, not only of those luxuries which Lucy had mentioned, but of such domestic refreshments as lemon-pie and hulled-corn.

When, however, you turned your thoughts and eyes away from this aspect of it, and looked out upon the water, the neighborhood gloriously retrieved itself. There its poverty and vulgarity ceased, there its beauty and grace abounded. A light breeze ruffled the face of the bay, and the innumerable little sail-boats that dotted it took the sun and wind upon their wings, which they dipped almost into the sparkle of the water, and flew lightly hither and thither like gulls that loved the brine too well to rise wholly from it; larger ships, farther or nearer, puffed or shrank their sails as they came and

went on the errands of commerce, but always moved as if bent upon some dreamy affair of pleasure; the steamboats that shot vehemently across their tranquil courses seemed only gayer and vivider visions, but not more substantial; yonder, a black sea-going steamer passed out between the far-off islands, and at last left in the sky above those reveries of fortification, a whiff of sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a memory of battle; to the right, on some line of railroad, longplumed trains arrived and departed like pictures passed through the slide of a magic-lantern: even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction, seemed to have no malice in the blows which, after a loud clucking, it dealt the pile, and one understood that it was mere conventional violence like that of a Punch to his baby.

"Why, what a lotus-eating life this is!" said Frank, at last. "Aunt Melissa, I don't wonder you think it's like the seaside. It's a great deal better than the seaside. And now, just as we've entered into the spirit of it, the time 's up for the Rose Standish to come and bear us from its delights. When will the boat be in?" he asked of the Autobiographer, whom Lucy had pointed out to him.

“Well, she's ben in half an hour, now. There she lays just outside the John Romer."

There to be sure she lay, and those pleasure-takers had been so lost in the rapture of waiting and the beauty of the scene as never to have noticed her arrival.

W. D. Howells.