A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold wind of last night has
blown the whole world clean of clouds. One has a sense of the globe
swinging in depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the
reaches of space.
The sea is blue as the sky. It quivers where the sun slants upon it,
and reflects the rays from myriad facets of steel. You cannot look at
it long there, but now you begin to understand what Tennyson meant when
he called it
“The million-spangled sapphire marriage-ring of the land.”
All day yesterday, which was the great day for the arriving European
steamers, they came hurrying in. We counted ten or twelve, each
blocking the length of an express train out of the rim of the horizon.
To-day there are none: only a few far-off full-sailed ships, and nearer
shore the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners, tilting and swaying,
and now and then flying in so close to the beach that we can see the
men on board, and trailing their small boats through a drift of foamy
sea.
There are twenty-three guests in the house now--the house that holds
a thousand! Two hunters came down with their guns Friday night, and
re-enforced us. After breakfast a gay group gathered on the great
midmost stairway of the veranda, and one of the men told the ladies
stories and made them laugh. Every one is acquainted now, and speaks
freely to every one else. It is rather weird. Should we be so civil if
we were normally conditioned?
We have a very good two-o’clock dinner: the cook still remembers it is
Sunday. After dinner two of us go down to the bathing-beach, and from
the spectators’ benches watch a soft-shell crab which has been bathing,
and is now lying in the warm sand where the rising tide has flung him.
We wait to see it reach him again, and draw him back, but it does not.
It seems to me that he is unhappy in the sun, and I take a stick and
tilt him into the sea. I do not know whether he likes that either; but
he cannot help himself. He could not help himself in the sun.