"That's the reason why Miss Trehearne has them to stay with her. Excuse me—I can't get a light in this wind." 

 Thereupon Lawrence turned away and got under the lee of the deck saloon, leaving the Professor to himself. Having lighted his cigarette, the artist went forward and stood in the sharp head-breeze that seemed to blow through and through him, disinfecting his whole being from the hot, close air of the train he had left half an hour earlier. 

 Bar Harbour, in common speech, includes Frenchman's Bay, the island of Mount Desert, and the other small islands lying near it,—an extensive tract of land and sea. As a matter of fact, the name belongs to the little harbour between Bar Island and Mount Desert, together with the village which has grown to be the centre of civilization, since the whole place has become fashionable. Earth, sky, and water are of the north,—hard, bright, and cold. In artists' slang, there is no atmosphere. The dark green islands, as one looks at them, seem to be almost before the foreground. The picture is beautiful, and some people call it grand; but it lacks depth. There is something fiercely successful about the colour of it, something brilliantly self-reliant. It suggests a certain type of handsome woman—of the kind that need neither repentance nor cosmetics, and are perfectly sure of the fact, whose virtue is too cold to be kind, and whose complexion is not shadowed by passion, nor softened by suffering, nor even washed pale with tears. Only the sea is eloquent. The deep-breathing tide runs forward to the feet of the over-perfect, heartless earth, to linger and plead love's story while he may; then sighing sadly, sweeps back unsatisfied, baring his desolate bosom to her loveless scorn. 

 The village, the chief centre, lies by the water's edge, facing the islands which enclose the natural harbour. It was and is a fishing village, like many another on the coast. In the midst of it, vast wooden hotels, four times as high as the houses nearest to them, have sprung up to lodge fashion in six-storied discomfort. The effect is astonishing; for the blatant architect, gesticulating in soft wood and ranting in paint, as it were, has sketched an evil dream of mediævalism, incoherent with itself and with the very common-place facts of the village street. There, also, in Mr. Bee's shop window, are plainly visible the more or less startling covers of the newest books, while from on high frowns down the counterfeit presentment of battlements and turrets, and of such terrors as lent like interest when novels were not, neither was the 

 Prev. P 5/79 next