boys standing behind us very upright, with their wool hats set far back on their heads, and they pointing and staring about as only very young gentlemen from the country can stare and point, while I, poor victim, sat crouching behind Mr. J., my calash drawn to its utmost extension over my face, and my parasol directed with a reference to the side-walk rather than to the sun. I was young, sensitive, and perhaps a little too keenly alive to the ridiculous, and if I did not feel exactly like a criminal going to execution, I did feel as if some old lady’s fruit stall had been robbed and I was the suspected person. When about three miles from town, we left our equipage, whose rattle had given me a headache, and, after walking along the shore awhile, Mrs. J. selected a spot of fresh grass, shaded by a clump of junipers, where she commenced preparations for dinner. First, with the assistance of her two boys, she dragged forth a basket that had been stowed away under the wagon seat—then a table-cloth, white as a snow drift, was spread on the grass—next appeared sundry bottles of cider and currant wine, with cakes of various kinds and dimensions, but mostly spiced with caraway seed. To these were added a cold tongue, a loaf of exquisite bread, a piece of cheese, a cup of butter covered with a cool cabbage leaf, and, last of all, a large chicken-pie, its edge pinched into regular scollops by Mrs. Johnson’s two thumbs, and the centre ornamented by the striking resemblance of a broken leaf, cut by the same ingenious artist in the original paste. Truly a day is like a human life, seldom all clouds or entire sunshine. The most gloomy is not all darkness, nor the most happy all light. When the remembrance of that sea-side dinner, under the juniper bushes, comes over me, I must acknowledge that my day of tribulation—with all its provoking incidents and petty vexations—had its hour of respite, if not of enjoyment. There we sat upon the grass in a refreshing shade, with nobody to look on as we cut the tender crust of that pie, while the cider and the currant wine sparkled in the two glasses which we circulated very promiscuously from lip to lip, while the cool wind came sweeping over us from the water, and the sunshine, that else had been too powerful, played and glittered every where about. A few yards from our feet the foam-crested waves swept the beach with their dash of perpetual music. The Sound, studded by a hundred snowy sails, lay out-stretched before us. Far on our right spread an extensive plain, with cattle grazing peacefully over it, and here and there a dwelling or a cluster of trees flinging their shadows on the grass. On our left was the town, with its houses rising, like palaces of snow, among the overhanging trees; its taper steeples pencilled in regular lines against the sky, and a picturesque extremity of the Green Mountains looming in the distance.