The young folks, further south, have, it is true, a sort of penance they call a pic-nic; but a pic-nic is no more like a clam-bake than vinegar is like champaigne. Imagine a dozen couple packed into an omnibus, after having got up before day—a thing no sane man was ever known to do—jolting over dusty roads for an hour or two, and then sitting down on the damp grass, on a greenish rock, or on a decaying trunk, to breakfast on cold ham and insipid water. Call you that fun? And, by and bye, the sentimental ones will wander off into the woods to read Tom Moore in company or alone—while those who affect field sports, Heaven save the mark! will go bobbing for eels with a skewer, or fish for trout in still waters and with a float. Others may rig out a rickety, leaky scow, shaded by an awning not bigger than a sun-screen, and take a sail—the gentlemen shoving the ark along with poles, and the ladies, all dressed in white, sitting with their feet in the water and singing “The Gondolier’s Song,” or “Shall we go a sailing!” Then, at noon, when the sun is hot enough to broil a steak, and the sweet dears’ faces look as flushed as a cook’s, they will huddle around a table cloth spread on the dusty grass, and try to keep each other in countenance by eating the remnants of their breakfast, washing the whole down with the interminable water, or lemonade so sour that a cupful would carry off a regiment with the cholera. Toward night they will start for home, regarding it as “a crowning mercy,” as old Noll would say, if a thunder storm doesn’t come up, and drench them through. Egad! it would make the tears run down your cheeks with laughter, if you could only see a pic-nic party after a shower—all draggled and dirty, dripping like drowned rats, or, to be more complimentary, like mermaids, hungry, tired, out of humor, and looking as unlike the dear angels we love as a radish looks unlike a claret bottle.