_June 25th._--Newport has not yet put on its festive attire. It is not the season, and we ought not to be here. Nevertheless it is still so pleasant, and so respectably dull, that one enjoys it amazingly. After breakfast we walked down to the seashore and sat gazing on vacancy, and on three yellow ladies collecting clams. Returning thence in a very hot sun, ran to earth in the hotel where, presently, there were many visitors; and how kind and anxious to please they were! Mr. Fearing drove up later on the top of a drag, and whirled us away to a charming fishing-box on the shore, in order to judge for ourselves what bass-fishing was like. It was a very pretty drive, and Mr. Fearing handled his "four" as if he were bent on joining the Coaching Club--not indiscreetly, as the horses were not accustomed to going together, but with satisfactory decision--and we all were landed without mishap by the side of the road, close to one of the best-organised sporting-boxes I have ever seen, built entirely for the comfort and delectation of Mr. Fearing and two or three friends who own the bass-fishing stands, at the end of one of which a gentleman was then busily engaged in his pastime, for the sea comes rolling up upon the rocks within some forty or fifty yards of the sward of the green meadows on which the house is placed. From it projects into the breakers a platform supported on iron pillars, at the end of which there is an enlargement of the structure to enable the fisherman and his attendants to stand at their ease--the one in hurling the bait and the other in preparing it. And first, as a proof that the labour is not futile, there was exhibited a terrible-headed monster with great scales, which had been caught that morning by Mr. Whipple--a bass of 57 lbs. weight, of which I think the skull and jaws and gills must have weighed a third. The fishing is not, as I found, to be done at once, but needs a little practice. The art of casting consists in the double operation of jerking the bait from the top of a stiff rod, and checking the run of the line without permitting it to overrun, which it is very apt to do in an inexperienced hand, by a pressure of the thumb on the reel, just sufficient to let the weight of the bait carry out the hook to the farthest stretch of the jerk. The rod, not more than eight or nine feet long, a work of great art, and costly, is furnished with a reel, also very expensive, containing a couple of hundred yards of prepared line. At the end is a large single hook, sometimes secured to a piece of piano-wire, as the "blue fish" will cut through the strongest cord or gut. To this is fixed a junk of fat oily fish, of which supplies are kept in a basket close at hand, to be cut up for ever and ever by the attendant, and ever and anon pieces are chucked into the sea, and being of a very unctuous nature, the oil rising to the top, floats away on the surface of the water, and attracts the bass within measurable distance of the platform.