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. XIV. It is Monday morning now, and the world is wrapped in cold gray clouds, which seem to have meant something unpleasant to the fishing craft, for they have all vanished but two of the bolder sail. It rains a little and then stops. A wind, heavy with the salt breath of the sea, rises steadily, and bemoans itself in all the angles and projections of the house. The lanterns of the veranda, which have not been lighted for a week, rattle dolefully in the blast. Under them, the long line of rocking-chairs in which a quarter of a mile of ladies used to sit and gossip together stretches emptily away. The wind pushes against the tall backs of the chairs, and they rock softly to and fro, as if the ghosts of the gossipers invisibly filled them, and still inaudibly babbled on. Where some of the chairs are grouped facing one another, the effect is very creepy. Will they keep up their spectral colloquies all winter? I escape from this eery sight to my own room, and in the corridor, three uptown blocks away, I behold a small chambermaid balancing herself against a large bucket as she wavers slowly down. It is tragic.