I was determined to evidence to my guests that they had reached the land of plenty, and before they had been with me a week, the Governor declared, with a sigh, “That he detested the sight of food.” I put him through a course of vapor baths, and galloped him daily. On one occasion, we visited the beach together, when the surf was full of people. We saw an enormously tall, Rubens-like woman, clad in a clinging garment of calico, exhilarated by the bath, jumping up and down, and in her ecstasy throwing her arms up over her head. “Who is the creature?” he exclaimed. “Is this allowed here! Why, man, you should not tolerate it a moment!” I gave one look at the female, and then, convulsed with laughter, seized his arm, exclaiming, “It is your wife’s English maid!” If I had given him an electric shock, he could not have sprung out of the wagon quicker. Rushing to the water’s edge, he shouted, “Down with you! down with you, this instant, you crazy jade! how dare you disgrace me in this way!” The poor girl, one could see, felt innocent of all wrong, but quitted the water at lightning speed when she saw the crowd the Governor had drawn around him. The first Cotillion Dinner ever given at Newport, I gave at my Bayside Farm. I chose a night when the moon would be at the full, and invited guests enough to make up a cotillion. We dined in the open air at 6 P.M., in the garden adjoining the farm-house, having the gable end of the house to protect us from the southerly sea breeze. In this way we avoided flies, the pest of Newport. In the house itself we could not have kept them from the table, while in the open air even a gentle breeze, hardly perceptible, rids you of them entirely. The farm-house kitchen was then near at hand for use. You sat on closely cut turf, and with the little garden filled with beautiful standing plants, the eastern side of the farm-house covered with vines, laden with pumpkins, melons, and cucumbers, all giving a mixture of bright color against a green background, with the whole farm lying before you, and beyond it the bay and the distant ocean, dotted over with sailing craft, the sun, sinking behind the Narragansett hills, bathing the Newport shore in golden light, giving you, as John Van Buren then said to me, “As much of the sea as you ever get from the deck of a yacht.” Add to this, the exquisite toilets which our women wear on such occasions, a table laden with every delicacy, and all in the merriest of moods, and you have a picture of enjoyment that no shut-in ball-room could present. No “pent-up Utica” then confined our powers. Men and women enjoyed a freedom that their rural surroundings permitted, and, like the lambs gambolling in the fields next them, they frisked about, and thus did away with much of the stiff conventionality pertaining to a city entertainment.