After a pleasant ride of an hour in the cars, they stepped out at a little way-station, where a carriage was awaiting them. About half a mile from this station, on a point of land hidden from it by a strip of thick woods, was their cottage. The place was quite solitary; not a house in sight landward, though summer cottages nestled all about among the hills, hidden in wild green nooks. But across the water, towns were visible in all directions. They drove with soundless wheels over a moist, brown road that wound and coiled through the woods. There had been a shower in the night that left everything washed, and the sky cloudless. It was yet scarcely ten o'clock; and the air, though warm, was fresh and still. The morning sunshine lay across the road, motionless between the motionless dense tree-shadows; both light and shade so still, so intense, they looked like a pavement of solid gold and amber. If, at intervals, a slight motion woke the woods, less like a breeze than a deep and gentle respiration of nature, and that leaf-and-flower-wrought pavement stirred through each glowing abaciscus, it was as though the solid earth were stirred. A faint sultry odor began to rise from the pine-tops, and from clumps of sweet-fern that stood in sunny spots; but the rank, long-stemmed flowers and trailing vines that grew under the trees were yet glistening with the undried shower; the shaded grass at the roadside was beaded, every blade, with minute sparkles of water; and here and there a pine-bough was thickly hung with drops that trembled with fulness at the points of its clustered emerald needles, and at a touch came clashing down in a shower that was distinctly heard through the silence. The birds were taking their forenoon rest; but, as the carriage rolled lightly past, a fanatical bobolink, who did not seem to have much common sense, but to be brimming over with the most glorious nonsense, swung himself down from some hidden perch, alighted in an utterly impossible manner on a spire of grass, and poured forth such a long-drawn, liquid, impetuous song, that it was a wonder there was anything of him left when it was over. Three pairs of hands were stretched to arrest the driver's arm; three smiling, breathless faces listened till the last note, and watched the ecstatic little warbler swim away with an undulating motion, as if he floated on the bubbling waves of his own song. {174} In a few minutes a turn of the road brought them in sight of the blue, salt water spread out boundlessly, sparkling, and sail-flecked; and presently they drove up at the cottage door. This was a long, low building, all wings, like a moth; colored, like fungi, of mottled browns and yellows; overtrailed by woodbines and honeysuckles, through which you sometimes only guessed at the windows by the white curtains blowing out.