“No, sir; not to-day. I have a call--a visit--some miles off.” And while he was yet stammering out his excuses, Martin waved a familiar good-bye with his hand, and passed into the adjoining room. “And what can this mean?” said Nelligan to himself. “Is this the cordial treatment of an intimate, or is it contemptuous indifference for an inferior?” And, far more puzzled than he should have been with the knottiest problem of the “Principia,” he quitted the house and strolled homewards. His way led along the shore, and consequently in front of that straggling row of cottages which formed the village. It chanced to be the last day of the month, and, by the decree of the almanac, the close of the bathing-season. The scene then going forward was one of unusual and not unpicturesque confusion. It was a general break-up of the encampment, and all were preparing to depart to their homes, inland. Had young Nelligan been--what he was not--anything of a humorist, he might have been amused at the variety of equipage and costume around him. Conveyances the most cumbrous and most rickety, drawn by farm horses, or even donkeys, stopped the way before each door, all in process of loading by a strangely attired assemblage, whose Welsh wigs, flannel dressing-gowns, and woollen nightcaps showed how, by a common consent, all had agreed to merge personal vanity in the emergency of the moment. The innumerable little concealments which had sheltered many a narrow household, the various little stratagems that had eked out many a scanty wardrobe, were now abandoned with a noble sincerity; and had there been a cork leg or a glass eye in the company, it would not have shrunk from the gaze of that open-hearted community. Such of the travellers as had taken their places were already surrounded with the strangest medley of household gods it is possible to conceive. Like trophies, bird-cages, candlesticks, spits, cullenders, fenders, and bread-baskets bristled around them, making one marvel how they ever got in, or, still more, how they were ever to get out again; the croaking of invalids, with crying children, barking terriers, and scolding owners, making a suitable chorus to the confusion. Still, amidst all the discomforts of the moment, amidst the last wranglings with landlords, and the last squabbles over broken furniture and missing movables, it must be owned that the prevailing temper of the scene was good-humor and jollity. The Irish temperament seems ever to discover something congenial in those incidents of confusion and bustle which to other people are seasons of unmitigated misery, and even out of its own sources of discomfiture can derive matter for that quaint humor with which it can always regard life. In this wise was it that few now dwelt much upon their own inconveniences, so long as they were free to laugh at those of their neighbors.