Atlantic Coast (U.S.) -- Description and travel -- Fiction
The attraction of Bar Harbor is in the union of mountain and sea; the
mountains rise in granite majesty right out of the ocean. The traveler
expects to find a repetition of Mount Athos rising six thousand feet out
of the AEgean.
The Bar-Harborers made a mistake in killing--if they did kill--the
stranger who arrived at this resort from the mainland, and said it would
be an excellent sea-and-mountain place if there were any mountains
or any sea in sight. Instead, if they had taken him in a row-boat and
pulled him out through the islands, far enough, he would have had a
glimpse of the ocean, and if then he had been taken by the cog-railway
seventeen hundred feet to the top of Green Mountain, he would not
only have found himself on firm, rising ground, but he would have been
obliged to confess that, with his feet upon a solid mountain of granite,
he saw innumerable islands and, at a distance, a considerable quantity
of ocean. He would have repented his hasty speech. In two days he would
have been a partisan of the place, and in a week he would have been an
owner of real estate there.
There is undeniably a public opinion in Bar Harbor in favor of it, and
the visitor would better coincide with it. He is anxiously asked at
every turn how he likes it, and if he does not like it he is an object
of compassion. Countless numbers of people who do not own a foot of
land there are devotees of the place. Any number of certificates to its
qualities could be obtained, as to a patent medicine, and they would all
read pretty much alike, after the well-known formula: “The first bottle
I took did, me no good, after the second I was worse, after the third I
improved, after the twelfth I walked fifty miles in one day; and now I
never do without it, I take never less than fifty bottles a year.” So it
would be: “At first I felt just as you do, shut-in place, foggy, stayed
only two days. Only came back again to accompany friends, stayed a week,
foggy, didn't like it. Can't tell how I happened to come back again,
stayed a month, and I tell you, there is no place like it in America.
Spend all my summers here.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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