At this time Newport’s summer colony was in the wooden age. Bellevue Avenue was thickly settled with pleasant, substantial cottages, some of which still survive. The word cottage was, however, always a misnomer; these commodious, well-furnished houses should more properly have been called villas. The first symptom of the impending change was the sudden transformation of the cottage from a simple, medium-sized country house to a large ambitious structure like the George Francis Train villa in the atrocious style of the early seventies, the darkest period of American architecture. After the wooden age, the brick, stone, and marble ages followed in quick succession. The Emperor Caesar Augustus “found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.” Richard Hunt might well have said, “I found Newport a town of wood; I left it a town of marble.” At about the time I am writing of, Hunt built Linden Gate for Mr. Henry Marquand and the John N. A. Griswold house on Touro Park, now the home of the Art Association. While maintaining something of the cottage characteristics, both these are far handsomer and more substantial than the earlier houses, and mark the summer colony’s second stage of architectural evolution. I spent part of one season with my mother’s friend, Mrs. Charles H. Dorr, in Newport, and entered more fully into the social life of the place than I had done before. Compared to our life in Portsmouth, Newport seemed formal, dull, cut and dried. Everybody bathed then on the First Beach, except the few people who lived near “Bailey’s.” The ladies’ hour was from ten to twelve. At noon a flag was run up on the bathing pavilion, announcing that the “gentlemen’s hour” had begun, when women and children were banished from the beach, and the men were free to take their swim dressed or undressed as they pleased. Most people dined early, though the seven or half-past seven o’clock dinner parties were beginning. In the afternoon society took its drive up and down Bellevue Avenue from five to seven. The horses, harnesses, carriages, lap dogs, ladies, and toilettes were the handsomest that money could buy. While I admired the style of it all, the artificiality fretted me, and after a few days of Bellevue Avenue I was glad to scurry home to Portsmouth to embrace my parents and go for a tramp with my Twin. The introduction of polo by James Gordon Bennett was a great boon to the colony. I can see him now on his swift broncho, tearing across the polo field after the ball, the blood streaming from a cut on his forehead, made by the mallet of one of the opposing players.