"Anything you please; I never thought of asking. It was only my duty."

"Heroic man!" I exclaimed; "and brave as modest. It is my pleasure to be more than grateful. Never, never can I repay you save with the warmest and sweetest emotions of a woman's heart. I owe you--ah, how much--how much!"

My hands were clasped, my eyes were uplifted; emotion prevented me finishing my sentence. He spoke, while my soul halted for words--

"Well, if you think so much of just helping you out of the way of a seaward wave, supposing we say five dollars. It is my duty, as bathing-master, to help people up from the sand when they get face downwards, as you did; but as you insist, I don't mind a fiver."

Oh, sisters!

XCII.

PLEASURE BAY.

Dear sisters:--I really do think that Cousin Dempster is one of the best creatures that ever lived. He seems to understand all the wounds and pains that a female woman's heart is exposed to, and sort of eases them off, so that you are cheated out of half your natural suffering.

I cannot say that the bathing in the salt-sea waves was not a failure as a matrimonial speculation; but that is my luck. In some respects, the future to me is like a mirage--I put my hand out hopefully, and grasp nothing but fog.

That bathing-master was a fine-looking man until he opened his mouth and attempted to sit down on a chair. He created a pleasant delusion in my bosom for a few moments, and then--well, we will say nothing more about that--the private sanctuary of a female woman's thoughts are too sacred for a Report.

If I wept in the stillness of the night, no one but the angel that records broken love-dreams will ever know of it. With this precious angel I am in full sympathy. He has done too much of that kind of writing for me not to feel the cruel pangs of the long list of disappointments with which his books are blotted.

Well, I arose the next morning after my experimental bath, heavy-eyed, heavy-hearted, and altogether blue as indigo. Cousin Dempster saw this, and his generous heart seized upon a remedy.

"Let us go down to Pleasure Bay," says he. "What do you think of a day's crabbing?"

"Crabbing?" says I, "just as if I didn't feel crabbed enough already. Do you want me to keep it up all day?"

Dempster laughed; so did E. E.; just as if I'd said something awful funny, which I wasn't in the least conscious of, not having a spark of fun left in me since that salt-water deluge and its consequences.

"Oh," says he, as good-natured as pie, "there is nothing like Pleasure Bay when one has the blues--a lunch under the trees, and a boat before the breeze."

I stopped him; the dear, good fellow was launching off into poetry without knowing it; a.s.sociation with genins is doing everything with him. There is no knowing where he might have ended, if I hadn't lifted my forefinger, for a whole gust of poetry was riling up in his earthly nature like yeast in a baking of bread.

"I'll go to Pleasure Bay," says I, "but, for goodness sake, don't try that sort of thing again; genius isn't catching, and though you have married into our family, don't expect that it will spread like an epidemic into yours, because it won't."

"Why not?" says he; "is there nothing in a.s.sociation?"

"Well, I can't exactly decide," says I; "strange things do happen in that direction. I have heard of young women marrying literary men who never wrote a line worth reading before, who burst out into full-blown geniuses right in the honeymoon. But it is wonderful how much their style was like their husbands'. Of course, those must be cases of especial affinity. When a woman has ransacked a poor fellow's heart, she naturally begins to pillage his brain, and I reckon he must like it at first; but after that, he subsides into himself, and she subsides into herself, and somehow she writes just as she did before, and so does he!"

"Then there are plenty of young ladies who carry their ambition and their flirtations in among the newspaper people and stray Bohemians,"

says E. E., kindling up to the subject; "for every time they get into a new flirtation, which is once in about three months, their style changes, giving them a wonderful versatility of talent that, somehow, dies out after awhile, as she grows old and homely."

"That is," says Dempster, laughing, "every time a literary lady of this stamp changes her lover, she changes her style, too."

"Exactly," answers E. E., "and where she hasn't any good-natured lover she retires into modest privacy till one comes along."

I just listened, holding my breath.

"What," says I, "does fraud and deception creep into the sacred literature of our country? I cannot believe it."

"Can't you?" says E. E.; "but you have never been in Bohemia."

"No," says I, "that is a part of Europe that I hope to visit, but never have. Is it a popular place for Americans?"

"Oh, wonderfully popular, for people who dash off things here and there, write for this and that, and are willing to give half that they earn and know to any adventurer that comes along, free gratis for nothing; or, on occasion, sell reputation by the line, and for a price. Oh, Bohemia is a splendid place for adventurers and adventuresses to forage in!"

"What!" says I, "genius sell itself?"

"Yes," says she, "and its readers, too."

"Cousin E. E.," says I, "you slander the grandest, the purest, the most sublime people on the earth."

"Do I?" says she, nodding her head and laughing. "Wait and see."

"Remember--you are speaking of authors, the first and purest aristocracy known to our free nation."

"No; I speak of would-be authors--guerillas in literature--men and women of erratic ability, who adore inspiration and scorn work; for authorship, I am told, and believe, requires the hardest work of any calling in the world."

"I'm afraid it does," said I, drawing a long breath, "but then such work brings its own prompt payment. The power to write is happiness in itself."

"But what has this to do with Pleasure Bay?" says Dempster; "we mean to go there--not to Bohemia."

"Just so," says I, a-tying on my bonnet.

We got into Dempster's carriage, and after a delightful drive, we came down on the edge of a little bay, with green gra.s.s growing close down to the sh.o.r.e, and great, tall trees clumped here and there all around it.

I was so charmed with the scenery that I didn't realize where we were till the carriage stopped before a white house, with a long wooden stoop in front, when we got out and walked right away down to the sh.o.r.e, where a plank platform ran out from the land, and a cunning little boat, with white sails, lay dipping up and down like a duck in the water.

Sisters, I'm not timersome, but getting into a boat that rocks like a cradle in the water tries me, I must own to that. With what holding on and keeping your dress well down upon the ankles, one is seized with a sense of being awfully unsteady. This riles up the const.i.tution to a state of dizziness that makes your ears buz like a b.u.mblebee's nest.

I was thankful to get seated at last, and, tucking up my dress, prepared at once for a long sea-voyage. E. E. had slung a great straw gypsy hat on her arm, by the strings, when she left Long Branch, which she bent down over her head like an umbrella with herself for a handle; over that she spread a broad yellow parasol that blazed in the hot air like a great sunflower.

"Phmie," says she, a-looking up from under her straw tent, "didn't you bring a flat?"

"No," says I; "the young fellows of that stamp didn't happen to be about when we started."

"Dear me! you'll burn your face up," says she; "that beehive is no protection."

"About as much as one of your York flats would be," says I. "But supposing I hoist my parasol, too--one don't need a beau for that."

The sun was pouring down like blazes, and I was mighty glad to spread my parasol, I can tell you; so I did it, and settled down on the same bench with E. E.

Dempster had been awful busy on sh.o.r.e, pulling out fish-lines, looking up nets that swung like a great hang-bird's nest, on the end of a pole: and now he was on his knees, hacking a fish into chunks, which he tied to a line and dropped into the bottom of the boat. At last he lifted his great straw hat, wiped the blazing warmth from his face, and jumped in.