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Even our pleasures have come to be taken sadly. We are irritable at picnics, snarly at clambakes, and bored to death at dinners. The Government ought to hire Douglas Fairbanks, and send him over the country as an agent of the Bureau of Grins. Have him start work in Boston, and then rush him by special train to Philadelphia.

They went boating on the harbor and up the three pretty rivers that flowed into it; they had clambakes on the bar and mussel-bakes on the rocks; they picked strawberries on the sand-dunes; they went out cod-fishing with Captain Jim; they shot plover in the shore fields and wild ducks in the cove at least, the men did.

In the distance lay the bay, calm and resplendent, with white sails and specks of boats. Beyond it rose Martha's Vineyard, green and cool and bowery, and at its wharf lay a steamer. I was, as I said, light-hearted. I was thinking of rides over the sandy roads at the close of the long, bright days; of excursions on the bay; of clambakes and picnics.

And then, there they are right in the middle of the champagne, clambakes and everything else! invited to sit with the choicest of America's nobility on golden chairs supplied from New York at one dollar per and to dance to the strains of the most expensive music amid the subdued popping of distant corks.

"Think of all the things I'll have to tell you about when I get back from the seashore. Only two short months, just eight little weeks, but I'm going to crowd them so full of glorious hard work that I'll accomplish wonders. There'll be no end of good times, too: clambakes and fishing and bathing to fill up the chinks in the days, and the story-telling in the evenings around the driftwood fires.

In return for these courtesies we are invited yearly by the élite to some two hundred dinners, about fifty balls and dances, and a large number of miscellaneous entertainments such as musicales, private theatricals, costume affairs, bridge, poker, and gambling parties; as well as in the summer to clambakes where champagne and terrapin are served by footmen and other elegant rusticities.

But lawn parties, picnics, and clambakes at the shore were pretty much on the same scale, those who could afford it having music and employing a caterer, while those who could not made no secret of the cause, and felt neither jealous nor humiliated.

The theory is that if enough people see their own names in the paper often enough, can read about their weddings, funerals, sociables, foreign travels, lodge meetings, school prizes, their fiftieth birthdays, their sixtieth birthdays, their silver weddings, their outings and clambakes, they will make a reliable circulation.

An' there's another teks that says, Don't ye fret over spilt milk; an', bein' a pillar of the church, I reckon you'd like to practise 'em, an' let your light shine afore men. Now if there's one thing more'n another that Sam prides himself on, its bein' a deacon, an' livin' up to it; an' my speakin' Scriptur' to him was jest a word in season, for he quiets down an' falls to reckonin'. 'Give 'em to me for what you give by the lot, an' throw in the freight, says I, seein' he meant to make on 'em, 'an' I'll take 'em an' see to the pickin' 'em up, an' you can load up the cart an' start off home. He jes' took to it at once, for, with the lot he had, one bag didn't make so much differ out half a dozen he buys 'em that way mostly, for ye know he keeps a' eatin' house; temperance strict it is, up to Stony Beach, where there's lots of clambakes an' picnics holdin' all the time, an' the folks eats heaps of peanuts.

Possessing nothing but a statistical, inhuman conception of government, the average municipal reformer looks down contemptuously upon a man like Tim Sullivan with his clambakes and his dances; his warm and friendly saloons, his handshaking and funeral-going and baby-christening; his readiness to get coal for the family, and a job for the husband.