This little seaport is intended to be attractive, and it would give
these travelers great pleasure to describe it, if they could at all
remember how it looks. But it is a place that, like some faces,
makes no sort of impression on the memory. We went ashore there, and
tried to take an interest in the ship-building, and in the little
oysters which the harbor yields; but whether we did take an interest
or not has passed out of memory. A small, unpicturesque, wooden
town, in the languor of a provincial summer; why should we pretend an
interest in it which we did not feel? It did not disturb our
reposeful frame of mind, nor much interfere with our enjoyment of the
day.
On the forward deck, when we were under way again, amid a group
reading and nodding in the sunshine, we found a pretty girl with a
companion and a gentleman, whom we knew by intuition as the "pa" of
the pretty girl and of our night of anguish. The pa might have been
a clergyman in a small way, or the proprietor of a female
boarding-school; at any rate, an excellent and improving person to
travel with, whose willingness to impart information made even the
travelers long for a pa. It was no part of his plan of this family
summer excursion, upon which he had come against his wish, to have any
hour of it wasted in idleness.
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