There was a good deal of first-rate cider drank around that table, and we left a bushel of open shells under the trees, besides a heap of lobsters, clams, and chicken bones, well picked.
Then we went back to look at the place where they had been cooked, and found nothing but a heap of smoking stones, a ring of burnt grass, and a pile of steamy sea-weed. Somehow, the sight of it all made me feel sort of faint, and it didn't seem to me that I should ever want to eat or drink again.
We went home from Pleasure Bay in the carriage, feeling lazy and kind of half sea-sick.
That night I dreamed that a whole regiment of green lobsters were crawling over my bed, clawing at me fiercely as they went. Then I thought that Mr. Burke came and shoved them off with both arms flung out, and invited me to breakfast on a heap of empty shells, dipped in butter, which set awful heavy on my stomach.
In fact, I had a worrying night, and got up feeling as if I had been feasting on tenpenny nails and roasted flat-irons.
XCVII.
ONE HOUR OF HEAVEN.
DEAR SISTERS:—You haven't the least idea of what warm weather is in Vermont. Why, if one of your mountain trout streams could have run through New York, it would have boiled over and cooked the poor little speckled creatures that live in its waves. You never saw anything like it in your born days. The sea breezes at Long Branch seemed to come over an ocean of melted lead, blasted up by some old furnace of a volcano. For one whole week I was just dying of envy, when I thought of the pigs roving loose in our village, with such lovely mud puddles to lie down in, without caring a sumarke whether their clothes were mussed—excuse that word, I got it here in York—or not.
While I was panting for breath on the sea-shore, I could think of them, with home-sick longing, up to their throats in the soft, mushy fluid of a delicious puddle, with swarms of yellow butterflies rising, floating, and settling around them, as if a bed of primroses had got tired of growing in one place, and had burst off on a grand spree through the air, settling down for a drink now and then.