Page:Maud Howe - A Newport Aquarelle.djvu/169

 rose from his chair, and the worshipful company of the elect had finished their mid-day repast, whose chief and greatest charm had been that it had been eaten beneath the canopy of God's blue sky, between the walls of living green, and in the pure air, sweet with the stacks of new-mown grass and clover in the field hard by.

The sunflowers in stiff florist's garlands, the colored paper gewgaws, were, to an over-sensitive mind, a discord; but few among the guests detected the inharmoniousness of trimming, with art intended to be decorative, one of the most beautiful bits of nature in the idyllic island. And there was not one among them who was not made the better, the more kindly, by that day passed among the ferns and sweet-briers of Glen Anna.

The dance in the pavilion was rather a failure. Somehow, the incongruity of the little stiff town bouquets and the flimsy favors seemed to strike most of the company, and the cotillon only included the army