Excerpt from In Brightest Summer Land His present guests had arrived at his home the evening before, and in thus visiting him had only entered upon a plan long since matured, that the three would pass a summer vacation together in Eastern Massachusetts and upon the seacoast. The Missourian had never as yet looked upon ocean waters and, while the nephew had no such lack of experience in this direction, he really knew but little of ocean shores, his entire acquaintance with salt water and its belongings having been attained through less than half a dozen brief winter visits to the cities of New York and Boston. And now, with cares and responsibilities thrown aside, or shifted temporarily to other shoulders, and with that eager longing for natural scenes and for intimate connection with new localities and events out of doors which every mortal experiences with the advent of summer, these (for the time being) emancipated slaves, the one from his mines, the other from his studies, and the third from his counting room, were ready to come down to the level of nature, - to scrape and scratch in the sand; to roam and dawdle in the woods; to wallow in the swamps; to paddle in the creeks or on the bavs and harbors; to turn Indian and live in the Open air, and upon food wrested by their own hands and ingenuity from woods and waters and gravelly shores to wander up and down exploring, investigating, discovering, noting, and, above all, enjoying. Each had a standpoint from which he proposed to act, and each an object which he pro posed to attain; and, although these objects aggregated may have been alike only in being equally intangible, there was nothing in their differences which prevented perfect harmony in the pursuits of the actors. As Mr. Malcolm closed his half-explanatory, half-eulogistic reference to the merits of Boston, the Missourian cast a hasty and somewhat impatient glance out at window, in the direction where the outspread waters of Dorchester Bay were shimmering in the clear sunlight, the green and gray island and mainland shores forming most beautiful setting for this gem of ocean views. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.