A SUMMER IDYLL.* WAS there ever yet a drag-net with

no dropped stitches, or rents here and there big enough to let a good fish through ? We doubt it. At any rate, we have to own that here is a very bright fish which has escaped hitherto our literary drag-net, which should " bring to bank " whatever is really worth landing out of the ever-widening flood of English books. We owe an apology to Mr. Dudley Warner ; but for our readers we think the singular fitness of the moment at which we introduce them to it ought to hold us free from blame. For it is before all things a book for the holidays. Having just spent the first days of our own in its perusal, we can speak confidently, and may say shortly that we have not met with its like as a holiday-book for a month of Sundays.

For why ? It is, in the first place, an excellent guide to all the chief summer resorts in the Eastern States, from Niagara. to Fortress Monro,—including Newport, Martha's Vineyard, Saratoga, the White Mountains, and a dozen other places not so well known ; and then into this solid framework, useful to the most matter-of-fact Cook's tourist, is interwoven a good old-fashioned love-story, which runs sparkling from cover to cover along coast and river, over mountains, and through giant hotels, casinos, and dainty cottages, as our cousins still insist on calling their luxurious summer-houses at Newport and elsewhere. As to the truthfulness of the descriptions of scenery, and of the salient features and character of the life and

surroundings of several of these summer resorts, the present writer happens to be able to speak with some confidence, and has really only one criticism to make, and of that he scarcely feels sure. But is not the effect of the great Falls on the nerves of visitors overdrawn ? The " dread of Niagara," as

here described, may be felt by nervous persons, but surely not by two strong, healthily minded young men, like King, the hero of the tale, and Forbes, his artist-friend, to such an extent that they go back to their hotel " full of nervous apprehension," and with their whole party confess " they are almost afraid to stay longer " !

To turn to that part of the book which will chiefly attract readers, the love-story, we may remark in passing, that the season for pleasure-resorts on the other side of the Atlantic is evidently extending at a rate proportioned to the extra- ordinary increase of wealth in the States, and has already left us and every other nation in Europe far behind. It is on March 20th that the hero first meets his fate, in the- person of Miss Irene Benson, in the Hygeia Establishment at Fort Monro, in which are gathered some eight hundred persons who know " what's the right thing to do in March," and not till the end of October that he de- parts for Virginia to take evidence in a great mining case for his uncle, a leading New York lawyer, leaving Irene be- trothed and happy, to write him love-letters from the country house of one of his rich relatives in the Berkshire hills. Mr.

Stanhope King comes of an old Knickerbocker family, famed

for its exclusiveness. He is getting on for thirty, and has. qualified for practice at the Bar, with a vague intention of some day joining his uncle, Mr. Schuyler Brevoost, as junior partner in his lucrative business. Meantime, having a competency, he has been wandering over his own and most other countries, and is in danger of gently subsiding into the travelled man of the world, with the calm repose of

manner which suits the caste of Vere de Vere (and of the Knickerbockers), knowing everybody, superficially well-read,

but incapable of setting hand or mind to any serious effort, and frankly bored with the whole business of living his life.. However, this blasg stage has not yet been reached when we meet him at the breakfast-table in the Hygeia, Hotel, at-the-

table of Mrs. Cortlandt, a fashionable Southerner, of whom he asks casually : " Who is that clever-looking,. graceful girl over there ? " Mrs. Cortlandt replies by an exclamation of surprise, and crosses the room to ask the girl to join her party for a sail in the bay. She comes back with:-

"' Yes ; she'll join our party—without her mother. How lucky you saw her !' —` Well ! is it the Princess of Paphlagonia ?'—' Oh,. I forgot, you were not in Washington last winter. That's Miss Benson : just charming, you'll see. Family came from Ohio some- where. You'll see what they are, but Irene ? Yes, you needn't ask ; they've got money, made it honestly. Began at the bottom —as if in training for the Presidency, you know. The mother • Their Pilgrimage. By Charles D. Warner. New York: Harper Brothers. 1887. hasn't got used to it. You know how it is. But Irene has had every advantage—best schools, best masters, foreign travel, every- thing. Poor girl ! I'm sorry for her. Sometimes I wish there wasn't any such thing as education, except for the educated. She -never shows it; but of course she must see what her relatives are.' "

This will give readers at once the motive of the book. In the evening, after the sail in the bay, King gets introduced to

Mrs. Benson, sits by her and wins her confidence, hears from her of their home at Cyrusville, which has "got all the im-

provements, but somehow Irene don't seem to be contented, tho' there ain't a better appearin' nor smarter nor more dutiful girl anywhere—well I just couldn't live without her." And to further inquiries as to their plans :—

" Yes, we are going to take a regular tour all summer round to the different places where people go. Irene calls it a pilgrimage to the holy places of America. Pa thinks we'll get enough of it, and he's determined we shall have enough of it for once. I suppose we shall. I like to travel, but I haven't seen any place better than Cyrusville yet."

There is nothing of the snob about King, who at once appreciates the homely old matron and her husband, the honest Ohio merchant, who, while he hopes his wife and daughter are going to get enough of it, sits in the hotel piazzas rather bored, except when he can get some one to talk real-estate with, and honestly confesses that he is "beginning to understand how Christian felt going through Vanity Fair." In their short stay at the Hygeia, before the Bensons leave for the New Orleans Centennial, and King for Florida, he gets sufficiently interested in his new acquaintance to resolve that he too will make a sort of roving summer among the resorts of fashion and pleasure. Accordingly, on his return from Florida, he picks up a young artist, introduced by Mrs. Cort- landt, as a companion of his pilgrimage, and having heard casually that the Bensons had passed through Washington and spoke of going to Atlantic City "to tone up a little for the season," he carries the wondering artist off to that amazing seaside resort, where he is rewarded by finding the Bensons in the same hotel. The artist, however, soon ceases to wonder, but as he can find nothing worth sketching in the jig-saw architecture of the city of wooden shanties, protests he has had enough of it after a few days. " Of course," he says, "it is a great pleasure to me to sit and talk with Mrs. Benson while you and that pretty girl walk up and down the piaiza all the evening ; but I'm easily satisfied, and two evenings did for me." So King gives in, and departs with his friend to the Catskills, having first impressed on Mrs. Benson the duty of being at Newport early in July. At the Catskills, the artist also meets with his fate, a young Southern girl, an orphan, one Marion Lamont, travelling with her uncle. Their story also is told, and constantly crosses that of Irene and her lover ; but though it is quite as piquant in its own way, we have no space to refer to it further. The friends reach Newport at dawn on " the glorious Fourth," and find the Bensons already there, and driving daily in the avenue, as they learn from Mr.

Benson, whom they find tilted back on a chair in the piazza of the Ocean House :-

" Folks are queer," he adds : "at a place we were last summer, all the summer boarders in the houses round tried to act like as they were staying at the big hotel, and the hotel people swelled about on the fact of being at the hotel. Here you're nobody. I hired. a carriage by the week, driver in buttons, and all that. It don't make any difference I'll bet a gold dollar every cottager knows it's hired The drive round the island, there's nothing like it in the country. We take it every day. Yes, it would be a little lonesome but for the ocean. It's a good deal like a funeral procession. Nobody ever recognises you, not even the hotel people in hired hacks. If I were to come again, Mr. King, I'd come in a yacht, drive up from it in a box on two wheels with a man clinging on behind, and have a cottage with an English gardener. That would fetch 'em. Money won't do it, not at an hotel. But I'm not sure but I like this way best." •

Notwithstanding delicious drives and walks with Irene, in which some of her remarks make him decidedly uneasy for the first time at the idle life he is leading, King finds that he must do something to break the spell of cottage exclusiveness for his friends. Mrs. Benson had greeted him with : " I'm right glad you are come, Mr. King ; seems like seeing some one from home. I told Irene when you came I guess we should know somebody." Besides, his position grows hourly more embarrassing. He knows most of the cottage people, and has

a cousin, Mrs. Bartlett Glow, with a cottage on the Point of Rocks, whose invitation to stay he had declined:— "Her husband had been something in the oil line in New York, and King had watched with interest his evolution into the full- blown existence of a man of fashion. The process is perfectly charted. Success in business, membership of a good club, tandem in the park, introduction to a good house, marriage to a pretty girl of family without much money, a yacht, a four-in-hand, a Newport villa. His name had undergone a like evolution. It used to be on his business-cards Jacob B. Glow, on the wedding- cards it was J. Bartlett Glow, and the dashing pair were always spoken of at Newport as the Bartlett Glows."

So King goes to his cousin, and after some amusing fencing, mentions the Bensons :- "'Mrs. Benson, a good-hearted old lady, rather plain, and—' --` Yes, I know the sort. Had a falling out with Lindley Murray in her youth, and never made it up. But what I want to know is about the girl.' "

King describes her as clever, cultivated, and, in his artist- friend's judgment, a beauty, and wants Penelope to be just a little civil to them. Penelope, to oblige him, will ask them to a "five-o'clock," but warns him not to fall in love with a country girl " whom no one in the set knows." Before the " five-o'clock," King makes two more blunders, taking his friends to walk on the cliff-path in front of the cottages on Sunday afternoon—which fashion, since he had been there, had decreed should be left for the upper servants on that day—and lets them bathe, in ignorance that the cottages " have withdrawn their support from the ocean." Mrs. Glow, however, calls, and in ten minutes gets into Mrs. Benson's confidence, and hears all about " pa's " habits and Cyrnsville, Irene sitting by in agony.

At the " five-o'clock," Mr. Benson comes in full evening black, and Mrs. Benson's homely Western talk floats over the low hum, causing amused pauses, while Irene is annoyed by the stare of a youth in English clothes, " who bad caught very successfully the air of an English groom," and by the inso- lence of two fashionable girls who drop into French comments

on her mother. King luckily comes up ; so she greets him in French, to the discomfiture of her ill-bred neighbours ; and a saunter with him on the verandah mends matters, but he is left uneasy. Matters do not improve next day, when he tries to explain. " Can't you believe I had some pride in having my friends see you and know you ?" To which she answers : " Well, I'll be as frank as you are, Mr. King. I don't like being shown off. There, don't be displeased; I didn't mean anything disagreeable." The whole talk is freshly piquante, and we wish we had space for more of it, and for the other

Newport incidents, including the catastrophe which hurries the Bensons away, leaving King with this note in answer to a letter of explanation when he has failed to obtain an interview : —" Dear Mr. King,—No explanation whatever was needed.

We never shall forget your kindness. Good-bye.—!BENS B."

He has no clue to their route, and wanders round the Massa- chusetts coast watering-places with the artist, and Marior, and her uncle, disconsolate, till Marion gets a note from Irene, and he finds that the Bensons are at Bar Harbour. Thither he hurries his companions ; finds a rival, a rich Bostonian widower, attached to the Bensons ; pursues them to Sulphur Springs, Virginia, to the disgust of the artist (who has to leave Marion), and there at last gets his chance, pro- poses, and is accepted.

Here Their Pilgrimage would naturally end, but, luckily for readers, does not. We suppose some friend commented : "Why, man, you've left out Saratoga, Long Branch, and Niagara. That'll never do." So the author brings in Pene- lope again, who makes dear friends with Irene, and artfully persuades her to immolate herself On the altar of King's family, and to release him from this " unsuitable" engage- ment. This, Irene, in self-sacrificing mood, does by letter, and thus enables the author to prolong Their Pilgrimage until, at the Glen House in the White Mountains, he catches her again. She has just refused the Bostonian. " I am come," King says at their meeting, "in answer to your letter. This is my answer." She had meant to maintain the heroic attitude of self-sacrifice, but now somehow can only say, falteringly : " hoped you would come." And here the curtain is drawn by a waggish Cupid, who bows to readers on the last page, and is the last of the admirable illustrations of Mr.

Reinhart, which are entirely worthy of the text.

There is one half-cynical moral, which the author seems to wish to inculcate,—viz. (to use his own words), that "popular commingling in pleasure-resorts is safe enough in aristocratic countries, but will not suit a Republic."