A Newport Aquarelle

The speakers were seated in the long crescent-shaped corridor of the Newport Casino. The hands of the quaint golden clock on the tower of the outer courtyard pointed to the hour of twelve. It was mid-day, and all the fashionable world of Newport was gathered within the aristocratic enclosure just named. Some of the more energetic people were playing lawn tennis in the fine grounds of the inner courtyard, which separates the semi-circle of the open corridor from the theatre and racket court. Others were lunching luxuriously in the well-appointed restaurant, and a few of the more serious-minded butterflies were sitting in the comfortable reading-room, where ladies, as well as gentlemen, are admitted to read the news, and write their impressions of the place to their less fortunate friends and relatives, broiling in town or rusticating in Maine. But the great crowd of people were assembled in the open corridor, listening to the music of the band, which at that moment was playing the exhilarating strains of the "Merry War." Seated on either side was a double row of people, who laughed and chatted with each other, criticising the less fortunate late-comers who had found no seats, these last having no other resource than to walk up and down between the two rows of well-dressed men and women. The most popular of the ladies held little courts of their own at different points of the corridor, and were surrounded by circles of men, of whom they spoke to their husbands as friends, to their lady acquaintances as beaux. The lady who had promised to stop Miss Carleton as she passed by, had succeeded in securing for herself a seat close to the steps which led down from the corridor to the tennis courts,—a veritable coigne of vantage, from whence every eligible man who passed up or…