Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett — Read

I am sure that Kate Lancaster and I must have spent by far the greater / part of the summer out of doors. We often made long expeditions out into / the suburbs of Deephaven, sometimes being gone all day, and sometimes / taking a long afternoon stroll and coming home early in the evening / hungry as hunters and laden with treasure, whether we had been through / the pine woods inland or alongshore, whether we had met old friends or / made some desirable new acquaintances. We had a fashion of calling at / the farm-houses, and by the end of the season we knew as many people as / if we had lived in Deephaven all our days. We used to ask for a drink of / water; this was our unfailing introduction, and afterward there were / many interesting subjects which one could introduce, and we could always / give the latest news at the shore. It was amusing to see the curiosity / which we aroused. Many of the people came into Deephaven only on special / occasions, and I must confess that at first we were often naughty enough / to wait until we had been severely cross-questioned before we gave a / definite account of ourselves. Kate was very clever at making / unsatisfactory answers when she cared to do so. We did not understand, / for some time, with what a keen sense of enjoyment many of those people / made the acquaintance of an entirely new person who cordially gave the / full particulars about herself; but we soon learned to call this by / another name than impertinence.

I think there were no points of interest in that region which we did not / visit with conscientious faithfulness. There were cliffs and / pebble-beaches, the long sands and the short sands; there were Black / Rock and Roaring Rock, High Point and East Point, and Spouting Rock; we / went to see where a ship had been driven ashore in the night, all hands / being lost and not a piece of her left larger than an axe-handle; we / visited the spot where a ship had come ashore in the fog, and had been / left high and dry on the edge of the marsh when the tide went out; we / saw where the brig Methuselah had been wrecked, and the shore had been / golden with her cargo of lemons and oranges, which one might carry away / by the wherryful.