I have seen Venice and Naples, I have driven along the
Cornice Road, I have spent a month at our own Mount Desert, and I say
that all of them together are not so beautiful as this glowing, deep-
hued, soft-gleaming, silvery-lighted, ancient harbor and town, with the
tall hills crowding round it and the black cliffs and headlands
planting their iron feet in the blue, transparent sea. It is a very old
place, and has had a history which it has outlived ages since. It may
once have had two or three thousand inhabitants; it has scarce five or
six hundred to day. Half the houses are in ruins or have disappeared;
many of the remainder are standing empty. All the people are poor, most
of them abjectly so; they saunter about with bare feet and uncovered
heads, the women in quaint black or dark-blue cloaks, the men in such
anomalous attire as only an Irishman knows how to get together, the
children half naked. The only comfortable-looking people are the monks
and the priests, and the soldiers in the fort. For there is a fort
there, constructed on the huge ruins of one which may have done duty in
the reign of Edward the Black Prince, or earlier, in whose mossy
embrasures are mounted a couple of cannon, which occasionally sent a
practice-shot or two at the cliff on the other side of the harbor.
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