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The worst of it all is, however, that the boarder finds that the cottager has enclosed some of his favorite walks. He can no longer get to them without trespassing or intruding. He can only look wistfully from the dusty high-road at the spots on which he probably once “rocked” with the girl who is now his wife, or chopped logic with professional or clerical friends, whom “the growth of the place” has long ago driven to fresh fields and pastures new. There is something very interesting and touching about these old Mount Deserters of the first period, between 1860 and 1870, who fled even before the enlargement of the hotels, and to whom cottages at Bar Harbor are almost unthinkable. One finds them in undeveloped summer resorts in out-of-the-way places along the American coast, often on the Alps or in Norway, or on the Scotch lakes, still tender, and simple, and unassuming, and cheery, older of course and generally stouter, but with the memories of the mountains, and the rocks, and the islands, of the poor food, “which made no difference, because the air was fine,” still as fresh as ever, but without a particle of bitterness. They wander much, but wander as they may they find no summer resorts which can have for them the charm of Frenchman’s Bay or Newport Mountain, and no vehicle which touches so many chords in their hearts as the primeval buckboard, in the days when it could only be hired as a great favor.

The cottager, too, sets no bounds to his pretensions as to territory. His policy, apparently the old policy of the conqueror everywhere, is to let the boarder go up the coast and discover the most attractive resorts, and allow him to report on them in the newspapers, write poetry about them, lay the scene of novels and plays in them, and then pursue him and eradicate him from the soil as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes a resort far more beautiful to the eye than the boarder there is no denying. He covers it with beautiful houses; he converts the scraggy, yellow pastures into smooth, green lawns; he fills the rock crevices with flowers; he introduces better food and neater clothing and the latest dodges in plumbing. But these things are only for the few–in fact, the very few. An area which supports a hundred happy boarders will only bring one cottager to perfection. Moreover, it is impossible, no matter how much the country may flourish, that all Americans who leave the city in summer should by any effort become cottagers. The mass of them must always be boarders and remain boarders, and we would warn the cottagers that it may become dangerous to push them too hard and too far. Much farther east or north on the coast they will not go without turning on their persecutors. They will not put up with the shores of Labrador or Greenland, no matter how hot the season may be. The survival of the fittest is a great law, and has worked wonders in the animal world, but it must be remembered that it has to work in our day in subordination to that greater law of morality which makes weakness itself a strong tower of defence.

The future at all our leading seashore places, in truth, belongs to the Cottager, and it is really useless to resist him. His march along the American coast is nearly as resistless as that of the hordes who issued from the plains of Scythia to overthrow the Roman Empire. He moves on all the “choice sites” without haste, with the calm and remorselessness of the man who knows that the morrow is his. He has two tremendous forces at his back, against which no boarder can stand up. One is the growing passion, or fashion, if any one likes to call it so, of Americans to live in their own houses, both summer and winter. This is rapidly taking possession of all classes, from the New England mechanic, who puts up his shanty or tent on the seashore, to the millionaire who builds his hundred-thousand dollar villa on his thirty-thousand dollar lot. Everybody who can seeks to be at home all the year round, let the home be never so small or humble, and the life in it never so rough. This is a change in the national manners which nobody can regret, but it is a change from which the boarder must suffer, and which must cost him much wandering and many tears. The other is the spread of the love of the seashore among the vast population of the Mississippi Valley, whose wealth is becoming great, for whom long railroad journeys have no terrors, and who are likely now to send their thousands every year to compete with the “money kings” of the East for the best villa sites along the coast. And be it remembered that although our population doubles every twenty-five years, our rocky Atlantic shore, which is what all most love to seek–the sand is tame and dreary in comparison–remains a fixed quantity. It only extends from New York to Eastport, Me., and it only contains a limited number of building lots. These are now being rapidly bought up and built on, or hold on speculation, and in some places, where land only brought ten dollars an acre fifteen years ago, are held at monstrous prices.

To fight against these tendencies is useless. The wise boarder will not so do, nor waste his time in bewailing his fate. It is absurd for him to expect that long stretches of delightful shore will be left wild and uninhabited and unimproved, for him to walk over for three or four weeks every summer. Not even the Henry George regime would oust the cottager, for under it he would simply rent what he owns; a cottager he would still remain. Finally, the boarder must remember that though the cottager, like woman, when he is bad is very bad, when good is delightful. Nothing the American summer has to show can surpass a cottager, and we rejoice to know that the number of good cottagers every year grows larger. At his best though he may be stern in the assertion of his rights of property, there is no simpler, honester gentleman than he, and the moral earnestness with the want of which the more austere boarder has been apt to reproach him, grows very rapidly after he gets his lawn made and his place in order.