We know neither whence they come, nor anything about their antecedents. They talk and eat and drink like the rest of us, and are sometimes very agreeable to converse with, and take infinite pains to make themselves popular. Nevertheless, we regard them with suspicion. We are never sure that they will be with us for long. Some day they will release the anchor and go up with a whisk above the clouds into the fog-land whence they fell.
There are certain times of the year when meteoric stones descend, and there are certain belts on the surface of the earth on which they chiefly tumble. So is it with these people who come down on us out of the clouds. They usually fall into watering-places, and winter-quarters, and always drop down in the season at these resorts. Rarely do they descend into quiet country towns or rural districts among the autochthones, parsonic and squirarchical. We come on them abroad, we become acquaintances, we sit together at the opera, organize picnics together, take coffee at one table in the gardens where the band plays, yet we never know whence they have come and whither they will go. When we are at the sea-side with our family we meet with another family, the father and mother respectable, the young men handsome and polite, the girls æsthetic, and with oh, such eyes! The young people soon strike up an intimacy, go boating, shrimping, nutting together; but we, the parents, have seen the intimacy thicken with some uneasiness, and do not like to see our son hang about the handsomest of the girls, or the most irreproachable of the young men so assiduous in his attentions to our daughter. Then we begin to institute enquiries, but learn nothing. Nobody ever heard of these people before. Nobody ever saw them before. Nobody knows where they made their money—yet money they must have, for the girls dress charmingly, and you cannot dress charmingly by the sea-side for nothing.
