There is undeniably a public opinion in Bar Harbor in favor of it, and the visitor would better coincide with it. He is anxiously asked at every turn how he likes it, and if he does not like it he is an object of compassion. Countless numbers of people who do not own a foot of land there are devotees of the place. Any number of certificates to its qualities could be obtained, as to a patent medicine, and they would all read pretty much alike, after the well-known formula: “The first bottle I took did, me no good, after the second I was worse, after the third I improved, after the twelfth I walked fifty miles in one day; and now I never do without it, I take never less than fifty bottles a year.” So it would be: “At first I felt just as you do, shut-in place, foggy, stayed only two days. Only came back again to accompany friends, stayed a week, foggy, didn't like it. Can't tell how I happened to come back again, stayed a month, and I tell you, there is no place like it in America. Spend all my summers here.”
The genesis of Bar Harbor is curious and instructive. For many years, like other settlements on Mount Desert Island; it had been frequented by people who have more fondness for nature than they have money, and who were willing to put up with wretched accommodations, and enjoyed a mild sort of “roughing it.” But some society people in New York, who have the reputation of setting the mode, chanced to go there; they declared in favor of it; and instantly, by an occult law which governs fashionable life, Bar Harbor became the fashion. Everybody could see its preeminent attractions. The word was passed along by the Boudoir Telephone from Boston to New Orleans, and soon it was a matter of necessity for a debutante, or a woman of fashion, or a man of the world, or a blase boy, to show themselves there during the season. It became the scene of summer romances; the student of manners went there to study the “American girl.” The notion spread that it was the finest sanitarium on the continent for flirtations; and as trade is said to follow the flag, so in this case real-estate speculation rioted in the wake of beauty and fashion.
There is no doubt that the “American girl” is there, as she is at divers other sea-and-land resorts; but the present peculiarity of this watering-place is that the American young man is there also. Some philosophers have tried to account for this coincidence by assuming that the American girl is the attraction to the young man. But this seems to me a misunderstanding of the spirit of this generation. Why are young men quoted as “scarce” in other resorts swarming with sweet girls, maidens who have learned the art of being agreeable, and interesting widows in the vanishing shades of an attractive and consolable grief? No. Is it not rather the cold, luminous truth that the American girl found out that Bar Harbor, without her presence, was for certain reasons, such as unconventionality, a bracing air, opportunity for boating, etc., agreeable to the young man? But why do elderly people go there? This question must have been suggested by a foreigner, who is ignorant that in a republic it is the young ones who know what is best for the elders.