Very soon the boarder, unable to put up with the growing haughtiness of the cottager, and with exclusion from his entertainments, withdraws silently and unobtrusively from the scenes he once enjoyed so much, to seek out another unsophisticated farmer, and begin once more, probably when well on in life, with hope and strength abated, the heavy work of opening up another watering-place and developing its resources. The silent suffering there is in this process, which may be witnessed to-day in hundreds of the most beautiful spots in America, probably none know but those who have gone through it. In fact, the dislodgment along our coast and in our mountains of the boarder by the cottager is to-day the great summer tragedy of American life. Winter has tragedies of its own, which may be worse; but summer has nothing like it, nothing which imposes such a strain on character and so severely tests early training. The worst of it--the pity of it, we might say--is that this is not the expulsion of the inferior by the superior race, which is going on in so many parts of the world, and which Darwin is teaching us to look upon with equanimity. The boarder is often, if not generally, the cottager's superior in culture, in acquirements, and in variety of social experience. He does not board because he likes the food, but simply because it enables him to live in the midst of beautiful scenery. He eats the farmer's poor fare contentedly, because he finds it is sufficient to maintain his sense of natural beauty and the clearness of all his moral perceptions unimpaired, and to brace his nerves for the great battle with evil which he has been carrying on in the city, and to which he means to return after a fortnight or a month or six weeks, as the case may be. We fear, in fact, that very few indeed of our summer cottages contain half so much noble endeavor and power of self-sacrifice as the boarding-houses they are displacing.
The progress made by the cottager in driving the boarder away from some of the most attractive places, both in the hills and on the seaboard, is very steady. Among these Bar Harbor occupies a leading position. It was, for fully fifteen years after its discovery, frequented exclusively by a very high order of boarders, and probably has been the scene of more plain living and high thinking than any other summer spot on the seacoast. It was, in fact, remarkable at one time for an almost unhealthy intellectual stimulation through an exclusively fish diet. But the purity of the air and the grandeur of the scenery brought a yearly increasing tide of visitors from about 1860 onward. These visitors were, until about five years ago, almost exclusively boarders, and the development of the place as a summer resort was prodigious. The little houses of the original half farmers, half fishermen, who welcomed, or rather did not welcome, the first explorers, grew rapidly into little boarding-houses, then into big boarding-houses, then into hotels with registers. Then the hotels grew larger and larger, and the callings of the steamer more frequent, until the place became famous and crowded.