Picnic

“ The day of the picnic rose clear and bright, changing soon to the purple haze and soft air of a day in late November. Breakfast was hardly over when the picnickers began to pass the house, some of them walking in merry groups, some in little French carts drawn by oxen or small, hardy ponies, but many of them, I noted with a beating heart, on horseback carrying double, the maiden on a pillion holding fast with her arm around her escort's waist. ”

“ It does one's heart good to see scores of family parties to-day availing themselves of the superb weather and taking a last picnic. In every green, shady nook we see a merry group squatted on the ground, relishing their cold patties, fruit and wine, as they can only be relished out of doors. The babies, nursemaids, and pet dogs are there. Breakfast over, the holiday-makers amuse themselves, grandparents and bantlings, with fishing for minnows in the clear waters. ”

“ A picnic where love is may be endurable for one afternoon, when there are plenty of other people to cook and wash up. But a hungry and unclean picnic by day and night, beside a muddy river, with little to eat and no one to cook, nowhere to sleep but the rock, and nothing to do but dodge the shells, is another story. ”

“ The joy which is experienced in the glad, free life of the picnicker is always before the picnic. On the evening before he makes the excursion, he is too full of sacred pleasure and lavender-colored tranquillity for anything. ”

“ At half past twelve we go into the dining-room, where we have "a picnic in the woods." The big table represents a shady grove, the sideboard is a hill, a large ivy at one end of the room is a summer-house, and we sit on rocks and fallen trees. This gives us a little change of air, and, as everybody knows, change of air gives people a good appetite.
When our picnic is over, we go to work again, and as we are all in pretty high spirits, we are very funny and witty, if not very wise. ”

“ One must partition himself justly—else, by an over-stowage at the end, he list and sink.
I am partial to picnics—the spreading of the cloth in the woods or beside a stream—although I am not avid for sandwiches unless hunger press me. Rather, let there be a skillet in the company and let a fire be started! Nor need a picnic consume the day. In summer it requires but the late afternoon, with such borrowing of the night as is necessary for the journey home. You leave the street car, clanking with your bundles like an itinerant tinman. ”

“ They are of all ages, from the tottering old grandmother, careworn wife, and buxom maiden, to the child in perambulator and baby in arms; and in the bright sunlight, amid the groves of festooning green columns, form a most orderly, varied, and picturesque gathering—a regular picnic in fact, judging from the cheerful look on most of the faces, and the merry laugh that is occasionally heard. ”

“ They arrived as if coming to a circus, old husbands and wives, young couples and their children, pretty girls and their fellows, and hitched their horses to the tails of their wagons, and began to make a picnic lunch in the shadow of the grove lying between the hotel and the station. ”

“ A gayer picnic party never started down the pike than the one that went laughing along the road that winter morning, under barbed-wire fences, through pasture gates, across bare woodlands, and over frozen corn-fields. ”

“ Now your picnic-goer is a muff—an egregious, gregarious muff, and a glutton. Moreover, a nobody who, if he be male wears, in nine cases in ten, a red necktie and a linen duster to his heel; if she be female hath soiled hose to her calf, and in her face a premonition of colic to come.
We hold it morally impossible to attend a picnic and come home pure in heart and undefiled of cuticle. For the dust will get in your nose, clog your ears, make clay in your mouth and mortar in your eyes, and so stop up all the natural passages to the soul ”

“ The Redmon grounds, where the picnic was to be held, were extensive and beautiful. Broad velvety fields, green lanes, among miniature forests of fragrant cedar and spruce, and all sloping down to the smooth, white sands of the beach, with the gray sea tramping dully in, and the salt spray dashing up in your face. And "I hope it won't be foggy! I do hope it won't be foggy!" was the burden of every one's cry; the fog generally choosing to step in and stay a week or two, whenever Speckport proposed a picnic. ”

“ A picnic may be either a complicated affair which has occupied you all the day before, or the most impromptu expedition which you arrange on the spur of the minute; and the last kind are often more fun. ”

“ If you are fonder of roaming on the hills than of shooting, Mrs. Tregonell, why should we not organize a rambling party? It is not too late for a picnic. Let us hold ourselves ready for the first bright day—perhaps, after this deluge, we shall have fine weather to-morrow—and organize a pilgrimage to Tintagel, with all the freedom of pedestrians, who can choose their own company, and are not obliged to sit opposite the person they least care about in the imprisonment of a barouche or a wagonette. Walking picnics are the only picnics worth having. ”

“ Our picnic was different from summer picnics in other ways. Instead of cold lemonade we had hot cocoa, and we ate our lunch in the sunniest place we could find, by a great rock. It was almost night when we reached home, and we all ran to the fire to warm our fingers and toes. ”

“ One does not enjoy nature to great advantage at a picnic. There are woods and swamps of which on all ordinary occasions I almost feel myself the owner, but of which on Saturday and Sunday I have scarcely so much as a rambler’s lease. This I have learned, however,—and I pass the secret on,—that the Sunday picnic does not usually begin till after nine o’clock in the forenoon. ”

“ Not to-morrow, for at daylight we are off to Gale Bluff for the day. Not on Wednesday, for there’s a confounded picnic afoot for that day. I wish the man who invented picnics had been endowed with immortal life on earth and made to go to every blessed one of ’em! But on Thursday, Mell, I shall be in the meadow at the usual hour. ”

“ There we often rested, and his wife welcomed us with chocolates or peanuts or served us some other refreshment.
But the important business of the afternoon was the picnic, or rather its preparation. For it interested us that the picnic was spread and eaten in the open air. We carried the alcohol stove and the rest of the things to some distant and shady place in the park. The ladies put on their aprons; the gentlemen, in shirt-sleeves, made chocolate or coffee, or fried fish that we had just bought on the beach, and passed a happy time. ”

“ Merrill dropped her work and looked up at her big girl in surprise.
"A picnic up Clearwater!" she said. "Is it warm enough for picnics? Oh" (as Alice started to exclaim) , "I know it is warm enough if a little girl has been running home from school—I don't doubt that it is! But you must remember that the ground stays damp a long time in the spring and that a picnic usually means sitting around on the ground." ”

“ Before the children come, fill the baskets with sandwiches, devilled eggs, cookies, fruit, and cake, and whatever else you like to take when you go on a picnic.
Trim the playroom with greens, and cover the floor, so the picnic won’t hurt it. When your guests arrive, you can play outdoor games, just [28] as if you were at a real picnic. When it is time for refreshments, the children can help you bring in the baskets, and can set the table in true picnic style. Instead of a pitcher of water, use a pail and dipper, and if you have lemonade, that should be in a pail, too. ”

“ A passage under the road leads straight from the works into these beautiful grounds, and on a summer's day few prettier sights could be found than the numbers of white-robed girls who stream across in the dinner-hour to revel in the sunshine of the open fields, or sit in groups beneath the shady trees, enjoying a picnic lunch. ”

“ I should enjoy a ramble with you above all things, but a picnic is such a confoundedly infantine business. I always feel a hundred years old when I attempt to be gay and frisky before dusk—feel as if I had been dead and come back to life again, as some of the savage tribes believe. However, if it will really please you, I'll give up the birds to-morrow, and join your sports. ”

“ A picnic with our mother and one without her are two very different things. I never knew that a picnic could be dull till I grew up and went to one where that brilliant, gracious presence was lacking. The games we{160} played, the songs we sang, the garlands of oak and maple leaves that we wove, listening to the gay talk if we were little, joining in it when we were older; the simple feast, and then the improvised charades or tableaux, always merry, often graceful and lovely!—ah, these are things to remember! ”

“ Nan and I have found the most adorable spot for a picnic: a fallen tree about half a mile around the mountain—not a freshly fallen one but one that must have fallen ages and ages ago as it has decided just to grow horizontally. ”

“ Gray groaned.
"A picnic, boy? Whoever heard of a picnic in mid-winter. What mad notion is this?"
"But you have given your consent, aunty, and no honorable woman can go back on her word."
"So I have, child, but explain to me quickly what a winter picnic is so that I may know the worst at once."
"A winter picnic is a glorious tramp in the woods, with a big camp-fire at noon, for food, warmth and rest, and then a tramp back again."
"And can I trust to you to take good care of my four girls? Anne and Jessica are not giants for strength. You must not walk them too far, or let them get chilled ”

“ It does generally rain at picnics; but this time it didn't. When shall I ever forget that picnic? I stole a holiday to attend it. It was late when I arrived: the dinner was over, and I had one prepared expressly for me. Would you believe it? my fair attendant was the little Blue Veil. She was so kind and so gentle, and treated me in such a confiding, sisterly way. There was a tenderness in the soft depths of her eyes, a purity in the dazzling loveliness of her face, that my heart yielded to with the blind fervor of a devotee. When shall I ever forget that evening walk under the trees? Oh! ”

“ Every one is not so scrupulous. There are certain ladies and gentlemen who picnic near my cottage in the hot weather, and who tell each other that they love a wood. Most of these good people have nevertheless neither eyes nor ears for what goes on around them, except that they hear each other, and see the cold collation. They will picnic there summer after summer, and not know whether they sit under oaks or ashes, beeches or elms. All birds sing for them the same song. ”

“ Then they all come back to the picnic in good spirits and with good appetites, each eager to tell the others what he has seen and heard, each having satisfied his own taste and genius, and each and all having made vastly more out of the day than if they had all held to the gravel-path and walked in column to the Burgesses' well and back again. ”

“ All the girls had helped gather wood for the fire. Ah, how much better bacon tastes cooked outdoors! Besides the fun, the consciousness of being able to paddle one’s own canoe, both literally and figuratively, was the chief result of this picnic, and every trip in this beautiful country made the girls love it more. ”

“ Public picnics, like Sunday-school picnics, fed with ice cream and strawberries; or the clam bake, a unique and enjoyable affair by the sea, are in the hands of experts, and need no description here. The French people picnic every day in the Bois de Boulogne, the woods of Versailles, and even on their asphalt, eating out of doors when they can. It is a very strange thing that we do not improve our fine climate by eating our dinners and breakfasts with the full draught of an unrivalled ozone. ”

“ A picnic ascent of an easy buttress may be, and has been in Wales, turned by a light shower of rain, freezing immediately into a coat of verglas on the rocks, into a dangerous duel of descent against darkness and difficulty ”

“ PICNIC-TIME
IT'S June ag'in, an' in my soul I feel the fillin' joy
That's sure to come this time o' year to every little boy;
For, every June, the Sunday-schools at picnics may be seen,
Where "fields beyont the swellin' floods stand dressed in livin' green";
Where little girls are skeered to death with spiders, bugs, and ants,
An' little boys get grass-stains on their go-to-meetin' pants
It's June ag'in, an' with it all what happiness is mine—
There's goin' to be a picnic, an' I'm goin' to jine! ”

“ Have you ever observed how long the day always seems when something pleasant is going to happen to-morrow?
[124]
“I think a picnic is perfectly splendid! I’ve forgot what you pick, though,” said Posy, looking puzzled.
“You pick people’s cupboards, I should say,” replied Eliza, measuring out sugar. “I hate the very sound of a picnic! I thought I had all I could do before, but now here’s queen-cake”—
“Oh, that’s right, ’Liza! And some strawb’ry-jelly tarts, and cherry-turnovers, and peach-pie!” cried Pollio, turning a somerset in the middle of the floor. ”

“ In the spring the young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. Love is a good thing.
The picnic plant will soon lift its little head to the sunshine, and the picnic manager will go out and survey the country, to find where the most God-forsaken places are, and then he will get up an excursion to some of these picturesque mud-holes and sand-piles; and the man who swore last year that he would never go to another picnic, will pack up some mustard, and bay rum, and pickles, and glycerine, and a lap-robe, and some camphor, and a spyglass, and some court-plaster ”

“ The picnic at Long Lake was an annual function, held as soon as the weather got warm enough, to celebrate the return of spring. Winter is long and tedious on the high Western plains, where the frost is often Arctic and little work can be done, and after sitting by the red-hot stove through the dark, cold months, the inhabitants of the scattered homesteads come out with joyful hearts to greet the sunshine. ”