Jewett’s “The Reunion” and “The End of the Feast” are episodes describing the Bowden picnic reunion in Dunnet Landing, a fictional town in Maine.
The Bowdens sit at long tables in a grove of trees overlooking the sea. It’s a festive setting, a feast, and the narrator explains: To call it a picnic would make it seem trivial. The great tables were edged with pretty oak-leaf trimming, which the boys and girls made. We brought flowers from the fence-thickets of the great field, and out of the disorder of flowers and provisions suddenly appeared as orderly a scheme for the feast as the marshal had shaped for the procession. I began to respect the Bowdens for their inheritance of good taste and skill and a certain pleasing gift of formality. Something made them do all these things in a finer way than most country people would have done them. As I looked up and down the tables there was a good cheer, a grave soberness that shone with pleasure, a humble dignity of bearing.
Featured Image: Jerome Thompson’s A Pic Nick in the Woods of New England (c.1855c.) is an illustration of a picnic similar to the Bowen’s. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
See Sarah Orne Jewett. “Chapter XVIII, “The Reunion,” and “Chapter XIX: The End of the Feast.” In The Country of the Pointed Firs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896; Barbara N. Parker. “A “Pic Nick,” Camden, Maine” by Jerome B. Thompson. Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, 50,282 (Dec. 1952)