The smaller cottages were nearly all empty at that season.  At different times I made use of many of them, when the sun was hot, or I had been long afoot.  Once I was resting thus on a flight of front steps, when a three-seated carriage came down the beach and pulled up opposite.  The driver wished to ask me a question, I thought; no doubt I looked very much at home.  From the day I had entered Florida, every one I met had seemed to know me intuitively for a New Englander, and most of them—­I could not imagine how—­had divined that I came from Boston.  It gratified me to believe that I was losing a little of my provincial manner, under the influence of more extended travel.  But my pride had a sudden fall.  The carriage stopped, as I said; but instead of inquiring the way, the driver alighted, and all the occupants of the carriage proceeded to do the same,—­eight women, with baskets and sundries.  It was time for me to be starting.  I descended the steps, and pulled off my hat to the first comer, who turned out to be the proprietor of the establishment.  With a gracious smile, she hoped they were “not frightening me away.”  She and her friends had come for a day’s picnic at the cottage.  Things being as they were (eight women), she could hardly invite me to share the festivities, and, with my best apology for the intrusion, I withdrew.

Of one building on the sand-hills I have peculiarly pleasant recollections.  It was not a cottage, but had evidently been put up as a public resort; especially, as I inferred, for Sunday-school or parish picnics.  It was furnished with a platform for speech-making (is there any foolishness that men will not commit on sea beaches and mountain tops?), and, what was more to my purpose, was open on three sides.  I passed a good deal of time there, first and last, and once it sheltered me from a drenching shower of an hour or two.  The lightning was vivid, and the rain fell in sheets.  In the midst of the blackness and commotion, a single tern, ghostly white, flew past, and toward the close a bunch of sanderlings came down the edge of the breakers, still looking for something to eat.  The only other living things in sight were two young fellows, who had improved the opportunity to try a dip in the surf.  Their color indicated that they were not yet hardened to open-air bathing, and from their actions it was evident that they found the ocean cool.  They were wet enough before they were done, but it was mostly with fresh water.  Probably they took no harm; but I am moved to remark, in passing, that I sometimes wondered how generally physicians who order patients to Florida for the winter caution them against imprudent exposure.  To me, who am no doctor, it seemed none too safe for young women with consumptive tendencies to be out sailing in open boats on winter evenings, no matter how warm the afternoon had been, while I saw one case where a surf bath taken by such an invalid was followed by a day of prostration and fever.  “We who live here,” said a resident, “don’t think the water is warm enough yet; but for these Northern folks it is a great thing to go into the surf in February, and you can’t keep them out.”