away and away, until blind with light it faints on a prodigiously far horizon.  Its falling noises are as soft as the sighs of Christabel.  Its colors are the pale and milky colors of the opal.  But ah! what an impression of boundlessness!  How the silver ribbon of beach unrolls for miles and miles!  And landward, what a parallel sea of marshes, bottoms and dunes!  The sense of having all the kingdoms of the world spread out beneath one, together with most of the kingdoms of the mermen, has never so come to one’s consciousness before.  And again, what an artist is Nature, with these faint washes and tenderest varied hues—­varied and tender as the flames from burning gases—­while her highest lights (a painter will understand the difficulty of that) are still diaphanous and profound!

One goes to the seaside not for pomp and peacock’s tails, but for saltness, Nature and a bite of fresh fish.  To build a city there that shall not be an insult to the sentiment of the place is a matter of difficulty.  One’s ideal, after all, is a canvas encampment.  A range of solid stone villas like those of Newport, so far as congruity with a watering-place goes, pains the taste like a false note in music.  Atlantic City pauses halfway between the stone house and the tent, and erects herself in woodwork.  A quantity of bright, rather giddy-looking structures, with much open-work and carved ruffling about the eaves and balconies, are poised lightly on the sand, following the course of the two main avenues which lead parallel with the shore, and the series of short, straight, direct streets which leap across them and run eagerly for the sea.  They have a low, brooding look, and evidently belong to a class of sybarites who are not fond of staircases.  Among them, the great rambling hotel, sprawling in its ungainly length here and there, looks like one of the ordinary tall New York houses that had concluded to lie over on its side and grow, rather than take the trouble of piling on its stories standing.  In this encampment of wooden pavilions is lived the peculiar life of the place.

[Illustration:  On the shining sands.]

We are sure it is a sincere, natural, sensible kind of life, as compared with that of other bathing-shores.  Although there are brass bands at the hotels, and hops in the evening, and an unequal struggle of macassar oil with salt and stubborn locks, yet the artificiality is kept at a minimum.  People really do bathe, really do take walks on the beach for the love of the ocean, really do pick up shells and throw them away again, really do go yachting and crab-catching; and if they try city manners in the evening, they are so tired with their honest day’s work that it is apt to end in misery.  On the hotel piazzas you see beauties that surprise you with exquisite touches of the warm and languid South.  That dark Baltimore girl, her hair a constellation of jessamines, is beating her lover’s shoulders with her fan