in a state of ferocity that you would give worlds to encounter.  That pair of proud Philadelphia sisters, statues sculptured in peach-pulp and wrapped in gauze, look somehow like twin Muses at the gates of a temple.  Whole rows of unmatched girls stare at the sea, desolate but implacable, waiting for partners equal to them in social position.  In such a dearth a Philadelphia girl will turn to her old music-teacher and flirt solemnly with him for a whole evening, sooner than involve herself with well-looking young chits from Providence or New York, who may be jewelers’ clerks when at home.  Yet the unspoiled and fruity beauty of these Southern belles is very striking to one who comes fresh from Saratoga and the sort of upholstered goddesses who are served to him there.

Some years ago the Surf House was the finest place of entertainment, but it has now many rivals, taller if not finer.  Congress Hall, under the management of Mr. G.W.  Hinkle, is a universal favorite, while the Senate House, standing under the shadow of the lighthouse, has the advantage of being the nearest to the beach of all the hotels.  Both are ample and hospitable hostelries, where you are led persuasively through the Eleusinian mystery of the Philadelphia cuisine.  Schaufler’s is an especial resort of our German fellow-citizens, who may there be seen enjoying themselves in the manner depicted by our artist, while concocting—­as we are warned by M. Henri Kowalski—­the ambitious schemes which they conceal under their ordinary enveloppe debonnaire.

[Illustration:  Mr. Thomas C. HAND’S cottage.]

There is another feature of the place.  With its rarely fine atmosphere, so tonic and bracing, so free from the depressing fog of the North, it is a great sanitarium.  There are seasons when the Pennsylvania University seems to have bred its wealth of doctors for the express purpose of marshaling a dying world to the curative shelter of Atlantic City.  The trains are encumbered with the halt and the infirm, who are got out at the doors like unwieldy luggage in the arms of nurses and porters.  Once arrived, however, they display considerable mobility in distributing themselves through the three or four hundred widely-separated cottages which await them for hire.  As you wander through the lanes of these cunning little houses, you catch strange fragments of conversation.  Gentlemen living vis-a-vis, and standing with one leg in the grave and the other on their own piazzas, are heard on sunny mornings exciting themselves with the maddest abuse of each other’s doctor.  There are large boarding-houses, fifty or more of them, each of which has its contingent of puling valetudinarians.  The healthy inmates have the privilege of listening to the symptoms, set forth with that full and conscientious detail not unusual with invalids describing their own complaints.  Or the sufferers turn their batteries on each other.  On the verandah of a select boarding-house we have seen a fat lady of forty lying on a bench like a dead harlequin, as she rolled herself in the triangles of a glittering afghan.  On a neighboring seat a gouty subject, and a tropical sun pouring on both.