It is a pretty place.  There is nothing grand, not even anything natural in Newport, but it is very pretty for all that.  For an artificial place, destined to house the most artificial people in the world during three months of the year, it is as pleasing as it can be in a light-comedy-scenery style.  Besides, the scenery in Newport is very expensive, and it is impossible to spend so much money without producing some result.  It cost a hundred thousand to level that lawn there, and Dives paid the money cheerfully.  Then there is Croesus, his neighbour, who can draw a cheque for a hundred millions if he likes.  His house cost him a pot of money.  And so they build themselves a landscape, and pare off the rough edges of the island, and construct elegant landing-stages, and keep yachts, and make to themselves a fashionable watering-place; until by dint of putting money into it, they have made it remarkable among the watering-places of the world, perhaps the most remarkable of all.

But there are times when the cliff at Newport is not an altogether flippant bit of expensive scene-painting, laid out for the sole purpose of “effect.”  Sometimes in the warm summer nights the venerable moon rises stately and white out of the water; the old moon, that is the hoariest sinner of us all, with her spells and enchantments and her breathing love-beams, that look so gently on such evil works.  And the artist-spirits of the night sky take of her silver as much as they will, and coat with it many things of most humble composition, so that they are fair to look upon.  And they play strange pranks with faces of living and dead.  So when the ruler of the darkness shines over poor, commonplace Newport, the aspect of it is changed, and the gingerbread abominations wherein the people dwell are magnified into lofty palaces of silver, and the close-trimmed lawns are great carpets of soft dark velvet; and the smug-faced philistine sea, that the ocean would be ashamed to own for a relation by day, breaks out into broken flashes of silver and long paths of light.  All this the moonlight does, rejoicing in its deception.

There is another time, too, when Newport is no longer commonplace, when that same sea, which never seems to have any life of its own, disgorges its foggy soul over the land.  There is an ugly odour as of musty salt-water in men’s nostrils, and the mist is heavy and thick to the touch.  It creeps up to the edge of the cliff, and greedily clings to the wet grass, and climbs higher and over the lawns, and in at the windows of Dives’s dining-room, and of Croesus’s library, with its burden of insiduous mould.  The pair of trim-built flirtlings, walking so daintily down the gravel path, becomes indistinct, and their forms are seen but as the shadows of things dead—­treading on air, between three worlds.  The few feet of bank above the sea, dignified by the name of cliff, fall back to a gaping chasm, a sheer horror of depths, misty and unfathomable.  Onward slides the thick cloud, and soon the deep-mouthed monotone of the fog-horns in the distance tells it is in the bay.  There is nothing commonplace about the Newport cliff in a fog; it is wild enough and dreary enough then, for the scene of a bad deed.  You might meet the souls of the lost in such a fog, hiding before the wrath to come.