Last night when we gathered at dinner, a few moments after our arrival and our first meeting at this cottage, I at once became aware that though host and hostess were the same delightful couple, we were not dining at Meadow’s End, their Oaklands cottage, but at Gray Rocks, with silver sea instead of green grass below the windows.  While the sea surroundings were brought indoors and on the centre of the dinner table the mirror was edged by a border of sea-sand, glistening pebbles and little shells were arranged as a background instead of mosses and lichens, and rich brown seaweeds still moist with the astringent tonic sea breath edged this frame, and the more delicate rose-coloured and pale green weeds seemed floating upon the glass, that held a giant periwinkle shell filled with the pink star-shaped sabbatia, or sea pink, of the near-by salt marshes.  There was no effort, no strain after effect, but a consistent preparation of the eye for the simple meal of sea food that followed.

In front of the cottage the rocks slope quickly to the beach, but on either side there is a stretch of sand pocketed among the rocks, and in the back a dune stops abruptly at the margin of wide salt meadows, creek-fed and unctuous, as befits the natural gardens of the sea.

The other cottages lying to the eastward are gay in red-and-white striped awnings, and porch and window boxes painted red or green are filled with geraniums, nasturtiums, petunias,—­any flowers, in short, that will thrive in the broiling sun, while some of the owners have planted buoy-like barrels at the four corners of their enclosures and filled them with the same assortment of foliage plants with which they would decorate a village lawn.  This use of flowers seemed at once to draw the coolness from the easterly breeze and intensify the heat that vibrates from the sand.

Have you ever noticed that the sea in these latitudes has no affinity for the brightest colours, save as it is a mirror for the fleeting flames of sunrise and sunset?

The sea-birds are blended tints of rock, sand, sky, and water, save the dash of coral in bill and foot of a few, just as the coral of the wild-rose hips blends with the tawny marsh-grasses.  Scarlet is a colour abhorred even by the marshes, until late in autumn the blaze of samphire consumes them with long spreading tongues of flame.  How can people be so senseless as to come seaward to cool their bodies, and yet so surround themselves with scarlet that it is never out of range of the eye?

Lavinia Cortright and the botanical Bradfords, as Evan calls them, because though equally lovers of flowers, they go further than some for the reason why that lies hid beneath the colour and perfume, have laid out and are still developing a sand garden that, while giving the cottage home the restful air that is a garden’s first claim, has still the distinct identity of the sand and sea!