way to the casino sun parlor, where they disrobe and bake until the bathing hour.  The object of this practice is to acquire, as nearly as a white man may, the complexion of a mulatto, and it is surprising to see how closely the skins of some more ardent members of the “Browning Club,” as this group is called, match those of their chair boys.  The underlying theory of the “Browning Club” is that a triple-plated coat of tan, taken north in March, advertises the wearer as having been at Palm Beach during the entire winter, thus establishing him as a man not merely of means, but of great endurance.

The women of Palm Beach seem to be divided into two distinct schools of thought on the subject of tanning.  While none of them compete with the radicals of the “Browning Club,” one may nevertheless observe that, in evening dress, many young ladies reveal upon their necks, shoulders, and arms, stenciled outlines of the upper margins of their bathing suits.  Ladies of the opposing school, upon the contrary, guard the whiteness of their skins as jealously as the men of the “Browning Club” guard their blackness.  Rather than be touched with tan, many ladies of the latter group deny themselves the pleasures of the surf.  The parasols beneath which they arrive upon the sands are not lowered until they are safely seated beneath the green and blue striped canvas tops of their beach chairs, and it may be observed that even then they are additionally fortified against the light, by wide black hats and thick dark veils draped to mask their faces up to the eyes; “harem” veils, they call them—­the name, however, signifying nothing polygamous.

A pleasant diversion at the beginning of the bathing hour occurs when some mere one-horse millionaire from a Middle-Western town appears on the beach with his family.  He is newly arrived and is under the fond delusion that he is as good as anybody else and that his money is as good as any other person’s money.  Seeing the inviting rows of beach chairs, he and his family plump into several of them.  They are hardly settled, however, when the man who attends to the beach chairs comes and asks them to get out, saying that the chairs are reserved.

The other thinks the man is lying like a head waiter, and demands to know for whom the chairs are reserved.

In reply the beach-chair man mentions, with suitable deference, the name of Mrs. Hopkinson Skipkinson Jumpkinson-Jones.

“Well,” cries the Middle-Westerner, “Mrs. Jones isn’t here yet, is she?  She can’t use the chairs now, can she, if she isn’t here?”