At the station in Jersey City—­a place suggestive of love and romance and full of tender associations—­the party separated for a few days, the Bensons going to Saratoga, and King accompanying Forbes to Long Branch, in pursuance of an agreement which, not being in writing, he was unable to break.  As the two friends went in the early morning down to the coast over the level salt meadows, cut by bayous and intersected by canals, they were curiously reminded both of the Venice lagoons and the plains of the Teche; and the artist went into raptures over the colors of the landscape, which he declared was Oriental in softness and blending.  Patriotic as we are, we still turn to foreign lands for our comparisons.

Long Branch and its adjuncts were planned for New York excursionists who are content with the ocean and the salt air, and do not care much for the picturesque.  It can be described in a phrase:  a straight line of sandy coast with a high bank, parallel to it a driveway, and an endless row of hotels and cottages.  Knowing what the American seaside cottage and hotel are, it is unnecessary to go to Long Branch to have an accurate picture of it in the mind.  Seen from the end of the pier, the coast appears to be all built up—­a thin, straggling city by the sea.  The line of buildings is continuous for two miles, from Long Branch to Elberon; midway is the West End, where our tourists were advised to go as the best post of observation, a medium point of respectability between the excursion medley of one extremity and the cottage refinement of the other, and equally convenient to the races, which attract crowds of metropolitan betting men and betting women.  The fine toilets of these children of fortune are not less admired than their fashionable race-course manners.  The satirist who said that Atlantic City is typical of Philadelphia, said also that Long Branch is typical of New York.  What Mr. King said was that the satirist was not acquainted with the good society of either place.

All the summer resorts get somehow a certain character, but it is not easy always to say how it is produced.  The Long Branch region was the resort of politicians, and of persons of some fortune who connect politics with speculation.  Society, which in America does not identify itself with politics as it does in England, was not specially attracted by the newspaper notoriety of the place, although, fashion to some extent declared in favor of Elberon.

In the morning the artist went up to the pier at the bathing hour.  Thousands of men, women, and children were tossing about in the lively surf promiscuously, revealing to the spectators such forms as Nature had given them, with a modest confidence in her handiwork.  It seemed to the artist, who was a student of the human figure, that many of these people would not have bathed in public if Nature had made them self-conscious.  All down the shore were pavilions and bath-houses, and the scene at a distance was not unlike that when the water is occupied by schools of leaping mackerel.  An excursion steamer from New York landed at the pier.  The passengers were not of any recognized American type, but mixed foreign races a crowd of respectable people who take their rare holidays rather seriously, and offer little of interest to an artist.  The boats that arrive at night are said to bring a less respectable cargo.