It is a pleasant walk or drive down to Elberon when there is a sea-breeze, especially if there happen to be a dozen yachts in the offing.  Such elegance as this watering-place has lies in this direction; the Elberon is a refined sort of hotel, and has near it a group of pretty cottages, not too fantastic for holiday residences, and even the “greeny-yellowy” ones do not much offend, for eccentricities of color are toned down by the sea atmosphere.  These cottages have excellent lawns set with brilliant beds of flowers; and the turf rivals that of Newport; but without a tree or shrub anywhere along the shore the aspect is too unrelieved and photographically distinct.  Here as elsewhere the cottage life is taking the place of hotel life.

There were few handsome turn-outs on the main drive, and perhaps the popular character of the place was indicated by the use of omnibuses instead of carriages.  For, notwithstanding Elberon and such fashion as is there gathered, Long Branch lacks “style.”  After the White Sulphur, it did not seem to King alive with gayety, nor has it any society.  In the hotel parlors there is music in the evenings, but little dancing except by children.  Large women, offensively dressed, sit about the veranda, and give a heavy and “company” air to the drawing-rooms.  No, the place is not gay.  The people come here to eat, to bathe, to take the air; and these are reasons enough for being here.  Upon the artist, alert for social peculiarities, the scene made little impression, for to an artist there is a limit to the interest of a crowd showily dressed, though they blaze with diamonds.

It was in search of something different from this that King and Forbes took the train and traveled six miles to Asbury Park and Ocean Grove.  These great summer settlements are separated by a sheet of fresh water three-quarters of a mile long; its sloping banks are studded with pretty cottages, its surface is alive with boats gay with awnings of red and blue and green, and seats of motley color, and is altogether a fairy spectacle.  Asbury Park is the worldly correlative of Ocean Grove, and esteems itself a notch above it in social tone.  Each is a city of small houses, and each is teeming with life, but Ocean Grove, whose centre is the camp-meeting tabernacle, lodges its devotees in tents as well as cottages, and copies the architecture of Oak Bluffs.  The inhabitants of the two cities meet on the two-mile-long plank promenade by the sea.  Perhaps there is no place on the coast that would more astonish the foreigner than Ocean Grove, and if he should describe it faithfully he would be unpopular with its inhabitants.  He would be astonished at the crowds at the station, the throngs in the streets, the shops and stores for supplying the wants of the religious pilgrims, and used as he might be to the promiscuous bathing along our coast, he would inevitably comment upon the freedom existing here.  He would see women in their bathing