ing
every night of the week. The hotels at watering-places are celebrated
for several things, particularly low ceilings, widows, youngish ladies,
and girls like our Cecilia, who wonder every day of their lives how
their mothers ever got along decently till they were born to tell them
how.

Well, the most enterprising of these hotel accompaniments are the
widows. Their superior advantages of experience is just overpowering,
and these advantages are used with unscrupulous freedom. I say this with
feeling, being one of the class that suffers from such unwarrantable
competition.

A widow was in the hotel I have spoken of. Yes, what might be called two
widows rolled into one, for she had put two husbands into their little
beds, and tucked in the sods comfortably before she came to Long Branch
in search of a third.

Sisters, she found him; her little traps and lines and baits had been
all out to no sort of purpose for three or four weeks. She danced in the
parlor, exhibited all the lines of a plumptitudinous figure at the
bowling alley, which is a place I never saw, but have heard about;
walked on the beach with a Leghorn hat on, curled up at the ears, and in
front too, and Japanese umbrella, brown outside and yellow in the
interior, which looked as if she had lots of money and meant to put it
on the market with a dash.

There was a great deal said about this widow. Some observed that she was
handsome. Some said she wasn't--mostly ladies. Some observed how
graceful she was, at which others smiled and shook their heads. One
person persisted in it that she was awful rich--two or three hundred
thousand dollars, at least. Then that was contradicted. Forty thousand
was more than any one could prove she had. Others persisted that her
wealth, like her virtues, was unlimited. In fact, being a widow, she
made the best of it and let people talk, minding her snares and traps
and things all the same.

Last week a strange man came to that hotel. It was Saturday morning, and
the first object that his eyes fell upon at breakfast was this widow,
without the sign of a cap, and with a long curl straggling down to one
shoulder, very fluffy and enticing. He looked at the curl; then his eyes
wandered up to the widow's face. That face had smiled through a couple
of matrimonial campaigns, and received the first battery of admiring
eyes with a sweet, downcast look, innocent as blanc-mange. Then she
lifted her eyes with slow modesty, and glanc