han the cottages about which
our friends strolled. But the cottages were all ready, the rows of new
chairs stood on the fresh piazzas, the windows were invitingly open, the
pathetic little patches of flowers in front tried hard to look festive
in the dry sands, and the stout landladies in their rocking-chairs
calmly knitted and endeavored to appear as if they expected nobody, but
had almost a houseful.

Yes, the place was undeniably attractive. The sea had the blue of Nice;
why must we always go to the Mediterranean for an aqua marina, for
poetic lines, for delicate shades? What charming gradations had this
picture-gray sand, blue waves, a line of white sails against the pale
blue sky! By the pier railing is a bevy of little girls grouped about an
ancient colored man, the very ideal old Uncle Ned, in ragged, baggy, and
disreputable clothes, lazy good-nature oozing out of every pore of
him, kneeling by a telescope pointed to a bunch of white sails on the
horizon; a dainty little maiden, in a stiff white skirt and golden hair,
leans against him and tiptoes up to the object-glass, shutting first one
eye and then the other, and making nothing out of it all. "Why, ov co'se
you can't see nuffln, honey," said Uncle Ned, taking a peep, "wid the
'scope p'inted up in the sky."

In order to pass from Cape May to Atlantic City one takes a long circuit
by rail through the Jersey sands. Jersey is a very prolific State, but
the railway traveler by this route is excellently prepared for Atlantic
City, for he sees little but sand, stunted pines, scrub oaks, small
frame houses, sometimes trying to hide in the clumps of scrub oaks,
and the villages are just collections of the same small frame houses
hopelessly decorated with scroll-work and obtrusively painted, standing
in lines on sandy streets, adorned with lean shade-trees. The handsome
Jersey people were not traveling that day--the two friends had a theory
about the relation of a sandy soil to female beauty--and when the
artist got out his pencil to catch the types of the country, he was
well rewarded. There were the fat old women in holiday market costumes,
strong-featured, positive, who shook their heads at each other and
nodded violently and incessantly, and all talked at once; the old men in
rusty suits, thin, with a deprecatory manner, as if they had heard that
clatter for fifty years, and perky, sharp-faced girls in vegetable hats,
all long-nosed and thin-lipped. And though the