day was cool, mosquitoes
had the bad taste to invade the train. At the junction, a small
collection of wooden shanties, where the travelers waited an hour, they
heard much of the glories of Atlantic City from the postmistress, who
was waiting for an excursion some time to go there (the passion for
excursions seems to be a growing one), and they made the acquaintance of
a cow tied in the room next the ticket-office, probably also waiting for
a passage to the city by the sea.

And a city it is. If many houses, endless avenues, sand, paint, make a
city, the artist confessed that this was one. Everything is on a large
scale. It covers a large territory, the streets run at right angles, the
avenues to the ocean take the names of the states. If the town had been
made to order and sawed out by one man, it could not be more beautifully
regular and more satisfactorily monotonous. There is nothing about it to
give the most commonplace mind in the world a throb of disturbance. The
hotels, the cheap shops, the cottages, are all of wood, and, with three
or four exceptions in the thousands, they are all practically alike, all
ornamented with scroll-work, as if cut out by the jig-saw, all vividly
painted, all appealing to a primitive taste just awakening to the
appreciation of the gaudy chromo and the illuminated and consoling
household motto. Most of the hotels are in the town, at considerable
distance from the ocean, and the majestic old sea, which can be
monotonous but never vulgar, is barricaded from the town by five or six
miles of stark-naked plank walk, rows on rows of bath closets, leagues
of flimsy carpentry-work, in the way of cheap-John shops, tin-type
booths, peep-shows, go-rounds, shooting-galleries, pop-beer and cigar
shops, restaurants, barber shops, photograph galleries, summer theatres.
Sometimes the plank walk runs for a mile or two, on its piles, between
rows of these shops and booths, and again it drops off down by the
waves. Here and there is a gayly-painted wooden canopy by the shore,
with chairs where idlers can sit and watch the frolicking in the water,
or a space railed off, where the select of the hotels lie or lounge
in the sand under red umbrellas. The calculating mind wonders how many
million feet of lumber there are in this unpicturesque barricade, and
what gigantic forests have fallen to make this timber front to the sea.
But there is one thing man cannot do. He has made this show to suit
himself, he ha