es, and beside these, a great wooden
structure on wheels, not unlike the enormous house-caravans in which
the owners of shows and menageries and such-like wandering folk travel
about from fair to fair. The French flag fluttering from a pole on the
top of the caravan drew attention to it, and on closer inspection one
read above the entrance--which was approached by a movable wooden
staircase--the proud legend "Casino d'Ault." Yes, Ault actually boasted
a casino, with an entrance fee of ten centimes a head, and in the
single room, which occupied the whole structure, you found a jeu de
course, and other games of hazard, exactly as they had them in the most
renowned and elegant dens of thieves of the fashionable watering places.

Here, however, nobody went to the dogs. Life on the shore was prim and
patriarchal. Whole families sat or lay about on camp stools or on
traveling rugs, the wives in morning wraps, the husbands smoking in
linen suits; the former occupied with needlework, the latter reading
the newspapers or novels. The young people ran about barefoot and in
bathing costume, or lay at the edge of the water fishing for shrimps,
which they rarely or never caught. There were merry, noisy groups of
bathers in the shallow water near the shore, splashing one another,
shrieking at the approach of the larger waves, bobbing up and down, and
shouting encouragement to the newcomers, who only ventured timidly and
by degrees into the chilly waters. As very few of the bathers could
swim, this all took place in the close vicinity.

At first Wilhelm had been rather shocked to see the two sexes bathing
together, and that the girls and married women--coming out of the sea
with their legs and arms bare, and their clinging, wet bathing dresses
revealing the outline of their forms with embarrassing
distinctness--should calmly stroll back to the bathing houses under the
open gaze of the men. For that reason he even refrained from going to
the shore at the bathing hour, or bathing there himself. By degrees,
however, he grew accustomed to it, seeing that nobody thought anything
of it, and that the almost nude figures disported themselves among
their equally unconcerned parents, relatives, and friends with the
naive unconsciousness of South Sea Islanders.

As he made his way, not too easily, over the rolling shingle between
the chattering, lazy groups, he saw his neighbor of the table d'hote
sitting, a little apart, on a camp stool under