cing
some result. It cost a hundred thousand to level that lawn there, and
Dives paid the money cheerfully. Then there is Croesus, his neighbour,
who can draw a cheque for a hundred millions if he likes. His house cost
him a pot of money. And so they build themselves a landscape, and pare
off the rough edges of the island, and construct elegant landing-stages,
and keep yachts, and make to themselves a fashionable watering-place;
until by dint of putting money into it, they have made it remarkable
among the watering-places of the world, perhaps the most remarkable of
all.

But there are times when the cliff at Newport is not an altogether
flippant bit of expensive scene-painting, laid out for the sole purpose
of "effect." Sometimes in the warm summer nights the venerable moon
rises stately and white out of the water; the old moon, that is the
hoariest sinner of us all, with her spells and enchantments and her
breathing love-beams, that look so gently on such evil works. And the
artist-spirits of the night sky take of her silver as much as they will,
and coat with it many things of most humble composition, so that they
are fair to look upon. And they play strange pranks with faces of living
and dead. So when the ruler of the darkness shines over poor,
commonplace Newport, the aspect of it is changed, and the gingerbread
abominations wherein the people dwell are magnified into lofty palaces
of silver, and the close-trimmed lawns are great carpets of soft dark
velvet; and the smug-faced philistine sea, that the ocean would be
ashamed to own for a relation by day, breaks out into broken flashes of
silver and long paths of light. All this the moonlight does, rejoicing
in its deception.

There is another time, too, when Newport is no longer commonplace, when
that same sea, which never seems to have any life of its own, disgorges
its foggy soul over the land. There is an ugly odour as of musty
salt-water in men's nostrils, and the mist is heavy and thick to the
touch. It creeps up to the edge of the cliff, and greedily clings to the
wet grass, and climbs higher and over the lawns, and in at the windows
of Dives's dining-room, and of Croesus's library, with its burden of
insiduous mould. The pair of trim-built flirtlings, walking so daintily
down the gravel path, becomes indistinct, and their forms are seen but
as the shadows of things dead--treading on air, between three worlds.
The few feet of bank above the sea, dignified b