nlet, on the south shore of
Long Island. The railroad and telegraph station is at West Oyster Bay.
Everybody who has travelled on the Long Island Railroad knows the
station, but few, perhaps, know Pine Inlet. Duck-shooters, of course,
are familiar with it; but as there are no hotels there, and nothing
to see except salt meadow, salt creek, and a strip of dune and sand,
the summer-squatting public may probably be unaware of its existence.
The local name for the place is Pine Inlet; the maps give its name as
Sand Point, I believe, but anybody at West Oyster Bay can direct you
to it. Captain McPeek, who keeps the West Oyster Bay House, drives
duck-shooters there in winter. It lies five miles southeast from West
Oyster Bay.

"I had walked over that afternoon from Captain McPeek's. There was a
reason for my going to Pine Inlet--it embarrasses me to explain it,
but the truth is I meditated writing an ode to the ocean. It was out
of the question to write it in West Oyster Bay, with the whistle of
locomotives in my ears. I knew that Pine Inlet was one of the
loneliest places on the Atlantic coast; it is out of sight of
everything except leagues of gray ocean. Rarely one might make out
fishing-smacks drifting across the horizon. Summer squatters never
visited it; sportsmen shunned it, except in winter. Therefore, as I
was about to do a bit of poetry, I thought that Pine Inlet was the
spot for the deed. So I went there.

"As I was strolling along the beach, biting my pencil reflectively,
tremendously impressed by the solitude and the solemn thunder of the
surf, a thought occurred to me--how unpleasant it would be if I
suddenly stumbled on a summer boarder. As this joyless impossibility
flitted across my mind, I rounded a bleak sand-dune.

"A girl stood directly in my path.

"She stared at me as though I had just crawled up out of the sea to
bite her. I don't know what my own expression resembled, but I have
been given to understand it was idiotic.

"Now I perceived, after a few moments, that the young lady was
frightened, and I knew I ought to say something civil. So I said, 'Are
there many mosquitoes here?'

"'No,' she replied, with a slight quiver in her voice; 'I have only
seen one, and it was biting somebody else.'

"The conversation seemed so futile, and the young lady appeared to be
more nervous than before. I had an impulse to say, 'Do not run; I have
breakfasted,' for she seemed to be meditating a flight into the