mean time it is easy enough to go down, and
the ladies go down every day, taking their novels or their needle-work
with them. They have various notions of a bath: some conceive that it is
bathing to sit in the edge of the water, and emit shrieks as the
surge sweeps against them; others run boldly in, and after a moment of
poignant hesitation jump up and down half-a-dozen times, and run out;
yet others imagine it better to remain immersed to the chin for a given
space, looking toward the shore with lips tightly shut and the breath
held. But after the bath they are all of one mind; they lay their shawls
on the warm sand, and, spreading out their hair to dry, they doze in the
sun, in such coils and masses as the unconscious figure lends itself to.
When they rise from their beds, they sit in the shelter of the cliff and
knit or sew, while one of them reads aloud, and another stands watch to
announce the coming of the seals, which frequent a reef near the shore
in great numbers. It has been said at rival points on the coast that
the ladies linger there in despair of ever being able to remount to
the hotel. A young man who clambered along the shore from one of those
points reported finding day after day the same young lady stretched out
on the same shawl, drying the same yellow hair, who had apparently
never gone upstairs since the season began. But the recurrence of this
phenomenon in this spot at the very moment when the young man came by
might have been accounted for upon other theories. Jocelyn's was so
secluded that she could not have expected any one to find her there
twice, and if she had expected this she would not have permitted it.
Probably he saw a different young lady each time.

Many of the same boarders come year after year, and these tremble at
the suggestion of a change for the better in Jocelyn's. The landlord has
always believed that Jocelyn's would come up, some day, when times
got better. He believes that the narrow-gauge railroad from New
Leyden--arrested on paper at the disastrous moment when the fortunes of
Jocelyn's felt the general crash--will be pushed through yet; and
every summer he promises that next summer they are going to have a
steam-launch running twice a day from Leyden Harbor. But at present his
house is visited once a day by a barge, as the New England coast-folks
call the vehicle in which they convey city boarders to and from the
station, and the old frequenters of the place hope that the