s as they walked against the wind;
white-aproned waiters flitting about restaurant verandas, carrying pink
ices, or baskets of fruit, like jewels.

It was a gay scene, but Robert said it was nothing to the "high season,"
which began on the first of August, and brought throngs of fashionable
people from all over Europe. As for the top-hats at which I laughed, he
defended them stoutly, saying they were as much _de rigueur_ at The
Hague as in London, and he could see nothing comic in wearing them at
the seaside.

Still we had had no glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and
driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of
gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as
far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a
bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up the
fashionable center of Scheveningen.

In the center, the Kurhaus dominated all; hotel, restaurant,
concert-room, theater, in one. Terrace below terrace it descended and
sent out into the green water of the North Sea a great pier blossoming
with flags. But the most individual feature was the large and
enterprising family of "wind stoels"--dear, cozy basket-houses for one,
like green and yellow bee-hives cut in half, or giant sunbonnets
crowding the beach behind the bathing-machines. There one could nestle,
self-contained as a hermit-crab in a shell, defying east wind or baking
sun, happy with a book, or the person one liked best in a twin
wind-stoel opposite.

Reposeful gaiety seemed at this first glance to be the note struck by
Scheveningen, and the air was buoyant as I had never known air to be
before.

"If you visit us in August," said Robert, "you will hear the best
operas, see the best automobile races, the most exciting motor-boat
races----"

"But we shall be on our own motor-boat in August," said I.

"I do not think so. You will perhaps let your boat. We will talk to my
mother," Robert answered, as one soothes a fractious child. Then, before
I had breath to answer, he swept us away from the beach, and drew up
before an aggressively comfortable villa on a terrace opening to the
sea.

VI

There was a garden-room with flower-painted walls, and Japanese
furniture and silk things; and in the garden-room stood Cousin Robert's
mother. The great glass doors were wide open, and she moved slowly to
the threshold to meet us.

Yes, she is far too large t