ty that lives for the laziest sort of pleasure. If they were rich,
what more could they have? Is not this the ideal of a watering-place
life?

The spectacle of this happy community ought to teach us humility and
charity in judgment. Perhaps the philosophy of its attractiveness lies
deeper than its 'dolce far niente' existence. We may never have
considered the attraction for us of the disagreeable, the positive
fascination of the uncommonly ugly. The repulsive fascination of the
loathly serpent or dragon for women can hardly be explained on
theological grounds. Some cranks have maintained that the theory of
gravitation alone does not explain the universe, that repulsion is as
necessary as attraction in our economy. This may apply to society. We are
all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so
violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom
and color. But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the
leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic
mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out? It is not contrast
altogether. For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and again and
again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision is shut in
by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible longing for these wind-swept
plains as wide as the sea, with the ashy and pink horizons. We shall long
to be weary of it all again--its vast nakedness, its shimmering heat, its
cold, star-studded nights. It seems paradoxical, but it is probably true,
that a society composed altogether of agreeable people would become a
terrible bore. We are a "kittle" lot, and hard to please for long. We
know how it is in the matter of climate. Why is it that the masses of the
human race live in the most disagreeable climates to be found on the
globe, subject to extremes of heat and cold, sudden and unprovoked
changes, frosts, fogs, malarias? In such regions they congregate, and
seem to like the vicissitudes, to like the excitement of the struggle
with the weather and the patent medicines to keep alive. They hate the
agreeable monotony of one genial day following another the year through.
They praise this monotony, all literature is full of it; people always
say they are in search of the equable climate; but they continue to live,
nevertheless, or try to live, in the least equable; and if they can find
one spot more disagreeable than another there they build a big cit