solid stone villas like those of Newport, so far as congruity with
a watering-place goes, pains the taste like a false note in music.
Atlantic City pauses halfway between the stone house and the tent, and
erects herself in woodwork. A quantity of bright, rather giddy-looking
structures, with much open-work and carved ruffling about the eaves
and balconies, are poised lightly on the sand, following the course
of the two main avenues which lead parallel with the shore, and the
series of short, straight, direct streets which leap across them and
run eagerly for the sea. They have a low, brooding look, and evidently
belong to a class of sybarites who are not fond of staircases. Among
them, the great rambling hotel, sprawling in its ungainly length here
and there, looks like one of the ordinary tall New York houses that
had concluded to lie over on its side and grow, rather than take
the trouble of piling on its stories standing. In this encampment of
wooden pavilions is lived the peculiar life of the place.

[Illustration: ON THE SHINING SANDS.]

We are sure it is a sincere, natural, sensible kind of life, as
compared with that of other bathing-shores. Although there are brass
bands at the hotels, and hops in the evening, and an unequal struggle
of macassar oil with salt and stubborn locks, yet the artificiality is
kept at a minimum. People really do bathe, really do take walks on the
beach for the love of the ocean, really do pick up shells and throw
them away again, really do go yachting and crab-catching; and if they
try city manners in the evening, they are so tired with their honest
day's work that it is apt to end in misery. On the hotel piazzas you
see beauties that surprise you with exquisite touches of the warm and
languid South. That dark Baltimore girl, her hair a constellation of
jessamines, is beating her lover's shoulders with her fan in a state