of the North, it is a great sanitarium. There are seasons when the
Pennsylvania University seems to have bred its wealth of doctors
for the express purpose of marshaling a dying world to the curative
shelter of Atlantic City. The trains are encumbered with the halt and
the infirm, who are got out at the doors like unwieldy luggage in
the arms of nurses and porters. Once arrived, however, they display
considerable mobility in distributing themselves through the three or
four hundred widely-separated cottages which await them for hire. As
you wander through the lanes of these cunning little houses, you catch
strange fragments of conversation. Gentlemen living vis-à-vis, and
standing with one leg in the grave and the other on their own piazzas,
are heard on sunny mornings exciting themselves with the maddest abuse
of each other's doctor. There are large boarding-houses, fifty or more
of them, each of which has its contingent of puling valetudinarians.
The healthy inmates have the privilege of listening to the symptoms,
set forth with that full and conscientious detail not unusual with
invalids describing their own complaints. Or the sufferers turn their
batteries on each other. On the verandah of a select boarding-house we
have seen a fat lady of forty lying on a bench like a dead harlequin,
as she rolled herself in the triangles of a glittering afghan. On a
neighboring seat a gouty subject, and a tropical sun pouring on both.

"Good-morning! You see I am trying my sun-bath. I am convinced it
relieves my spine." The same remark has introduced seven morning
conversations.

"And my gout has shot from the index toe to the ring toe. I feared my
slipper was damp, and I am roasting it here. But, dear ma'am, I pity
you so with your spine! Tried acupuncture?"