beach-learned manners into contrast with the thrift and hardness of
the neighboring commonwealth. The native of the alluvium is another
being from the native of the great mineral State. But, by the very
reason of this difference, there is a strange soft charm that comes
over our thoughts of the younger Jersey when we have done laughing
at it. That broad, pale peninsula, built of shells and crystal-dust,
which droops toward the south like some vast tropical leaf, and
spreads its two edges toward the fresh and salt waters, enervated with
drought and sunshine--that flat leaf of land has characteristics that
are almost Oriental. To make it the sea heaved up her breast, and
showed the whitened sides against which her tides were beating. To
walk upon it is in a sense to walk upon the bottom of the ocean. Here
are strange marls, the relics of infinite animal life, into which
has sunk the lizard or the dragon of antiquity--the gigantic
_Hadrosaurus_, who cranes his snaky throat at us in the museum,
swelling with the tale of immemorial times when he weltered here in
the sunny ooze. The country is a mighty steppe, but not deprived of
trees: the ilex clothes it with its set, dark foliage, and the endless
woods of pine, sand-planted, strew over that boundless beach a murmur
like the sea. The edibles it bears are of the quaintest and most
individual kinds: the cranberry is its native condiment, full of
individuality, unknown to Europe, beautiful as a carbuncle, wild as
a Tartar belle, and rife with a subacid irony that is like the wit of
Heine.

[Illustration: MR. RICHARD WRIGHT'S COTTAGE.]

Here is the _patate douce_, with every kind of sweet-fleshed gourd
that loves to gad along the sand--the citron in its carved net,
and the enormous melon, carnation-colored within and dark-green to