were the fat old women in holiday market costumes, strong-featured,
positive, who shook their heads at each other and nodded violently and
incessantly, and all talked at once; the old men in rusty suits, thin,
with a deprecatory manner, as if they had heard that clatter for fifty
years, and perky, sharp-faced girls in vegetable hats, all long-nosed and
thin-lipped. And though the day was cool, mosquitoes had the bad taste
to invade the train. At the junction, a small collection of wooden
shanties, where the travelers waited an hour, they heard much of the
glories of Atlantic City from the postmistress, who was waiting for an
excursion some time to go there (the passion for excursions seems to be a
growing one), and they made the acquaintance of a cow tied in the room
next the ticket-office, probably also waiting for a passage to the city
by the sea.

And a city it is. If many houses, endless avenues, sand, paint, make a
city, the artist confessed that this was one. Everything is on a large
scale. It covers a large territory, the streets run at right angles, the
avenues to the ocean take the names of the states. If the town had been
made to order and sawed out by one man, it could not be more beautifully
regular and more satisfactorily monotonous. There is nothing about it to
give the most commonplace mind in the world a throb of disturbance. The
hotels, the cheap shops, the cottages, are all of wood, and, with three
or four exceptions in the thousands, they are all practically alike, all
ornamented with scroll-work, as if cut out by the jig-saw, all vividly
painted, all appealing to a primitive taste just awakening to the
appreciation of the gaudy chromo and the illuminated and consoling
household motto. Most of the hotels are in the town, at considerable
distance from the ocean, and the majestic old sea, which can be
monotonous but never vulgar, is barricaded from the town by five or six
miles of stark-naked plank walk, rows on rows of bath closets, leagues of