At the Water’s Edge ~ 
motley collection of cheap, tasteless houses, worse 
than factory dwellings, each propped on its 
own arid sand-heap, not one of them facing 
any conceivable point of the compass, and no’ 
two standing at any calculable angle with each 
other, but all looking as if they might have 
been carried across the Bay from the main land 
by a tornado, and dropped on this general 
dumping ground; various small restaurants 
bearing the questionable inscription—‘‘ Chau- 
tauqua Bottling Company,’’ with a few long, 
low buildings straggling off in odd directions— 
this dismal and heterogeneous aggregation of 
architecture, crowned with an east wind and 
drizzling clouds, made me more lonesome than 
if there had been no sign of human life with- 
in a hundred miles. 
Escaping from the scene as soon as possible, 
I wandered over to the beach on the south side. 
The desolate, sandy stretches were buttered 
thick—as if to make them more palatable—with 
dense, low masses of bright yellow flowers, a 
marine vegetation much resembling mossy stone- 
crop. It was a marvel how any plant could 
extract enough moisture from parched sand to 
break forth into such a rich display of bloom. 
Where the ground began to rise, beyond the 
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