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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