[Illustration:  The excursion house.]

There are prettier and more innocent stories.  Every freckle-nosed girl from the Alleghany valleys who sweeps with her polka-muslin the floors of these generous hotels has an idyl of her own, which she is rehearsing with young Jefferson Jones or little Madison Addison.  In the golden afternoons they ride together—­not in the fine turn-outs supplied by the office-clerks, nor yet on horse-back, but in guiltless country wagons guided by Jersey Jehus, where close propinquity is a delightful necessity.  Ten miles of uninterrupted beach spread before them, which the ocean, transformed for the purpose into a temporary Haussmann, is rolling into a marble boulevard for their use twice a day.  On the hard level the wheels scarcely leave a trace.  The ride seems like eternity, it lapses off so gentle and smooth, and the landscape is so impressively similar:  everywhere the plunging surf, the gray sand-hills, the dark cedars with foliage sliced off sharp and flat by the keen east wind—­their stems twisted like a dishclout or like the olives around Florence.

[Illustration:  A scene in front of Schaufler’s hotel.]

Or she goes with Jefferson and Madison on a “crabbing” hunt.  Out in a boat at the “Thoroughfare,” near the railroad bridge, you lean over the side and see the dark glassy forms moving on the bottom.  It is shallow, and a short bit of string will reach them.  The bait is a morsel of raw beefsteak from the butcher’s, and no hook is necessary.  They make for the titbit with strange monkey-like motions, and nip it with their hard skeleton ringers, trying to tuck it into their mouths; and so you bring them up into blue air, sprawling and astonished, but tenacious.  You can put them through their paces where they roost under water, moving the beef about, and seeing them sidle and back on their aimless, Cousin Feenix-like legs:  it is a sight to bring a freckle-nosed cousin almost into hysterics.  But one day a vivacious girl had committed the offence of boasting too much of her skill in crab-catching, besides being quite unnecessarily gracious to Mr. Jefferson Jones.  Then Mr. Madison Addison, who must have been reading Plutarch, did a sly thing indeed.  The boat having been drawn unnoted into deeper water, a cunning negro boy who was aboard contrived to slide down one side without remark, and the next trophy of the feminine chase was a red boiled crab, artificially attached to a chocolate caramel, and landed with mingled feelings by the pretty fisherwoman.  Then what a tumult of laughter, feigned anger and becoming blushes!  It is said that that crimson shell, carved into a heart-shape of incorrect proportions, is worn over Mr. Jones’s diaphragm to this day.