on this coast) these beasts, which are well fitted neither for land nor water, spend their time in absolute indolence, except when they are compelled to cruise around in the deep water for food.  They are of no use to anybody, either for their skin or their flesh.  Nothing could be more thoroughly disgusting and uncanny than they are, and yet nothing more fascinating.  One can watch them—­the irresponsible, formless lumps of intelligent flesh—­for hours without tiring.  I scarcely know what the fascination is.  A small seal playing by himself near the shore, floating on and diving under the breakers, is not so very disagreeable, especially if he comes so near that you can see his pathetic eyes; but these brutes in this perpetual summer resort are disgustingly attractive.  Nearly everything about them, including their voice, is repulsive.  Perhaps it is the absolute idleness of the community that makes it so interesting.  To fish, to swim, to snooze on the rocks, that is all, for ever and ever.  No past, no future.  A society that lives for the laziest sort of pleasure.  If they were rich, what more could they have?  Is not this the ideal of a watering-place life?

The spectacle of this happy community ought to teach us humility and charity in judgment.  Perhaps the philosophy of its attractiveness lies deeper than its ‘dolce far niente’ existence.  We may never have considered the attraction for us of the disagreeable, the positive fascination of the uncommonly ugly.  The repulsive fascination of the loathly serpent or dragon for women can hardly be explained on theological grounds.  Some cranks have maintained that the theory of gravitation alone does not explain the universe, that repulsion is as necessary as attraction in our economy.  This may apply to society.  We are all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom and color.  But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out?  It is not contrast altogether.  For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and again and again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision is shut in by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible longing for these wind-swept plains as wide as the sea, with the ashy and pink horizons.  We shall long to be weary of it all again—­its vast nakedness, its shimmering heat, its cold, star-studded nights.  It seems paradoxical, but it is probably true, that a society composed altogether of agreeable people would become a terrible bore.  We are a “kittle” lot, and hard to please for long.  We know how it is in the matter of climate.  Why is it that the masses of the human race live in the most disagreeable climates to be found on the globe, subject to extremes of heat and cold, sudden and unprovoked changes, frosts, fogs, malarias?  In such regions