On one of the most charming of the many wonderfully picturesque little beaches on the Pacific coast, near Monterey, is the idlest if not the most disagreeable social group in the world.  Just off the shore, farther than a stone’s-throw, lies a mass of broken rocks.  The surf comes leaping and laughing in, sending up, above the curving green breakers and crests of foam, jets and spirals of water which flash like silver fountains in the sunlight.  These islets of rocks are the homes of the sea-lion.  This loafer of the coast congregates here by the thousand.  Sometimes the rocks are quite covered, the smooth rounded surface of the larger one presenting the appearance at a distance of a knoll dotted with dirty sheep.  There is generally a select knot of a dozen floating about in the still water under the lee of the rock, bobbing up their tails and flippers very much as black driftwood might heave about in the tide.  During certain parts of the day members of this community are off fishing in deep water; but what they like best to do is to crawl up on the rocks and grunt and bellow, or go to sleep in the sun.  Some of them lie half in water, their tails floating and their ungainly heads wagging.  These uneasy ones are always wriggling out or plunging in.  Some crawl to the tops of the rocks and lie like gunny bags stuffed with meal, or they repose on the broken surfaces like masses of jelly.  When they are all at home the rocks have not room for them, and they crawl on and over each other, and lie like piles of undressed pork.  In the water they are black, but when they are dry in the sun the skin becomes a dirty light brown.  Many of them are huge fellows, with a body as big as an ox.  In the water they are repulsively graceful; on the rocks they are as ungainly as boneless cows, or hogs that have lost their shape in prosperity.  Summer and winter (and it is almost always summer 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?