One can imagine no more interesting scene of movement than that in the evening at the height of the season on the esplanade at Atlantic City. I never witness it without thinking of two of the dreams of De Quincey, which he describes in some detail—the one of the crowd moving by in endless procession, like the figures on a frieze, on and on forever, the other of the innumerable faces of his vision revealed in the incessant convulsions of the ocean. At about half-past eight o’clock in the evening toward the end of July, when the season is at its climax, this impressive throng, in two lines, moving to the right and to the left, is most numerous. There is, so far as I am aware, nothing precisely like it anywhere else in the world—so variegated, so well-dressed, so lively and so complicated. To enjoy it perfectly there must be the vagueness of a veiled vision, and then, in addition to the passing faces, you catch the soft, dreamy effects of the costumes—whites and pinks, sometimes even the bold Mephistophelean red; the dim azures, the pale greens subsiding into yellow. In the two tides goes this strange army, slow in motion, laughing, volatile, the silvery tinkle of feminine laughter and the deeper murmur of conversation. To observe this throng has an absorbing fascination, but if at times you rest, it is to look over the railing of the esplanade at the darkness of the ocean and watch the waves rushing in, like sheeted women with outstretched and affrighted arms. Summing up, if I were asked to define the special enjoyment derived from nearsightedness, I should say that it arises from two sources—the serenity of the scenes disclosed by the sight, the absence of harshness in sky, landscape or environment anywhere; the fusing of mean details into an agreeable mass. And even stranger and pleasanter than this is the mystical effect; the softness and dreaminess of atmosphere and distances; the indolent, abstracted and slightly melancholy tone of mind produced; the beguiling idealization of existence. —_Walter Edgar M’Cann._ [Illustration] [Illustration: “_An XVIII Century Beauty._” _From the miniature by Hugh Nicholson._] [Illustration: COMMENT]