despair of ever being able to remount to the hotel. A young man who
clambered along the shore from one of those points reported finding day
after day the same young lady stretched out on the same shawl, drying
the same yellow hair, who had apparently never gone upstairs since the
season began. But the recurrence of this phenomenon in this spot at the
very moment when the young man came by might have been accounted for
upon other theories. Jocelyn’s was so secluded that she could not have
expected any one to find her there twice, and if she had expected this
she would not have permitted it. Probably he saw a different young lady
each time.
Many of the same boarders come year after year, and these tremble at
the suggestion of a change for the better in Jocelyn’s. The landlord
has always believed that Jocelyn’s would come up, some day, when times
got better. He believes that the narrow-gauge railroad from New
Leyden—arrested on paper at the disastrous moment when the fortunes of
Jocelyn’s felt the general crash—will be pushed through yet; and every
summer he promises that next summer they are going to have a
steam-launch running twice a day from Leyden Harbor. But at present his
house is visited once a day by a barge, as the New England coast-folks
call the vehicle in which they convey city boarders to and from the
station, and the old frequenters of the place hope that the station
will never be nearer Jocelyn’s than at present. Some of them are rich
enough to afford a sojourn at more fashionable resorts; but most of
them are not, though they are often people of polite tastes and of
aesthetic employments. They talk with slight of the large
watering-places, and probably they would not like them, though it is
really economy that inspires their passion for Jocelyn’s with most of
them, and they know of the splendid weariness of Newport mostly by
hearsay. New arrivals are not favored, but there are not often new
arrivals at Jocelyn’s. The chief business of the barge is to bring
fresh meat for the table and the gaunt bag which contains the mail; for
in the first flush of the enterprise the place was made a post-office,
and the landlord is postmaster; he has the help of the lady-boarders in
his official duties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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