Several aspects of the elementally simple landscape about us seemed peculiarly to sympathize with the quiet passing of the life of the great hotel. There could be no change in the long, irregular, gray sand dunes before it, which dropped themselves in lumpish masses, like the stretched and twisted shape of some vast bisected serpent. The stiff grasses and arid weeds that clothed them thinly, like a growth of dreadful green hair, kept their rigidity and their color with a sort of terrestrial immortality, or rather of an imperishable lifelessness; but over them fluttered a multitude of butterflies, thick as the leaves of autumn, and of much the same ultimate color, like spirits already released to their palingenesis. Flights of others, of a gay white and yellow, like the innocent souls of little ones, haunted the leaf-plant beds before the hotel, or tried to make friends with the harsh little evergreens surviving the plantations of a more courageous period of the enterprise, and stolidly presenting a wood at the borders of the plank walks. To the landward the mighty marshes stretched their innumerable acres to the sunrise and the sunset and the northern lights, one wash of pale yellow-green. Before we left, this began to be splashed as with flame or blood by the reddening of that certain small weed which loves the salt of tide-flooded meadows. The hollyhocklike bells of the marsh-roses drooped and fell, but other and gayer flowers, like ox-eye daisies of taller stem, came to replace them; and still, with the rising tide, the larger and the lesser craft that plied upon the many channels of the meadows blew softly back and forth, and seemed to sail upon their undulant grasses. In all, the large leisure, the serene lapse of nature toward decay, seemed to express a consciousness of the hotel’s unhurried dissolution, to wait gently upon it, and to stay in a faithful summer loveliness till the last light should be quenched, of all those that had made it flame like a jewel in the forehead of the sea, and that had faded from veranda and balcony to the glitter of the clustered lamps in the office and dining-room. XI.