He was not so much in keeping with the inlander’s ideal of bathing-beaches, where summer girls float in the waves or loll upon the sands in the flirtatious poses familiar to the observer of them in the illustrated papers. To guard these daring maids from the dangers of the deep the gaudy bronze giant, with his yachting cap, his black jerseys, his white shoes, and his brown arms folded upon his breast, where they half revealed, half hid his label of Life-Guard, was a far fitter figure. But for the real bathers, I think the guard in the cut-away, derby, and bare feet was much more to be trusted; he was simple, substantial, and unpretentious; and surf-bathing, let me whisper in the innumerable ear of the inland myriads who have never seen it, is not often the gay frolic they have fancied: rather, it is sober, serious, sloppy. XII. At first the mental frame of us lingerers in the closing hotel was one of heroic self-applause. We wore a brave and smiling front; we said it was so much nicer than when the house was full, than when there were a thousand or even a hundred in it; and we all declared that we were going to stay as long as the landlord would let us. But from time to time there were defections; one table after another was dismantled; face after face vanished; first a white face, then a black face. I do not think we were so smiling after four of the beach trains were taken off; secretly, I think each of us wondered, What if we should stay till the last train was taken off, and we could not get away! What should we do then? We have become rather more serious; we do not talk trivially when we talk, and we scarcely talk at all; we have traversed each other’s conversable territory so often that there is no longer the hope of discovery in it. We have not only become serious; I have reached the point where I have asked in thought if we are not a little absurd. Why should we stay? What is keeping us? The waves of autumn will soon reach the kitchen fires; and then? Last night, our waiter said he was going on Monday. This morning the newsboy passed through the office on his way to serve the cottagers with the papers. Asked if he were not going to serve the hotel guests, he went on without answering. It may be because he is an officer of a railroad, whose officers reluctantly answer questions; but perhaps he has come to feel a ghostly quality in us, and regards us as so many simulacra incapable of interest in the affairs of real men. The gas was not lighted in the ballroom after dinner yesterday; the halls gloomed like illimitable caverns late in the gathered dusk. Shall I be able to stay till Friday? We shall see. XIII. A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold wind of last night has blown the whole world clean of clouds. One has a sense of the globe swinging in depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the reaches of space.